An honest account leaves room for the help that made your success possible.

Stories get shorter each time they are told, and the parts that disappear first are other people. Not from dishonesty, but because a clean narrative wants one protagonist and a straight line, and the cousin who lent the deposit complicates the shape. Over a few years the tidy version becomes the version you believe.

The next time you tell how something happened, keep one inconvenient detail in: the loan, the introduction, the year someone else carried the household. It makes the story slightly less neat and considerably more true. And it lets the people listening see that the thing was reachable, which the tidy version never does.