Good Life Project - Suleika Jaouad | Between Two Kingdoms

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

Born in New York City to a Tunisian father and a Swiss mother, Suleika Jaouad attended The Juilliard School's pre-college program for the double bass, and earned her BA with highest honors from Princeton University and an MFA in writing and literature from Bennington College. Leaving music behind, she thought she’d a war correspondent, but her plans were cut short when, at age 22, she was diagnosed with leukemia that led to a brutal 4-year stint in and out of the hospital, with multiple rounds of chemo, and a bone marrow transplant. She began writing her New York Times column and Emmy-award winning video-series “Life, Interrupted” from her hospital room at Sloan-Kettering, and has written reported features, essays and commentary for New York Times Magazine, Vogue and NPR, among other publications. Suleika served on Barack Obama's Presidential Cancer Panel, the national advisory board of the Bone Marrow and Cancer Foundation, and the Brooklyn Public Library’s Arts & Letters Committee. She is also the creator of the Isolation Journals, a community creativity project founded during the Covid-19 pandemic to help others convert isolation into artistic solitude; over 100,000 people from around the world have joined. Her debut memoir, Between Two Kingdoms (https://amzn.to/3qaugcf), is a gorgeously written exploration of so many moments, people and stories that have led to her this moment in life.You can find Suleika Jaouad at:Website : https://www.suleikajaouad.com/bookInstagram : https://www.instagram.com/suleikajaouad/-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We all tend to step into our early lives with certain hopes and dreams and expectations about what we will be able to do. And then we put the work behind them. And when something happens that stops us, that is utterly out of our control, it can be terrifying and change the course of our lives. So my guest today, Suleika Jawad, was born in New York City. Her dad was Tunisian, mom's Swiss, and she ended up going to the Juilliard School's pre-college program, studying double bass. Really thought music would be her thing for a while, then ended up in Princeton and kind of started

to leave behind music. And she thought she would start and build a career as a war correspondent. But her plans were cut short when at 22, she was diagnosed with leukemia that led to really a brutal four-year stint in and out of the hospital, multiple rounds of chemo, and eventually a bone marrow transplant. And while in the hospital, she began sharing her experience online, kind of as a lifeline. And that led to a call from the New York Times with an invitation to start writing a column about her experience. That column became the New York Times column and Emmy award-winning video series, Life Interrupted, which was written mostly from her hospital room at Sloan Kettering in New York.

She has since written reported features, essays, and commentary for the New York Times Magazine, Vogue, NPR, and so many others. Suleika has served on Barack Obama's presidential cancer panel, the National Advisory Board of the Bone Marrow Uncancer Foundation, and the Brooklyn Public Library's Art and Letters Committee. She is also the creator of The Isolation Journals, a community creativity project founded during COVID-19 to help others convert isolation into artistic solitude. Over 100,000 people from all around the world have joined her. And in her debut memoir, Between Two Kingdoms, which is this gorgeously written exploration, she shares so many of the moments, the people, the stories that have led her to this moment in life. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in

glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. I have to tell you, I finished the book last night and it wrecked me in five ways.

I mean, as a son, a husband, friend, a brother, and a father, I was just like, as I'm reading, I'm stepping into every one of those roles. And I'm just like, you know, having trouble reading in each one of those, but in a good way. Thank you. Yeah. I love that. I hope the wrecking wasn't too unpleasant. So I want to dive into the book, into a whole bunch of different things with you. We're similar in that we sort of grew up in and out of the New York City area in various different ways. My sojourns out of the city were a little bit shorter than yours, about 45 minutes to Long Island, whereas yours were, you know,

potentially to Europe, Tunisia. Curious whether as a kid you had this sense of being a part of a number of different worlds and cultures or whether you kind of felt like, well, no, this is this one place where I'm grounded, but I happen to step out to these other places occasionally. Yeah, that's such a great question and something I think about a lot. So my father is Tunisian. My mother is Swiss.

I was born in New York City. And I have three passports, which has always made me think that in an alternate life, I should pursue becoming an international spy but the funny thing about being a mixed kid who grows up and like a multi-faith multilingual multi-ethnic background is that often instead of feeling like you're a part of many different worlds, you feel on the outsides of all of them. So I very much grew up feeling like a misfit in the most literal sense of the word.

