How to Turn a Mistake into Magic with Suleika Jaouad

Speaker 1 One thing I love about our listeners is how industrious all of you are. The stories we hear about you guys going off on your own and starting your own ventures like we did, it's truly inspiring.

Speaker 1 It's a big part of why NetSuite came to us as a sponsor. NetSuite offers real-time data and insights for so many business owners, and by that I mean over 42,000 businesses.

Speaker 1 NetSuite offers the number one AI-powered cloud ERP. Think of it as a central nervous system for your business.

Speaker 1 Instead of juggling separate tools for accounting here, HR there, inventory somewhere else, NetSuite pulls everything into one seamless platform.

Speaker 1 That means you finally have one source of truth, real visibility, real control, and the power to make smarter decisions faster.

Speaker 1 With real-time data and forecasting, you're not just reacting to what already happened, you're planning for what's next.

Speaker 1 And whether your company is bringing in a few million or hundreds of millions, NetSuite scales with you.

Speaker 1 It helps you tackle today's challenges and chase down tomorrow's opportunities without missing a beat.

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Speaker 2 All right, pod squad. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

Speaker 2 You should know right away that I personally have been waiting for this day for a very long time.

Speaker 2 I have kicked everyone else off the podcast for the day. I'm sorry, but there will be no sister, no Abby today because our guest today is so

Speaker 2 brilliant and important and has so much to teach us about

Speaker 2 how to live that I just just wanted to leave as much space as humanly possible for her to speak as much as possible.

Speaker 2 So today

Speaker 2 we have Sulaika Jawad, who is the author of the unbelievably beautiful book Between Two Kingdoms, which everyone that I know has read several times.

Speaker 2 She wrote the Emmy Award-winning New York Times column Life Interrupted, and her reporting and essays have been featured in the New York Times magazine, the Atlantic, Vogue, NPR, I think like 50 other places since then.

Speaker 2 I've read at least 50 other articles in 50 other places. She is a highly sought-after speaker, and her TED Talk, What Almost Dying Taught Me About Living, has nearly 5 million views.

Speaker 2 She is also the creator of the Isolation Journals, a community creativity project founded during the pandemic to help others convert isolation into artistic solitude, which, even that sentence, Zuleika.

Speaker 2 Thank you for that reframe. I'm not a hermit.
I just appreciate artistic solitude.

Speaker 3 That's right. Doesn't it sound so much better that way? You're so good at that.

Speaker 2 Hi.

Speaker 3 Hi. I'm so happy to be here with you.

Speaker 2 Have we ever spoken to each other in real life?

Speaker 3 I don't believe so.

Speaker 2 I feel like we have because I've spoken of you so often with Liz, my mutual friend.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 2 How are you?

Speaker 2 I hate to do this to people because I actually hate it when they do it to me, but I don't don't think that there's any other way we can start this interview other than saying, can you introduce yourself to us?

Speaker 2 How would you introduce yourself? Not this professional thing, which is so impressive and amazing, but who are you? Where are you? What is on your mind right now?

Speaker 3 You know, I was at a dinner party a couple of years ago with Astera Perel,

Speaker 3 and it was like about 10 people, which is enough people that everyone ends up splitting off into groups and nobody really talks together.

Speaker 3 And she had such a brilliant opening question, the way Esther Perel always has brilliant opening questions.

Speaker 3 And she asked everyone to introduce themselves with what was on their unofficial resume, what doesn't go on your CV. In fact, what might disqualify you from a job, which I loved so much.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 I

Speaker 3 am a writer. I think before I was a writer, I was a

Speaker 3 reader. reader.
There's nothing that I love more

Speaker 3 than both the refuge and escape that stories offer us.

Speaker 3 I am

Speaker 3 currently about two years out from a leukemia recurrence and a bone marrow transplant, which I feel like I have to mention only because it's still very much

Speaker 3 informing how I live and how I work,

Speaker 3 which, for better or for worse has been the ongoing challenge and beauty of the last 10 years, 12 years, 15 years of my adult life. Yeah, is trying

Speaker 3 to figure out how to live in a body that doesn't always feel well

Speaker 3 while not letting that hold me back from

Speaker 3 dreaming as big as I can dream, from imagining myself in the future, from

Speaker 3 filling my life with the things I love most, which are my husband and my family and my chosen family of friends and my two little dogs.

