Your past did not change. The person reading it did.
Once you know who you became, memory starts rearranging old events around that ending. This experiment makes the edit visible.
Start with who you are now
Which trait has become part of how you move through life?
Now pick the event you usually blame or credit
Which old event do you most easily use to explain it?
Reverse the arrow
Suppose the event did not create the trait from nothing.
Suppose it selected something already possible in you, rewarded it, sharpened it, or gave it a permanent job.
The spiral
Has the same theme returned in different clothes?
What does that trait give you now?
What does the trait produce now?
Now let the future change the meaning
Ten years from now, the same trait becomes central to a life you value.
What happens to the old event then?
The same life, read in two directions
Read forward
Read backward
Born backwards
Once you see the editing, the old event loses its monopoly on the explanation.
The past happened forward. The story of the past is written later. The child lives the event without knowing who will survive it. The adult looks back with words the child did not have and turns memory into a story with causes, lessons and inevitabilities.
Keep one distinction.
Later meaning can change the place an event occupies in your life without proving the event had to happen.