I was always trying to figure out how to fit myself into these different places and realizing that it was impossible. And so instead of feeling, you know, both American and Swiss and Tunisian, I felt neither. But the other thing about being a kid is that often more than anything, all you want is to fit in. So I had this kind of ongoing plea with my parents where I begged them to let me legally change my name to Ashley, which they, of course, refused to do. until I was older, probably later in high school or even college that I started to lean into that difference and to embrace it and to feel a sense of possibility in that. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I know for you, journaling was something that touched down really early and I've heard you describe it as both a place of hiding and a place of finding. Was journaling a part of the way that you sort of like processed

what you were moving through from the earliest days? Absolutely. So I had this ritual every time we got on a plane and we were about to move to a new place. And we moved a lot. I think, you know, by the time I was eight or 10, I'd gone to six different schools on three different continents. But I would sit on the plane and I would open a brand new journal and I would write a kind of character sketch about who I wanted to become in that new place and then that next year and so for me the kind of beauty of a journal is it's the space where we get to exist as our most unfarnished selves and to write in our most unedited voice and it's a space where you know you can chronicle what you did that day or you know write your grocery list or you can write fiction or you know fragments of poems or you can just kind of play and imagine what could

be and so for me very much the journal was this kind of place where I could kind of write into this space between no longer and not yet which for me felt very much like the kind of write into this space between no longer and not yet, which for me felt very much like the kind of defining theme of my childhood. Yeah. The way you describe it sounds very much like the way a grownup would describe the childhood experience looking back at it. I'm curious whether you have any sense that in the moment, your lived experience as a child, whether you had an awareness of sort of like your writing as serving these

different purposes. I don't think so. And, you know, there's a sense of kind of freedom and journaling where hopefully you're going into it without any expectation of what it should be or what it will look like or even if it's any good and now that I write for a living I actually try very hard to kind of hold on to that early sense of freedom that I found as a kid in a journal and it's the space where the writing doesn't count and the stakes are lower. And there's something for me that feels incredibly liberating about that.

Yeah. Is that hard for you? I'm really curious because I know when I, you know, I'm a writer as well and I express myself creatively in different ways, but I'm so focused on growth a lot of the times, even when I'm just doing something, which I have no intent of anyone ever sharing or seeing or it's entirely for me. I sometimes have trouble letting go of that sort of internal performance mindset. Yeah. I mean, I think the key for me in terms of like tapping into that sort of free-flowing liberated space is writing by hand I'm someone who the second I sit at my computer and I open up Word doc I completely freeze up

and so I write by hand I write with these like very cheap uh disposable fountain pens that I buy from the drugstore and they're just inky enough that you kind of have to keep moving. Otherwise you end up making a mess on the page. And because of that, you know, even most recently when I was writing my book, I wrote most of my first drafts by hand because I couldn't get free when I was sitting down at a computer. I mean, a computer, I don't know about you. I'm, you know, I have a bajillion tabs open and it's like the space where I write and I work and I pay my taxes and I do all kinds of other unpleasant things. And because of that, it's hard for me to find that kind of, that sense of like sort of sacredness that can, or maybe should when we're doing it right, accompany any creative endeavor. Yeah. That's so interesting. I mean, the fact that you've sort of, you've intentionally chosen physical tools that force you to work in a certain mode because you know

that allows your mind to go to the place it needs to go. It's kind of fascinating. It's like you've chosen these constraints to a certain extent designed to optimize. It's almost forced you to be in a certain state when you're actually writing sitting down to write. Yeah. And I don't know about you, but for me, when I'm at a computer, like the ability to edit and the kind of like what I describe as like the tyranny of like the space bar for me ends up meaning that I'll start typing, I'll stop typing, I'll delete, I'll go back, I'll move paragraphs around and I just completely lose my center. And so something not just about how hard it is, there's only so much editing you can do

when you're writing by hand before you cross out the entire page and you have to start over, but also something about the kind of physicality of writing, the, you know, the, the feel of the page against my palm, the pen, the kind of callous that I have on my finger from writing with a pen so much, um, something about that helps me be more embodied in my writing. Um you know so many writers have kind of extolled the virtues of writing with old-fashioned paper and pen but uh yeah i have yet to kind of figure out how how to be that free on a computer yeah if you have any secrets please please let me know. Oh, I wish I did. I got nothing for you. I know Neil Gaiman also writes, I think to this day, he writes all of his books longhand with Fountain Pen. But it's interesting because as you're sharing this, I flash back to two things.

One is a conversation with Ann Patchett that we had on the podcast a little while back. And she literally like almost does an entire book in her head. And when she sits down to write, it's all formed. The character, the world, everything, it just kind of pours out fairly quickly. The other thing that popped into my head was, so when I write, I print, you know, this is pre-internet, I print in caps. And I'm like, yeah, like way before that was considered just screaming nonstop. And also write really slowly. And I read fairly slowly and have a past life as a lawyer. And the way that you used to get your grades was essentially your grade was based on a single essay test at the end of the semester and sometimes a year. And I learned that because I write so slowly and I read slowly, basically what I had to

write had to be as close to final as humanly possible with as few words as humanly possible when it came out. A lot of pressure. Right. It's huge. So I got into this habit of, I would read a 10-page fact pattern and they would end with a question, which is identify every potential cause of action and argue both sides and who wins. And I would just sit there for like an hour, just doing it all in my head.