Speaker 2 Your life from the outside looks very big. Things are always happening.

Speaker 2 documentaries, the American Symphony was, I can't talk about it.

Speaker 3 Just everyone.

Speaker 2 See it immediately. Experience it.
I don't even think it's a seeing thing. It's just experience it.
What is a day like? What do you do?

Speaker 2 How does someone who doesn't feel good all the time create these things that then on the outside are so big?

Speaker 3 How?

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 you know, I think one of the interesting things

Speaker 3 about living with an illness and having limited energy is that you have to get really clear on

Speaker 3 what you want to do and who you want to spend time with.

Speaker 3 And I was someone who, before I got sick, was always racing a million miles per hour onto the next thing with five-year plans and 10-year plans and 15-year plans.

Speaker 3 And I was living in the way that I think a lot of us do,

Speaker 3 which is to say in the kind of aspirational realm. If I can only get here, I'll feel this way.
And illness forced me to be hyper-present

Speaker 3 because suddenly the future became a scary place. And so

Speaker 3 it's hard for me to make long-term plans because I have no idea how I'm going to be feeling. And so, what that's done for me in terms of my everyday is that I've had

Speaker 3 to

Speaker 3 pick one or two things that I want to do. And that can be writing, it can be going on a walk with my dogs, but really honing in on those two things.

Speaker 3 And then if I can do anything else beyond that, it's bonus.

Speaker 3 But the interesting thing about that is that rather than cramming my schedule full and thinking of that as productivity, really honing in on the things that I can do that I want to do, and picking a few of them has actually

Speaker 3 ended up being more creatively generative. So, I'm a total homebody, like you.
I spend as much time at home as I can.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I think that for me, it's diminishing returns as the day goes on, energy-wise. So, I wake up really early and try to lasso those first couple of hours to do the work that's most important to me.

Speaker 3 But I do a lot of it lying down, which is just the nature of where I'm at right now. And so I've had to find these kind of creative workarounds so that I don't feel like my

Speaker 3 ambition is constantly bumping up against my limitations.

Speaker 2 Tell me about your ambition/slash creativity. I mean, this is one of the things I find so fascinating about you is, y'all, Suleka is like,

Speaker 2 I mean, she's in scenes. I don't know if this is from your book or from the documentary or just Liz told, I have no idea, okay?

Speaker 2 But you're in a hospital bed

Speaker 2 in the middle of a painful treatment.

Speaker 3 You're

Speaker 2 upset, but not because what's going on in the room.

Speaker 2 It's because she has a deadline, which she has self-imposed because she's serving people, because she's writing to people everywhere through the isolation journals.

Speaker 2 And compare and contrast that with recently, I think in your last bone marrow, was it a bone marrow treatment? It's a bone marrow, what is it called?

Speaker 3 Transplant.

Speaker 2 Okay, you woke up with some vision issues, right?

Speaker 2 Okay, so she had trouble writing. So, then what did you do?

Speaker 3 I started painting,

Speaker 3 but

Speaker 3 I just want to go on record and say,

Speaker 3 because I want to go on record and say that I don't have superhuman energy. It took me a long time to get to this place.

Speaker 3 So, when I first got diagnosed with leukemia when I was 22, I was a year out of college. Overnight, I lost my job, my apartment.

Speaker 3 I moved back home into my childhood bedroom and ended up spending the better part of that next year in the hospital.

Speaker 3 And I went into that experience with a suitcase full of books that I brought with me to the hospital and told my parents that I was going to use that time in the hospital to read through the rest of the Western canon.

Speaker 3 And I did not read a single one of those books. And I spent a year

Speaker 3 feeling deeply angry. deeply frustrated, deeply defeated,

Speaker 3 because it felt like the ceiling had caved in on me me and whatever plans I'd had prior to that were no longer possible.

