The gift that pain has given me, as an adult, is that it lets me talk more easily about the pain of being an adult. When it was just childhood that I felt, haunting me, I flinched from everything that hurt as a man. A man’s pain, though, that has made me look more closely at the pain of others, as well as my own, without flinching. It’s a good thing, because that’s the ink I have to write with.