And then I would hand in one blue book, whereas everyone else is handing in like five or 10. And that process, I think for me, has sort of continued to this day, even in the context of more creative and editorial writing, which is kind of interesting. I love that. I don't do it in my head because I have way too much chaos in my head. But I do do it on post-it notes. And when I'm writing a book chapter or I'm writing a story, I'll end up papering the walls of my office almost entirely in post-it notes. And I have a kind of whole system that I've devised to do that. But similarly, I need to kind of see it mapped out before I can figure out how to put it into form. Yeah, I love that. And totally resonates with me too. I do the same thing with post-it notes on a

wall. I need to see the whole thing visually and then move it all over the place and just, you know, like throw it all up in the air and keep moving it because a screen will never give me that. Yeah. Post-it notes should probably underwrite the Good Life Project. I, a hundred percent. I actually just, literally as we're speaking, I turned in the manuscript for my next book this week. So I'm sort of like pulling out of this whole process as well. You're a little bit ahead of me with this one. Growing up, I know also journaling and writing touched down fairly early for you. Music did as well, but not in the typical way with the typical instrument that your average kid would normally gravitate to?

Yeah. So my mom is a beautiful classical pianist and she started me on lessons when I was about four years old and in the typical Swiss way, she was very strict and I had to practice every single day and I had to do my skills and I absolutely hated it. And when I was about eight, she gave me the option of picking a secondary instrument. And so I decided to pick the instrument in my mind that would most inconvenience my parents, which was the double bass. But I was also strangely drawn to it. I was the only girl in my class who expressed any interest in playing it. Everyone was sort of scrambling for the violins and the tellos. But, you know, I still remember the first time I played the bass and the sort of low, I can remember the low grumble of the strings and the way it would kind of reverberate into my chest.

And it just was, you know, one of those moments where you try something and you feel like a deep pull towards it. So I loved the bass. It was also highly inconvenient. My parents had to get a minivan to fit it into the back of their car. And until I was about 12 years old, my dad would have to carry it for me because I was this, you was this tiny little girl with a giant instrument. But yeah, I mean, I grew up, my mom's an artist, my dad's a literature and film professor. And I grew up in a household where we were very much encouraged to pursue whatever kind of creative endeavors we wanted to. So I danced, I wrote in my journal, I played the bass. And by the time I was a teenager, I was pretty sure that I wanted to become a double bass player. And so that's what I set out to do. Landing you in band camp at one point when you're 13 or so. Your description of that low rumble though

is just, is fascinating to me. I've become more attuned to that sort of, I think later in life through the process of chanting actually. I remember the first time I chanted OM, which was about 20 years ago. And I'm not an overly spiritual person or metaphysical, but I remember sitting in a room with people and going through the three syllables, and then when you hit the mm, and that's, to me, it's really similar to what you're describing. It's this really low range, deeply resonant thing where your whole body becomes like a pitchfork. And there's something that happens to you I think when you have that resonance so close physically to you yeah yeah I love that yeah you do become a kind of human pitchfork I'm also kind

of fascinated by what resonances different people are drawn to at least think that if I had kids I would bring them to an orchestra concert or maybe play them an album and based on what resonance or what sound they're drawn to, match them with that instrument. Because for everyone, it's different. But for whatever reason, the bass to me almost felt like a kind of kindred spirit. It was the outlier of the orchestra. It was unwieldy. It didn't always fit in. And that was very much how I felt as a kid. It was sort of the misfit instrument. Definitely.

Yeah. So I'm curious then, because I know you end up going to college, studying nearest studies in French, and then end up in Egypt, exploring women's rights, post-colonial in North Africa for a chunk of time. When you were younger, if you're thinking, this is going to be my thing, what shifted? So when I was about 16, I got a scholarship to attend the pre-college program at Juilliard in New York City. And it was thrilling and intimidating and so much work to the point that, you know, I was practicing up to six or seven hours a day and also trying to go to public school almost four hours away in upstate New York. And so what I ended up doing, and I'm still shocked that my parents agreed to this,

was dropping out of high school. And the deal with my parents was that I had to take a couple of classes at the college, the small liberal arts college where my dad took and where I could attend class for free. And the rest of the week I would be in New York City playing the double bass. But what I realized during that time was that as much as I was growing and learning from those six or seven hours spent in a practice room, there was something kind of confining about it. I found myself hungry to learn more and I found myself actually increasingly drawn to these kind of side classes that I was taking at my dad's college. Um, I also had a really sort of edifying experience, which was when a chair in the bass section of the New York Philharmonic opened up and about 800 double bassists showed up to audition. And I realized then that even though I was a pretty talented double bass player, I wasn't going to become like an Edgar Meyer or one of these other sort of world-class double bass soloists that I so admired.