Speaker 3 And I really didn't see a way to make this thing that had happened to me useful. And in fact, I would get really annoyed at people who would try to push me to figure out how to make it useful.

Speaker 3 And so it took me a year of really struggling, of

Speaker 3 not painting, not writing, instead trying to set the world record for the number of Gray's Anatomy episodes watched consecutively. Nice.
And really being in such a lowdown place

Speaker 3 to

Speaker 3 get to the point where I realized

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 when your life implodes, be it, you know, because of a life-threatening illness or some other kind of heartbreak or loss that brings you to the floor, you really have a choice.

Speaker 3 And the choice for me was that I could wallow in this thing that had happened to me.

Speaker 3 I could feel a kind of passive agent in this experience that I had no control over, or I could accept the new limitations and figure out how I could exist within them.

Speaker 3 And so

Speaker 3 ultimately for me, that choice was born out of despair because I didn't want to do it the wallowing way anymore.

Speaker 3 I needed to find some kind of light in that darkness, and that set me on the path of writing.

Speaker 3 I had always wanted to be a foreign correspondent, which I obviously could no longer do, but I realized that what I could write about, what I could report on, was what was happening in my hospital room.

Speaker 3 And so that became the story. And I think that ability to pivot, even when you have the most beautifully laid plans, has been a really

Speaker 3 important

Speaker 3 survival mechanism throughout this. So most recently during this second transplant, I lost my vision.
I didn't lose my vision. My vision was blurred and doubled because of medications that I was on.

Speaker 3 And so the thing that I had always reached for, the thing that's always gotten me through the most difficult passages was writing.

Speaker 3 And I couldn't really do that, at least not in a way that was comfortable or cathartic or enjoyable. And so instead of raging and railing against that, I decided to start painting.

Speaker 3 And I did it purely for myself without any expectation of outcome. I was using watercolors, which are fluid and hard to control.

Speaker 3 And that seemed like a pretty good medium for someone who couldn't see very well.

Speaker 3 And it became this reprieve for me from the fluorescence of the hospital room, from the drabness of the hospital room.

Speaker 3 And so I think for me, cultivating a creative practice, especially when it's just for myself, has been the thing that has allowed me to get through.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's amazing to watch these limitations from the outside come into your life and to watch you be completely undiminished by them. Your movement might be,

Speaker 2 but you, as a creative person, are completely undiminished by them. Is ambition the right word? Because when I look at you creating painting

Speaker 2 so beautifully, and I think it's, if I remember correctly,

Speaker 2 did that start from kind of nightmares or fever dreams you were having and you did not want to be afraid of them?

Speaker 2 So you started painting them?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Is that ambition? What is it about you

Speaker 2 that is

Speaker 2 unable

Speaker 2 to not

Speaker 2 put on the outside what is happening to you on the inside?

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 one of my favorite words in the English language is alchemy.

Speaker 3 And it does feel like a kind of alchemy. It's taking the thing

Speaker 3 that you're most afraid and

Speaker 3 seizing some agency over it, reimagining it, transforming it into something meaningful and useful and maybe even beautiful. And so I think in moments in my life when I've felt most powerless,

Speaker 3 that process of alchemizing whatever it can be. And I'll give you a really stupid example.

Speaker 3 When I came out of the hospital, I needed to use a walker, which was not something I ever thought that I would have to do at the age of 34. And I was kind of embarrassed by it.

Speaker 3 And it was like ugly, clunky walker. And I hated using it because it reminded me of how weak I'd become.

Speaker 3 And every time I used it, I'd measure where I was at physically with where I'd been a couple months before.

Speaker 3 And so what I did was I ordered a giant bag of rhinestones off the internet and a hot glue gun and I bedazzled it. Of course, you did.

Speaker 3 And so, instead of people looking at me with pity when they would see this young woman with a walker, they would laugh or talk about the rhinestones.

Speaker 3 And so, I think for me, that process of alchemizing

Speaker 3 the pain

Speaker 3 into something

Speaker 3 creative

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 fun and purpose-driven

Speaker 3 has

Speaker 3 been the sort of guiding principle for me throughout my life.

