I have been dwelling on what it means to live well. Not because I have mastered it, but because I have become very comically bad at it. I have spent years rushing through my life, panicked and convinced I was running out of time. I worried constantly about work – getting it, keeping it, doing it, caring about it too much, hating it and losing it. I obsessed over being more productive. I fretted about money, mostly about not having any left after travelling too much. I poured so much energy into dating that it’s kind of impressive I haven’t had a relationship for the last six years.

But most of all I became fixated on my fertility and how it dwindled in my early 30s, leaving me to make choices most women don’t have to until later. I tried to save my eggs and couldn’t. My lack of a partner in a conservative Catholic Lebanese family became a cudgel.

Pleasure was something bypassed on the way to a goal of being chosen and accepted. In other words, joy was a byproduct.

Trying to live well in a society that doesn’t prioritise it is like filling a cup with the bottom cut off: the water just runs through, passing you by, leaving you as parched as sandpaper.

A holiday was an opportunity to recover from work. In Italy, the plastic cup in my hand was solid and filled with the bitter strength of a negroni sbagliato – or a “broken negroni” – a drink........

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