And that if I was lucky, I might get a job in an orchestra somewhere, but that wasn't really fulfilling to me. I had no desire to be playing, you know, Pachelbel's Canyon or whatever it is that orchestras these days are kind of forced to have to play and that I was really hungry to learn and to learn you know beyond the double bass and I don't think it was clear to me that I wasn't going to become a double bass player but I just knew that conservatory from me felt constraining and that I wanted to kind of explore beyond music. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like to a certain extent, it wasn't so much that you were saying no to music or even to the double bass, but it's just sort of the context that was being laid out in front of you just wasn't resonating. So it's like almost like, well, let me not make this the focus of

every waking hour for the moment in time and kind of see what may happen. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it was that, and it was something that, you know, even at 16 or 17, however old I was that I identified, which was that I was good at this thing, but I probably wasn't going to excel at it in a way that would content me. And that's not to kind of diminish my own, you know, talent or skill, but it was a sort of important awareness. And it was an awareness that perhaps my efforts and my time might be more valuably invested in something else. And that I was going to kind of explore that and see how it felt. Yeah. I mean, doing that at Juilliard also is a whole different universe. My niece actually did that same program for opera when she was in high school and then

actually studied opera in college, but realized after graduating, it wasn't her thing. But I remember her describing to me the experience at Juilliard and she also did MSM at the same time. studied opera in college, but realized after graduating, it wasn't her thing. But I remember her describing to me the experience at Juilliard and she also did MSM at the same time. And Juilliard is the place where everyone goes to try and it's the place in the country, if not the world. But it is also, especially when you're a young person coming up, it can be a fairly brutalizing experience. And the industry, especially the classical music industry, can be a brutalizing culture.

Not that it always has to be, but it was interesting to hear your experience and also be able to reference the shared experience of my niece as well. And it's a whole different universe. It is. I'm shocked someone hasn't made a reality TV show about pre-college Juilliard, or more specifically about the parents

of pre-college Juilliard students, because that's its own sort of wildly competitive, surreal subculture. And there's a real heartbreak in those hallways and in those practice rooms, because you have a bunch of kids who likely were the best at whatever they did in whatever town or city they came from. And suddenly they're surrounded by hundreds or dozens of other kids who are just as good if not you know eons better um and it was brutal um

but so much of what I learned from like the discipline that it took to sit yourself down and practice for that amount of time, the dedication, the many ways in which within that competitive environment, you have to figure out how you're going to show up, how you're going to interact with that competition, if at all, is stuff that I still carry with me now. Yeah. It's one of those stuff that I still kind of carry with me now. Yeah, it's one of those things that I think it always stays with you, the experiences. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest

charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. So you end up in college at some point starting to think maybe war correspondent is the thing that you want to go out and do because you're deeply invested in issues. You end up graduating in Paris and it sounds like that's where there were hints of your

body starting to sort of betray you to a certain extent before that, but everything really starts to fall apart there. Yeah. I mean, the beginning of things is always so much harder to pinpoint than the end of them. It's easy for me to look back now and to see that in ways I wasn't fully aware of, I was probably sick my entire senior year of college, but it was only, you know, when I, when I got to Paris as like this recent graduate, I was working as a paralegal, which is a job I was very grateful for, but not my dream job. Um, that I began to understand that my fatigue was different to the fatigue of, you know, my 21, 22-year-old friends who were also very tired because they were working and, you know, going out dancing until 5 a.m. invincible and where illness probably isn't something that's kind of imminently in the kind

of landscape of possibilities was so disorienting. And, you know, even when I started to think that something might be seriously wrong with me, it was made all the more disorienting by doctors who were kind of operating under the same assumption, which was that, you know, an otherwise healthy looking 22 year old woman probably didn't have something seriously wrong And so I found myself on this hunt for answers. And it was its own kind of investigative reporting process that ultimately when I got my diagnosis, which was of acute myeloid leukemia, felt, of course, devastating, but also like a relief. Because after spending so long not knowing what was wrong,

wondering if I was like making shit up, if I was imagining things or dramatizing things, it was so clarifying and so relieving to have a diagnosis that I could actually hold on to. I mean, that's such a powerful statement, effectively saying that the certainty that came along with simply having an answer was almost a relief compared to the truth of what the diagnosis was, which is something I think so many of us grapple with. We are really bad at being in the liminal space for any level of time. It kind of can be massively destructive to our psyche, let alone us dealing with something that actually is really deeply challenging us physiologically. The psychological part can be brutalizing as well.

Yeah. Yeah. I think we struggle to find our footing in uncertainty. And of course, that's something that we're all struggling with right now, where the possibility of illness feels imminent for all of us. Yeah. It has expanded. I mean, it's sort of the fabric. It's the air we breathe through a certain extent right now, quite literally. You end up back in New York at Mount Sinai, in Sloan Kettering, a legendary institution, sort of like under the care of the best of the best. And still, this is a brutal diagnosis. There's a moment where the doctor essentially gives you and the family your odds, which is not good. And you move fairly immediately into treatment, into chemo. In the early days, things don't go well.

