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Good Medicine | Sheila Heti | Granta

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S ometime during my forty-eighth year, I began to overhear myself saying, in conversation, ‘I don’t really need to live much longer,’ or, ‘If I died tomorrow, that would be fine.’ I felt uneasy, surprised and disturbed every time this came out of my mouth. One friend said, ‘That’s very wise, very enlightened of you,’ and I suppose it could have been. But in my case, it didn’t feel like wisdom. I felt like I knew who I was, and what my life was, and looking to the future, I saw only repetition. My work, my friendships, my relationship with my boyfriend were all good. I just didn’t see the value in decades more of living. That spring, I had posted to Reddit for the first time, a question I titled, ‘What happened to you after fifty that was new?’ The post included the sentence, ‘I wonder if this age represents a natural downturn in a person’s life, where things sort of plateau, and all you were working toward reveals itself, and then you have it: a life . . . I know age forty-nine is stat

Good Medicine | Sheila Heti | Granta Skip to main content Good Medicine Sheila Heti it exists --> S ometime during my forty-eighth year, I began to overhear myself saying, in conversation, ‘I don’t really need to live much longer,’ or, ‘If I died tomorrow, that would be fine.’ I felt uneasy, surprised and disturbed every time this came out of my mouth. One friend said, ‘That’s very wise, very enlightened of you,’ and I suppose it could have been. But in my case, it didn’t feel like wisdom. I felt like I knew who I was, and what my life was, and looking to the future, I saw only repetition. My

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