Nothing has ever been your fault, which is precisely why nothing has ever been your achievement either.

The line is for the person whose autobiography consists entirely of things that were done to them. Every failure has a villain, every collapse has a culprit, and the culprit is never standing where you are standing. You call this self-awareness, or bad luck, or being surrounded by difficult people, and you deliver it with the wounded authority of someone who has never once asked the only question that matters. Who was driving? Here is the part that should sting: the same instinct that protects you from blame also prevents anyone from handing you credit, because blame and credit come out of the same account and yours has been overdrawn for years. You are not a victim of circumstance. You are a volunteer with a talent for leaving before the reckoning. Notice how nobody trusts you with anything that matters, how the interesting work drifts elsewhere, how people listen to your explanations with a politeness that has gone rather thin. The line lands best when you are halfway through explaining why it all went wrong again and the table has quietly stopped asking follow-up questions. It also lands when you describe yourself as unlucky, which is the flattering word for having made the same choice repeatedly and expecting a different invoice. Nothing was ever your fault. Nothing was ever yours.