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Speaker 1 One thing I love about our listeners is how industrious all of you are. The stories we hear about you guys going off on your own and starting your own ventures like we did, it's truly inspiring.

Speaker 1 It's a big part of why NetSuite came to us as a sponsor. NetSuite offers real-time data and insights for so many business owners, and by that I mean over 42,000 businesses.

Speaker 1 NetSuite offers the number one AI-powered cloud ERP. Think of it as a central nervous system for your business.

Speaker 1 Instead of juggling separate tools for accounting here, HR there, inventory somewhere else, NetSuite pulls everything into one seamless platform.

Speaker 1 That means you finally have one source of truth, real visibility, real control, and the power to make smarter decisions faster.

Speaker 1 With real-time data and forecasting, you're not just reacting to what already happened, you're planning for what's next.

Speaker 1 And whether your company is bringing in a few million or hundreds of millions, NetSuite scales with you.

Speaker 1 It helps you tackle today's challenges and chase down tomorrow's opportunities without missing a beat.

Speaker 1 Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com slash hardthings. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash hard things.

Speaker 1 Netsuite.com slash hard things.

Speaker 2 We just had a beautiful conversation with Alok, who is an artist and an amazing human.

Speaker 2 And Alok was talking about how Alok believes that all of the horrible things that happen on our earth, whether it's like war,

Speaker 2 guns,

Speaker 2 bigoted laws, all of it,

Speaker 2 even numbing, drugs, all of that,

Speaker 2 is a result of people being afraid of death.

Speaker 2 That all of fear of death causes us to control each other and we present it as protection, or we make laws, we make religions, we make. And when I watch you and John,

Speaker 2 it feels to me like you are

Speaker 2 an example of doing the opposite of that. Because alchemy through art is a bit of control, it's taking that control.

Speaker 2 It's like

Speaker 2 the world hands you or the universe or whatever hands you something, and you're like, No, I'm going to make that beautiful.

Speaker 2 Yeah, nope, I'm going to make that beautiful. Nope, that too, that too, that too.

Speaker 2 But you, in the face of uncertainty, in the face of fear of death,

Speaker 2 choose not to control, but to create.

Speaker 2 Does that feel like that's ringing true? And is that a conscious decision?

Speaker 3 It is a conscious decision, and it resonates so deeply. I mean, I have been

Speaker 3 really interested in how people confront their mortality, of course, for selfish reasons, because it's something I've had to do myself, but it's also something I've watched so many friends of mine do.

Speaker 3 And, you know, as a culture, we're afraid of death. We have all kinds of euphemisms that we use when someone dies.
We say someone passed away, someone gained their angel wings.

Speaker 3 And I completely agree with your artist friend. I do think the root cause of a lot of our fear is death.
But the interesting thing is that

Speaker 3 for more than a decade after I first got sick, I lived in complete fear of relapse.

Speaker 3 I didn't believe that I could do it again. I didn't believe that I could put myself through those treatments and that grueling transplant.

Speaker 3 I didn't believe based on my past experiences that

Speaker 3 a relationship could survive an illness like this. I had so much fear and so much baggage around the possibility of relapse and of death.
And then it happened.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I think sometimes when your worst fear comes to pass, it can be so liberating

Speaker 3 because instantly, you know, as terrifying as that news of a recurrence was, I knew I was going to do whatever I needed to do to stay alive and more than that, to not just survive, but to try to live, to live as fully as I could within whatever time I had, however short or long.

Speaker 3 And I don't know

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 I'm afraid of death.

Speaker 3 But I think

Speaker 3 for me, the question

Speaker 3 has been just that. It's how do we

Speaker 3 not just survive, but live? And so that has been the focus for me.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's distilled for you.

Speaker 2 So you can see it clearly.

Speaker 2 But all of us are between two kingdoms, right? Like every last one of us. And every single one of us is an unknown.

