Both Nadia and Macabéa are tragic figures fated to die. And yet, they desire to live. It's the process of resuscitation that is common to both, as is the means of their alleged ends (spoiler alert)-both are run over by cars. Lispector sees death as an encounter with self. As do the writers of Russian Doll. By the beginning of the sixth episode, the metaphor of the Matryoshka doll revealed itself more obviously. Self nestled within self nestled within self. I thought of my therapist, and how she had been helping me unravel this abundant multiplicity. It had been more than a month since I'd seen her. I owed myself a visit. Just as I thought this, the therapist character in Russian Doll tells Nadia and Alan, both characters stuck in a death loop, "without a therapist, you are the unreliable narrator of your own stories."

Right then, as these words were uttered, Mona's laptop ran out of battery and died. They had been talking about mirrors, how they function as proofs of our existence. I decided it was best that I slept. I went to the bathroom to pee and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and inadvertently thought I was beautiful-not usually the thought that comes to mind when I look into any reflective surface. It reminded me of one of my earliest sessions with my therapist, when I told her that I find myself most attractive when I am confronted with my reflection in front of the mirrors in Mona's house.

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When Macabéa is hit by the yellow Mercedes, the narrator says she seemed to become more and more transformed into a Macabéa, as if she were arriving at herself. "Her struggle to live resembled something that she had never experienced before, virgin that she was, yet had grasped by intuition. For only now did she understand that a woman is born a woman from that first wail at birth. A woman's destiny is to be a woman. Macabéa had perceived the almost painful and vertiginous moment of overwhelming love. A painful and difficult reflowering that she enacted with her body and that other thing you call a soul and I call-what?"

During the Easter Sunday mass two years ago, Father Mario gave a profound sermon. I don't remember all of it, but one line stood out, which I recorded instantly- "The Resurrection is a self-emptying process". When I did meet my therapist on Monday, I recounted to her that proclamation and articulated how I was trying still to make sense of the simultaneous nature of the processes of exhuming one's selves while also replenishing them. As I was watching Russian Doll, particularly as I drew nearer to the end, I thought of Sartre's dictum, "Hell is other people", expounded in his play, No Exit. The series makes the opposite point, as if to say, "Hell is the absence of people", the subtext being that our personal salvation is intricately connected to that of the other. Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, asks, "What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."

I decided to seek wisdom in the process of sour dough. As an ode to my Catholic upbringing, I prepared the leaven the night before Maundy Thursday. This afternoon I deemed it a success when I scooped out a spoonful and let it dive into a cup of water. As it floated I drifted once again into a state of grace. I remembered another wonderful line, I think it's also by Lispector-"Joy is limitless as long as it lasts".

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

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