And meanwhile, you're 22, 23 years old. You're a young person in the world. Everybody else that you know is out there living their lives. You write at one point, the world is moving forward and I'm stuck. And that stuckness for you doesn't end after a couple of days or weeks or even months. This becomes a years long experience for you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was interviewing a friend of mine recently who spent the last 20 years incarcerated and he said something to the effect of like, we can survive something as long as we can see the horizon. And I think for me, the ongoingness of my illness was something that was so, uh, yeah, I mean, I don't even have words for it. It was, it was,

it felt unendurable in moments. Um, it was fun thing to know, okay, I'm going to do this treatment for six months and it's going to suck and it's going to be brutal, but then it's going to end. The kind of shifting goalposts as my treatment kept getting extended was, I think, one of the most trying parts of that experience. It wasn't the physical pain. It wasn't the side effects. It was the not knowing. Yeah. And, you know, you're sharing this in the context of cancer diagnosis and treatments and, you know, failures and successes and new treatments and then saying, like, this is working, you know, you'll have X days and then showing up on like the X day and realizing, no, now you have twice that. So there is really no end. And we're having this context, as you just sort of shared in the conversation in the context of just life and what's happening around us in the world right now. And I, you know, like the world is living in this state

of perpetually moving goalposts and fear. And I wonder, you know, like the world is living in this state of perpetually moving goalposts and fear. And I wonder, you know, when you went through this, me. At one point, you described it as encanceration. whether you feel that any of what you felt in any way, shape or form is more relatable to people who haven't been through something that extreme. Yeah. I mean, I think that sense of stuckness is something that we're all living, whether we're stuck at home and working remotely or we're having to go to work, but there are any number of constraints and limitations that make doing whatever it is that we're doing and just generally going about our lives more difficult. For me, you know, that first year in treatment, I was in medical isolation. I spent much of that year in a very small hospital room that I wasn't allowed to leave, even just to walk around the hallways.

And the rest of the time I was stuck at home in my childhood bedroom. And I remember like going on social media and seeing photos of my friends, like starting jobs and dating and traveling the world and feeling that distance between me and them just kind of growing by the day. And at times even feeling, you know, deep envy and like a kind of nostalgia for a life that I had, you know, as an undergrad spent all of my energy and my time preparing for, but that likely based on what the doctors were telling me, I wouldn't be able to live possibly ever. And that was so difficult and I was so angry. And I think for a long time, you know, I kept trying to unstuck myself by grasping for things that would have made sense in my pre-diagnosis life. In the book, I describe how I enrolled in a creative writing class, but I only ever made it to the first day because I was hospitalized. I would, you know, set these ambitious goals for myself. And I had a big stack of books on my table that I, of course, never ended up reading because I was too tired to read.

And so I found myself increasingly frustrated. the long lineage of bedridden artists and writers throughout time that have found ways to, that have found ways to make of that space of confinement something creative and useful and even beautiful. I look to Frida Kahlo, who started painting in the aftermath of the automobile accident she was in. I look to Matisse, who changed his entire approach to his art after he was bed-bound by his own cancer diagnosis. I look to Virginia Woolf. And so I think in a way now, you know, a year into this pandemic, we've all had to make that pivot. There's the kind of adrenaline in the early stages of isolation where, you know, I remember it like in the first weeks when everything went into lockdown, reading people's plans on social media about, you know, the sourdough they were going to start baking or the new, you know, hobbies they were going to take up.

And inevitably there's a drop off and there's a kind of exhaustion and toll that starts to make itself known when something lasts for longer than we thought it did. And to me, that is like the most critical point and, um, the most interesting point when you're kind of brought down to your most savage self in a way, when you realize that what you thought perhaps might happen or what you thought you could do isn't going to happen and you have to find within yourself resources and activities and pursuits that fit within your limitations and that nourish you. And so that for me was like very much the focus, you know, beyond just navigating the illness and all the kind of logistical and bodily aspects of that. That was really my main focus and my preoccupation is how do I get myself existentially unstuck when it looks like I'm going to be stuck physically, at least in this body and in this illness for however long?

And how do I find a sense of joy and nourishment and purpose, regardless of what my circumstances are? Yeah, I know. and nourishment and purpose, regardless of what my circumstances are. Yeah. I know you're right at one point, what scared me more than the transplant, more than the debilitating side effects that came with it, more than the possibility of death itself was the thought of being remembered as someone else's sad story of unmet potential. Yeah. Which kind of really speaks to what you were just sharing. You end up having a match with your brother, actually moving through a transplant, which is Yeah. And at some point you also make the decision to share what you're going through in the early days as a form of a blog. And then in collaboration with the New York Times through the Life Interrupted series,

which also brings video into the equation and brings a lot of notoriety to what you're doing along the way, but not after the fact, in real time. I'm curious what, on the one hand, you've got this really powerful channel of expression and people are writing back to you and you've got a way to break the seal of the bubble without having to step outside of it. I'm curious how it was for you to share both as a sort of like an ongoing creative act, but also as an ongoing act of relationship, act of socialization? Yeah. I mean, it was terrifying, to be honest. I, you know, I'd never been published before.