Speaker 2 We don't know. We don't know how much longer we have.
It's so funny to say that person, they don't know how long they have. None of us.
So when you think about

Speaker 2 the in-between,

Speaker 2 right? Like you are in a situation where now I assume you don't know whether you'll stay in remission. What is the goal in those spaces? Because it can't be comfort anymore, right?

Speaker 2 It can't be security or safety, which is an illusion anyway.

Speaker 3 Totally.

Speaker 2 But an illusion that those of us who don't have are not staring at a diagnosis can convince ourselves more of. What is the goal?

Speaker 2 If it's not comfort, what are you looking for in each day that makes you say, I lived today?

Speaker 3 you know you're absolutely right life is a terminal condition for all of us I'm not special I live a little closer to that truth maybe but I actually think living closer to that truth meaning our affinitude

Speaker 3 has been really helpful because what it's done is it's woken me up

Speaker 3 it's woken me up

Speaker 3 to the fact that none of us have endless time to get to the things that we want to do, to spend time with the people we love most, to do the things that feel most meaningful, even if they're not things that anyone else will notice or see.

Speaker 3 And so for me, it's accepting that finitude. It's

Speaker 3 Instead of feeling kind of unmoored because you're in a liminal space, understanding that it's the great equalizer. All of us are in transition all the time.

Speaker 3 And the thing that comes to mind and the thing that I think of when I wake up is what my oncologist told me when I emerged from this most recent treatment and found out that while my transplant had worked, I was going to be in treatment indefinitely for the rest of my life.

Speaker 3 And I started to cry when he said that. And he asked me what was wrong.
And I said, it's the word indefinite.

Speaker 3 I can survive anything as long as there's an end date in sight. But I don't know how to keep doing this when it's ongoing.

Speaker 3 And what he said to me was, you have to live every day as if it's your last day, which is a thing that people say.

Speaker 3 And they say it with good intentions. And every single time he would say that to me, I felt complete panic.
Because what does it even mean to live every day as it's relaxed?

Speaker 3 And like, do I empty my bank account and, you know,

Speaker 3 go on vacation and possibly declare bankruptcy later? Do I, you know, eat ungodly amounts of ice cream for every meal? I don't know.

Speaker 3 But it put me in this place of panic of feeling like I had to wring as much meaning out of every moment. And that if I didn't do that or I couldn't do that, I was somehow failing.

Speaker 3 And so I've had to reframe that for myself. And I had to very gently, politely explain to my oncologist that, as well-intentioned as he was, it wasn't helpful to me.

Speaker 3 And that instead, what I'm trying to do is not to live every day as if it's my last, it's to live every day as if it's my first,

Speaker 3 to wake up with a sense of awe and curiosity and wonder that a newborn baby might. And that doesn't look like crossing off bucket list items.
It often looks like the simple things.

Speaker 3 It looks like play. It looks like taking my dogs for a walk in the woods.

Speaker 3 It looks like curling up with a good book and allowing myself the luxury of unstructured time where I can sort of tap into my curiosity just for the hell of it, not with any sort of end goal or expectation associated with it.

Speaker 3 And so I think that's how I've been navigating the uncertainty of being in this heightened liminal space by taking the pressure off and really

Speaker 3 following the threads of my curiosity and the things that bring me joy.

Speaker 2 What are you curious about these days?

Speaker 3 So many things. Recently, I've become obsessed with jellyfish.
I've been painting a lot of jellyfish. They're the only biologically immortal creature.

Speaker 3 They've survived five mass extinctions on the planet. They were here before dinosaurs and trees and flowers and fungi.

Speaker 3 And I'm fascinated by them. I'm fascinated by the fact that they have no blood or bones.
They're all nervous system, which is

Speaker 3 a perfect description of how I think of myself.

Speaker 3 And so yeah, I've been reading a lot about jellyfish and I've been painting jellyfish and

Speaker 3 allowing

Speaker 3 that painting to emerge without thinking too much about it and only kind of after the fact maybe decoding why jellyfish yeah because didn't you say i think i read that you said that

Speaker 2 you had one moment of clarification of the jellyfish obsession when you said, I feel like the woman swimming below the jellyfish. Can you explain that?

