Your misconceptions are out of date.

It's hard to be humble when other peoples' ideas are stuck in the past and mistaken from the beginning.

Immediately after I arrived in Kilkenny Ireland in the autumn of 2001, I met a group of people who became my friends.

People even referred to it as "the group."

This was important, to me, at that time

But it's a trap, too, this belonging. People define you, when you're part of a group. They take you in, in more ways than the mere benevolent. They think that they own you; they make assumptions about who you really are — and then they tend to hold on to these assumptions.

What they thought you were, when they met you — and you weren't — has also changed.