The event you use to explain yourself may have become important only in the retelling.

Some turning points are made in the telling. An episode gets recounted, then recounted again, and each time it takes on more explanatory weight until it becomes the reason you are how you are. At the time it may have been one of several similar things, unremarkable, and its importance is largely retrospective construction.

Take the story you use to explain yourself and ask what else was happening that year. Usually a great deal, and some of it more consequential. Loosening the grip of a single origin story tends to make the present feel less determined.