Speaker 3 Yeah, so I was a week out from a bone marrow biopsy when I started painting these jellyfish and the woman who was swimming with the jellyfish and it was unclear to me as I was painting it if the jellyfish were her friends or her foe.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I realized after the fact that that's exactly what it feels like to be waiting for results. You're swimming in this ocean of not knowing, and you don't know

Speaker 3 what's going to happen to you if you're going to sink or swim. And sometimes the best way to conserve your energy is to simply float.

Speaker 2 Can you tell me a story

Speaker 2 about

Speaker 2 a time or a person

Speaker 2 who has been a good friend to you during this? What does it look like

Speaker 2 to show up?

Speaker 2 Show up. We all say show up.
I don't even know if that's the right word. What does good friendship or good community or love feel like right now? And what does it not?

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 i think

Speaker 3 showing up in difficult moments especially is the moment of accountability that all relationships arc toward and yet it's the hardest thing to do there's a reason why when we hear someone's tragic news we often say words fail because we don't know what to say.

Speaker 3 We want to pick the perfect words. And often when we can't do that, sometimes we don't say anything at all and we stay away.
And I've been the recipient of that kind of distance and silence.

Speaker 3 I've also been the person

Speaker 3 who didn't know how to show up and therefore didn't and came to regret it deeply. But I think the strange and wonderful thing

Speaker 3 about being sick is watching people.

Speaker 3 come out of the woodwork, not necessarily the people you expect, although some of those too, but all kinds of people who show up with such generosity and such presence.

Speaker 3 And it's really raised the bar for me for the kind of friend I want to be to the people around me. And the interesting thing is it's not necessarily grand gestures.

Speaker 3 I think the best kind of showing up is when you make an offer of specific help. You don't text someone and say, let me know if you need help.

Speaker 3 Because if you're anything like me, I will never ask for help ever ever ever but it's doing the thing maybe that you already love to do so if you love dogs you offer to walk someone's dogs or to watch them if you love mowing the lawn you go and mow someone's lawn and i'll give you a couple of examples of acts of showing up that i've been the recipient of most recently, which is that when I was getting my bone marrow transplant, I spent about six weeks in the hospital and I was at the height of Omicron, which meant that I had really limited visitors.

Speaker 3 I could only have one to two people during very constrained visiting hours. And so I was really isolated in this hospital room.
And my friend Bahita one day

Speaker 3 called me and said, look outside your window. And I looked out on the window.
This is in Midtown Manhattan onto York Avenue. And she was just dancing like a maniac.

Speaker 3 And she's not a professional dancer, but she loves to dance. And she just danced as if nobody was looking for about five minutes straight.

Speaker 3 And of course, everyone was staring at her as they were walking by. And it was just this tiny moment of connection.
And I was laughing and I was knocking on the window and she was waving to me.

Speaker 3 And that was it. And it just filled my whole day with joy.

Speaker 3 Liz, our friend Liz, I remember on Valentine's Day quietly without telling me anything, went outside once again on the sidewalk outside the hospital and made a heart out of little LED lights.

Speaker 3 And that was it.

Speaker 3 And I think, you know,

Speaker 3 there's no right or wrong way to show up. But ultimately, I think the most powerful acts of showing up amount to this, which is, I'm here.

Speaker 3 I love you. I'm going to keep being here.

Speaker 2 What does that look like in a marriage, in a relationship?

Speaker 2 What is it like to be someone who is closer to the veil or lives closer to the veil, like you say, or living on a fault line? You say, I love all of your metaphors so much, Celia.

Speaker 2 And then with someone who

Speaker 2 it's easier to have the illusion that they're not.

Speaker 2 How does that work itself out in a marriage?

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 I had a lot of fear going into this. Like I said, the first week that I found out I was sick and that I started chemotherapy again, John, my husband, was nominated for 11 Grammy nominations.

Speaker 3 And it's a normal. It felt like, yeah, totally normal.

Speaker 3 But it felt like we were leading these polar,

Speaker 3 opposite, parallel existences. And it felt really important to us that we be inhabiting the same

Speaker 3 existence.

