On not being the person who has arrived

There is a way of writing about hard things that positions the writer safely on the other side of them. I understand the appeal. It is reassuring to be told by someone who has plainly made it out.

I cannot write that way honestly, because I am not standing there. There are things about my own life I do not have an answer for, and there will be more.

What I can say is narrower and, I think, more useful: I have been in this country before, more than once, and I did not get lost in it permanently. That is a smaller claim than having arrived. It is also the only one that has ever helped me when someone else made it to me.