I survived; I know this to be a fact. Still, there are moments when survival feels too simple a word for the distance between the life I was certain would end and the one I suddenly found myself continuing. Sometimes I cannot tell whether I came close to death and lived, or whether some part of me crossed into it and was sent back.

And perhaps because I did not know how to simply live after having spent so long learning how not to die, I began to make another bargain with existence. I measured my worth through what I could produce. I worked. I wrote. I accepted another task, another deadline, another project. I operated at what felt like four hundred per cent of my capacity and called it ambition, discipline, gratitude, resilience, anything except what it sometimes was: an inability to believe that being alive, by itself, was sufficient reason to occupy space. There is a peculiar moral economy that can emerge after catastrophe, in which life feels as though it must continuously justify having been spared. Rest becomes suspicious. Idleness becomes almost unbearable. A day in which nothing has been accomplished can feel, irrationally but powerfully, like a day in which one has failed to repay a debt. So I turned survival into productivity, and productivity into evidence that survival was not wasted. I became extraordinarily capable while remaining strangely unpractised in the simpler art of being alive. I know how to endure, how to work beyond exhaustion, how to respond to crisis, how to carry several lives at once; what I do not know is how to sit inside a quiet afternoon without turning it into a task. I am beginning to suspect that this, too, is one of the thorns.