Speaker 3 And one of the very first things that we did when we got that news was we got married. We'd been talking about getting married for a while.

Speaker 3 And because of the pandemic, we were waiting until we could have some big blowout weekend extravaganza in New Orleans with a second line parade.

Speaker 3 And what John said to me was, we had a plan and we're not going to let this get in the way of that plan.

Speaker 3 And so we ended up getting married the night before I was admitted to the hospital in a tiny little makeshift ceremony in our living room with fried chicken sandwiches

Speaker 3 and bread twists for rings because we didn't have time to get rings.

Speaker 3 And it was

Speaker 3 this act of love, but also of defiance

Speaker 3 that really set the tone for the coming months. For us,

Speaker 3 I think our shared language is a creative language. So when I went into the hospital, there were a couple of weeks where he couldn't be there.

Speaker 3 And what he decided to do was to write me lullabies he would send me a lullaby every single day so that i could listen to it so that it could blanket all the noises of the hospital the beeping of the iv poles and the wheezing of the respirators and

Speaker 3 it felt like

Speaker 3 such a gift of love to hear his voice to hear his music in that room and what i would do is i would text him photos of my paintings and we would talk about it and we were in spite of everything

Speaker 3 shifting and changing so rapidly, a friend of ours said that to describe that period of our life as a roller coaster was an insult to roller coasters. We were really

Speaker 3 trying

Speaker 3 to figure out how

Speaker 3 to bridge that distance and to find creative ways to do it.

Speaker 2 I remember watching those scenes where John would call you and you would tell John about your paintings. And I, I just remember thinking, this is the most

Speaker 2 beautiful relationship of two artists. John is out doing 40 million Grammy things.
I don't know, with Billie Eilish and whatever, whoever.

Speaker 2 You are painting these very like Frida Callo, very gorgeous in your hospital bed. And you two are talking to, he is talking to you about your paintings.

Speaker 2 you spend more time on the phone talking about the painting than what's going on with john that's what it feels like true artistry because it wasn't about the shininess there wasn't more emphasis on what john was doing just because it was out there and shiny your art was as crucial to each other

Speaker 3 yeah

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Speaker 1 off.

Speaker 2 When you say defiance, can we go back to that? Because when you said that, I'm like, oh, that's what every single thing they do feels like to me.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 All the things that you do and that John does, they all feel like beautiful defiance. What do you mean by that?

Speaker 3 I think

Speaker 3 especially

Speaker 3 when you feel

Speaker 3 enveloped in darkness,

Speaker 3 to find the light, to hold onto the light can feel like

Speaker 3 a radical act of defiance. And so, you know, for us

Speaker 3 to spend our time on the phone talking about paintings and talking about lullabies rather than whatever that morning's blood test showed, although, of course, we were talking about that too, but to keep the focus on the thing that allows us to find the light

Speaker 3 was our way

Speaker 3 of

Speaker 3 kind of reimagining this period of our lives, reimagining our survival as a creative act. John is a master of this.
He loves a no. He loves rejection because it lights a fire under him.

Speaker 3 I'm a little more sensitive to rejection.

Speaker 3 But yeah,

Speaker 3 I think his attitude is, oh,

Speaker 3 you're telling me I can't do this. Let me find a creative workaround and show you that we can

Speaker 2 there's this moment in the documentary american symphony which everyone on earth is talking about so i feel okay talking about it but

Speaker 2 it's like the culmination

Speaker 2 of the film at the end and you're at carnegie hall

Speaker 2 And this thing, John has been working on the symphony for so long in the midst of all of the insult to roller coaster life

Speaker 2 and your recovery from your latest treatment.

Speaker 2 And he's on stage with an entire symphony orchestra.

Speaker 2 It's his moment. And a few minutes in

Speaker 2 to the first piece, I think. Just tell us what happens and why it's the most amazing metaphor that ever happened in the entire world.