I'd never written for any publication or any newspaper. And here I was having to turn out these weekly installments from my hospital bed for the New York fucking times, which, you know, I felt so profoundly honored and excited to have a job to do other than being a patient. But then there was the reality of, of actually figuring out how to write period. I'd never written a column before. How to kind of ration my energy throughout the day in order to meet these deadlines. There's a photograph of me in the transplant unit, and I have a vomit bucket under one arm, and I have my laptop on my knees, and I'm crying, not because of this terrible, you know, scary transplant that I'm about to have, but because I'm late for my deadline. And I think that was bizarrely healthy for me.

It allowed me to kind of channel all the fears and the anxieties of my, you know, health predicament into something that felt productive. But more than that, after a year, you know, spent in isolation, it opened a kind of portal onto the outside world that I hadn't had before. And I started to receive responses and messages and letters from all kinds of people. And what surprised me was that, you know, I'd written this column in real time from the trenches with the hope of it being helpful or resonant to other people who were also living with cancer. But I was amazed by how broadly people interpreted

the idea of a life interruption. And it just kind of blasted my vision and my world wide open. And, you know, it was a reminder, I think a necessary one, that I wasn't the only one struggling with these struggles. I wasn't the only one living a kind of private grief or pain. And it kind of forced me to look outward. Yeah. I remember we had sat down with Katie Camilla, who writes these gorgeous children's books.

And we were talking and she shared something that has always stayed with me, which was that for her, she's a beautiful writer. But she said the creative act isn't done until a child reads what she's written or a parent reads it to a child. She said for her, the final act of creation is actually an act of connection. I'm curious how that lands with you. Yeah. I mean, you know, we've talked endlessly about memoir or the first person as this kind of navel gazing genre, but to me, the power of the first person, when you do it from a place of unvarnished honesty and vulnerability and generosity is that the I very quickly becomes a we and a you. And to me, that's the only reason I write in the first person ever is with that sort of objective in mind because I think there's no greater gift as a writer but but more than anything as a reader

when you read a story or you read a book and whether it's you know non-fiction or fiction and you feel a sense of recognition in its pages. And that's what I strive for. Yeah. I think that can happen in fiction, in memoir, in a lot of different things. Harriet the Spy, right? When you're transferring to that, so many people. But I'm fascinated by the notion of writing not to give people a place to escape to or something to aspire to, but to simply do it as a creative act and also to hopefully allow people to know that they're not alone. Yeah.

And we were talking about reverberations and frequencies in the context of music but the same is true of writing I think when we kind of show up in our writing and we tell the unvarnished truth there's a reverberation that begets reverberation and other people begin to share their own unvarnished truths and I've seen that you know I saw that happen when Iished truths. And I've seen that, you know, I saw that happen when I was writing the column. I've seen that happen as a reader in my own life. When I read something and I think, wow, I didn't know you were allowed to say that. Yeah. I mean, interestingly to, when I hear you say that part of what, yeah, I completely agree. And then there's something which says, I wonder if there's also a real difference between music and writing in that I'm someone who's done both my whole life also.

I played guitar, band as a kid and all this stuff, and I've been writing for much of my adult life. And I agree, there's the opportunity for resonance with both of them. But I experience it so differently in one really important way, at least for me. I'm curious whether you do also, which is the synchronous nature of the resonance. So like when you're playing music

and there's people around you, you know in the moment. You feel it in the moment and you can also adapt. You know, you can kind of go where you feel the room needs to go so that you're all there together. Whereas with a writer, it's kind of like you're flying blind and hoping and praying that you're getting there. Yeah. You're flying blind and alone and it's pretty terrifying. Yeah. And there is that long gap, especially when you're writing a book where like from the time you start writing it to when actual humans who are not tied to you by blood or obligation begin reading it you know it could be many years and there's this hope of like okay i'm sending this off into the void and i hope

you know i hope it goes somewhere i hope it lands for someone, but you don't know. But I do feel a reverberation that happens in me when I know I'm not just writing the truth, but like the truth beneath the truth beneath the truth. And so that to me is my kind of guiding pitchfork. when I feel scared, when I feel resistant, when I wonder, am I allowed to say this? And so it's a different, yeah, it's a different kind of process. I don't know if you have that experience. Yeah, I actually, I do. And I was actually curious with you also, I literally start to physically shake. It's the weirdest thing. Um, when I, and I love how you described it as the truth beneath the truth beneath the truth, because that's what it is. And you don't know it until you hit it. But when you hit it, I mean, at least for like physically, my body can't contain it.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I often joke that like my first drafts are full of lies, which is maybe an exaggeration, but they're like full of half truths or even aspirational truths. And what I have to do is I have to like print it out and I do a read for bullshit. I do a read for lies and not lies, of course, that I'm intentionally fabricating, but like lies I'm telling myself because I don't kind of want to do that excavation that's necessary to get to that deeper truth. Yeah. It's like reading it to see where you're hiding. Yeah, exactly. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun.

