You've Been So Lucky Already: A Memoir

by Alethea Black

In some ways it’s a comforting thought. All your frustrations, all your joys, all the moments when everything went wrong, when it was hard to believe anything would ever feel normal again, when you actually split off from yourself and observed from a slight distance, which seemed safer, especially when your life exploded right at its midpoint, affording you a crystal-clear view of the heartbreak you caused, the love you absorbed, the deaths that unmoored you, the illness that razed your existence to a pile of terrifyingly beautiful rubble—it’s comforting to feel that, somehow, you’ve borne them all before. And you have this shadowy memory that it was worth it, so you’ll do it again. You’ll do it all again and again.