The threads.

What we are given

You don’t choose the first page. It is written before you can read, and by other hands.

Everyone is given the same things, in no particular order: a first name, a last name, a year, a language, a table to eat at, a trade you watch being done before you know what it is, an era. Nobody signs for it. You start in the middle of a story that began without you, and you spend a good part of your life working out what you were given.

My first page fits in three lines on a piece of paper. A first name. A last name. A year, 1991. I don’t remember the first time I read them. I remember the first time I understood that they did not say everything.

I was adopted. I write it like that, in three words, because that is how it was said to me, and because everything that comes after those three words is less certain than the three words.

My parents gave me the name I carry, and a world: a working-class one. You learn early there that things are earned, that they are earned on a timetable, and that they are lost faster than they are earned. You also learn not to make a story of it. That is the first thing I was given without paperwork.

The era gave me its tools. I was born the year the Web opened to everyone. I grew up with machines that answered better and better and kept nothing from one time to the next. My parents worked in a world that kept everything on paper; I live in one that keeps everything and remembers nothing. That is not a complaint. It is the era, and it is part of what you are given.

There are two ways to carry what you were given. Suffer it, or fill it. It took me a long time to pick the second. I am not done.

What I was not given fits in an envelope: old papers, photographs, names, dates, places, handwriting hard to read. In August 2026, I laid them side by side, the way I now do with any file. Some pieces agree. Others contradict each other. I left the last one on the table, with its contradiction inside it, without forcing it. I will not tell you what is in there: it is not finished, and a story told before its end starts lying on its own.

I made my own way, often isolated. That is not a reproach to anyone. It is a fact, and it explains the way I hold things at arm’s length, not why I hold them.

Everyone has an envelope. Not always papers. A question you don’t open, a name you don’t say, a date you know without knowing where from. Where does what I am come from? I have no answer shorter than my life. What I have is a method: lay the pieces side by side, say what agrees, say what contradicts, and don’t conclude before the facts do.

I am not saying everything else comes from there. People who explain their life by its first page are lying, or mistaken, or both. I am saying that years later, when I demanded of a machine that it tell me where every figure came from before I believed it, I was not surprised to recognise myself.

You don’t choose what you are given. You choose what you do with it, and even then, not right away, and never once and for all.