On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk.

The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. You eventually sort of emerged from this season to a certain extent, you know, four years or so, where you're starting to feel different. You're starting to feel like you can participate in life more. You're kind of stepping back into the world. But now you've got this question, which is effectively, how do you live when you spent the last four years trying not to die? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, one of the first and kind of hardest lessons I learned when I was emerging from treatment is that there is a massive difference between surviving and living and that I was an expert in survival, but, and that there's a way in which, you know, those survival skills are useful in certain contexts. They help you make it through whatever difficult passage you're in, but they don't necessarily work as well when they're applied to, you know, normal, quote-unquote, everyday life. And, you know, beyond the work of learning to live again, I also realized that I couldn't go back to the person I'd been pre-diagnosis. I was no longer a cancer patient, but I also had no idea who I was. And so those two questions,

who am I and how do I actually start living my life? And what does that look like were terrifying. Yeah. And I mean, also, you know, your frame of reference compared to the average 27 year old person who hadn't just spent the last four or five years the way you had, I would imagine that it wasn't necessarily the easiest thing to relate to your peers sort of like at a similar point in life as well yeah yeah I mean definitely you know as much as I I wanted to I wasn't in a place where I could you know pursue a full-time career that would require me to sit at a desk because I wasn't well enough to do that I couldn't I didn't have the desire to go to parties. I was in this like very raw place where I felt, you know, vulnerable and kind of peeled open to the world. And so what I did was that I ended up realizing that if I didn't do something drastic and if I didn't kind of thrust myself back into the world and try to

answer some of those questions that I would end up living this kind of very small, isolated life, because that was what I'd known and that was what I was comfortable with. And so I decided to go on a road trip and to visit some of the people who've been responding to my column over the years. But first, of course, I had to learn how to drive, which was its own life or death terrifying exercise. For anyone who hasn't grown up around New York City, you don't get the fact that city kids don't get licenses until they absolutely have to. That's right. That's right. Very often it's in their 20s at some point. Yeah.

Yeah. So you met this, this hundredish, you know, or so day road trip, literally 15,000 miles around the country. Also visiting a number of the people who had been in contact and reaching out and responding to your life interrupted column over the years. And you write so beautifully about so many of the relationships and so many of the moments and will allow our listeners to read some of that. Towards the end of the trip, you end up in one conversation, actually meeting one person who had been in an early conversation with you, who goes by the moniker Lil GQ, who sounds like he's never been sick a day in his life,

but is in an experience which is profoundly different than the life you've lived, profoundly different than the moment you were in, yet in really odd ways, similar. Yeah. So Lil GQ is someone who has been on death row in the time he was 18 years old. He's now in his early 40s, so more than half his life. And he was one of the first strangers I received a letter from. And there was one line in particular that almost gave me a sense of vertigo. And he said, you know, I know that our experiences are different, but essentially he described how we were both in isolation, him in solitary confinement, me in my hospital room, and we were both facing mortality in these different ways. And I was so stunned by that letter. And I, you know,

I can still remember lying in my hospital bed in New York City and trying to picture this man in a prison cell in Texas. And it was dizzying. And I was intrigued by why he'd written to me. I was intrigued about those kind of strange parallels between my experience. As you said, I had described my experience as an incarceration of sorts. And of course, you know, without kind of reducing those parallels to sameness, I immediately, pretty much when I got that letter, I thought, oh, if I could ever travel, this is someone I'd like to sit down with face-to-face and speak to one day. And so toward the end of that road trip, I found myself in Texas, sitting down with him, you know, through a plexiglass barrier. And there was so much that, you know, about those conversations that will forever be imprinted on my heart. Um, but his, you know, at some point

in the conversation, he asked me what I did to kind of endure all that time I'd spent in the hospital bed. And when I told him that I got really, really good at Scrabble, he responded, me too, and explained to me how he and his neighboring and the neighboring prisoners would make board games out of scraps of paper and play together by kind of calling out their plays uh through the kind of metal vents in their cells and I think for me like one of the the kind of big things that I took away from that experience is the sort of astounding resilience of the human spirit. And I don't use that word resilience lightly. It's a word that's been so overused to the point of meaning absolutely nothing, but our ability to truly adapt to any circumstance

and to the incredible creativity that it takes to survive. We've talked about creative acts, but I think to me, survival requires perhaps the greatest of creative acts. Yeah. Which really resonates, given every creative act is an act of stepping into the void without any promise of an outcome. And this is sort of the ultimate, you know, survival is the ultimate creative act if you look at it that way. You know, there's a sort of a theme and it's sort of like teed up in your book, the notion of these two kingdoms, kingdom of the living and the kingdom of the dying. And it sounds like, you know, as you come back from that, as you slowly start to process of reintegration and trying to figure out what does me look like moving forward? What is the world? What does my world look like moving forward?

Part of your awakening through all the experiences you've had, and you've now in the intervening years spoken about this, taught about this, and really gone deep into it, is maybe the fallacy between the notion of there being any sort of defined border between those kingdoms. Yeah. Yeah. And we're so sort of steeped in binary thinking and whether you're trying to find your place in the geographical sense or in the cultural sense or whether you're trying to find your place in like the geographical sense or in the cultural sense, or whether you're trying to figure out where you fit as a healthy person or as a sick person.

In some ways, you know, it's taken me 30 something years to arrive to this this even though I've always sort of lived in that liminal space but that there's something very empowering about kind of abandoning those binaries and living in wilderness in between and allowing things to be messy and unformed and allowing yourself to elude easy categorization. Yeah. When I think about the two, it's funny, my mind sort of went to a place where I say, well, I almost wonder if it's an oversimplification of the model too, in that, you know, you have the physiological state of tending towards health or tending towards illness. You have the psycho-emotional state of feeling of aliveness versus stifled or tending towards death. And part of our work on the planet is to learn the skills and the practices to be able to dissociate the two, which is a brutally hard experience. But the people who I have known who have been the most nourished, the most alive, no matter

what happens to them from a clinical physiological standpoint, are the ones who I've seen tend to really live their best lives. Yeah. And I'm interested by the idea of that dissociation, because I think for me, it's felt very much like an active integration in the sense of, you know, there have been times when I've been the most physically sick that I've ever been and the most, you know, inspired and fulfilled. And there have been times when I've been as healthy and strong as a human could be and, you know, in such a state of despair. And and i like the kind of good type a student that i was raised to be have a hard time holding two things that seem like they are in opposition

in the same palm yeah don't we all yeah um but living into those those kind of paradoxes and living into the kind of possibilities that they invite has also been my work it's probably our work especially right now where we see people, for example, who have had COVID and who have survived COVID and who are living with the imprints of that experience. Yeah. No, I think the notion of holding two opposing things at once, it's a very alien experience, I think, especially to a Western mind. It comes more naturally to an Eastern mind, although it still very often takes decades of work and practice. I'm certainly not there. I study the philosophers and Buddhists and the ideas and the ideals.

And the few people that I've met who have seemed to be able to access something that allows them even the slightest experience of grace, that's an aspiration of mine for sure. And I've seen it in a small number of others enough times that I believe that it's available. I don't know how I get there, but it's a deep fascination of mine. Let me know when you, when you find out. It reminds me of something that someone on the road trip told me, um, man named Rich, who I stayed with in California. Um, and he said that when we take a trip, we actually take three trips. There's the trip of preparation. There's the trip you're actually on for me at that moment, this road trip. And then there's the trip that you remember.

The key is to stay in the trip that you're on. Yeah. For me, my practice is meditation and a lot of chocolate. My practice is no meditation, a lot of chocolate. I'm completely down with that too. Sometimes I'll substitute pizza for meditation. I think it's a complete equivalent experience. I want to just sneak in one other question that you, over the last year or so, guess you know you started this really cool project isolation journals tell me where that came from and it's it's it's amazing sort of like creating expanding on what you've done and creating this idea of like when we get interrupted maybe this is a really fascinating creative prime for all of us yeah i mean it was

you know the isolation journals is very much an extension of my own kind of lifelong journaling practice, but more specifically, a hundred day project that my family and friends and I, my creative act was journaling. And as, you know, in the early stages of the pandemic, it occurred to me that so many of those themes of isolation and interruption were things that we were all kind of now living with on a global scale. And I thought I might try to extend this idea of a 100-day project to a bigger audience. But instead of just like telling people to go journal every day for 100 days, which felt hard even for me, and I loved journaling at that time, I decided to invite some friends of mine, artists, writers, community leaders to offer words of inspiration and a prompt. And so that community has grown to over 100,000 people. a lesson and how in times like this we have the possibility of converting isolation into a kind of creative solitude and even a possibility of connection and community

and actually one of our upcoming prompts is from little GQ, whose execution date has been set for this May, which is just, it's a whole other discussion, but to be able to share his words or to share prompts from all kinds of people living all kinds of realities for me feels like the coming together of like so many aspects of of the work that I care so deeply about and that I've been trying to do over this last decade. Yeah. It's a really, it's a beautiful project. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well.

So sitting here in this container of good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To live a good life to me is to live a free life and freedom for me is less about freedom from any sort of outward forces but freedom from ego from expectation, from kind of self-imposed constraints. And that's the freedom to live creatively, whatever that means. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code

for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share, share the love. If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk.

The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. We'll see you next time.