Speaker 2 My jaw on the ground. I just, sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 3 So this symphony that I had watched him pour everything into over the course of five years that for so many reasons that aren't in the film came very close to not happening ended up premiering for one night only at Carnegie Hall.

Speaker 3 It was the first time I left my house or the hospital bubble in about nine months because I didn't care about the risks. I had my N95 mask on and I needed to be there to see this.

Speaker 3 It was such an important moment for him creatively. And he'd brought together this orchestra.
He wanted to reimagine what an orchestra in the 21st century would look like.

Speaker 3 So there were classical musicians and jazz musicians and opera singers and indigenous musicians and musicians who didn't even know how to read music. It was such a complex orchestration.

Speaker 3 And so he was already really nervous going into this. And the symphony starts, it's in the first movement.
And all of a sudden, the power went out on stage.

Speaker 3 And you see it in the dock where all of the musicians are like, oh shit, the power's out. What do we do?

Speaker 3 Like, you see the panic and the voice in their eyes, and everyone's just kind of holding their breath. And John paused.
And then he smirked

Speaker 3 and he just started to improvise. And he improvised this beautiful piano solo for about 10 minutes.

Speaker 3 You know, he kept going thinking, let's hope that they're figuring out how to get the power back on stage.

Speaker 3 And he played for 10 minutes and the power went back on. And they continued with the symphony.

Speaker 3 But the most amazing thing about that was that nobody in the audience had any idea the power had gone out. I knew because I knew the piece, but nobody had any idea.

Speaker 3 And that to me is the power of John's ability to improvise and to pivot. And I've thought a lot about what I would do in that situation.

Speaker 3 I think most of us, myself included, would run off the stage sobbing and profusely apologize to everyone and call it a night.

Speaker 2 I would call my sister from the stage.

Speaker 3 Totally.

Speaker 3 And,

Speaker 3 you know, what I loved most

Speaker 3 was his smirk.

Speaker 3 It was again that little like mischievous act of defiance. And when you ask people what their favorite part of the symphony was, they said the piano solo.

Speaker 3 It was the mistake that ended up being the magic.

Speaker 3 So I think

Speaker 3 for whatever reason,

Speaker 3 because of the various twists and turns of our individual lives and our joint lives, that's

Speaker 3 been the way that we move forward is taking things that can feel like a mistake, even like a catastrophe. And rather than turning away from it or running off the stage in tears,

Speaker 3 trying to make something magical and unexpected out of it.

Speaker 3 I still get shivers, by the way, just thinking about that moment. Like I'm getting anxiety just thinking about it.

Speaker 2 I will for the rest of my life. I will for the rest of my life.
I think that watching

Speaker 2 that in the context of your life and your story and John's life and John's story and watching the power go out, it's just,

Speaker 2 I mean, the makers of the dock had to be like, hell yes. If we could have a metaphor at the end,

Speaker 2 it was just, oh, nothing is going as expected. This is, you've planned this.
You have every expectation in the world. It's, it's fucked.

Speaker 2 Totally. Record scratch, it's fucked.
And then the smirk.

Speaker 2 And then the watch me make this beautiful. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Oh.

Speaker 3 I did have to ask the director of the doc if he had pulled the plug on stage because I was just like, this is too much. Everything that could possibly go wrong has gone wrong in the last six months.

Speaker 3 Let us have this one moment without drama.

Speaker 2 No, you are not allowed because you keep making things so beautiful.

Speaker 2 I wish you could have seen. I mean, you did.
You saw the whole world, but Abby and I, we couldn't, she only stands up for soccer. Like, she can't sit.

Speaker 2 But during that scene, she was standing up at the couch. I was leaning forward, sweating.
Like,

Speaker 2 it felt like John was going to tell us how to do life, which is what he did

Speaker 2 in that moment. And what you always do.

Speaker 3 I think it's a different form of showing up.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 in that moment, he had to show up for the symphony, but he also showed up for himself. He was like,

Speaker 3 I have worked too hard

Speaker 3 for this to end here. I'm not going to walk away.
I'm not going to turn away. I'm going to meet this moment where it's at.

Speaker 3 and have fun with it.

Speaker 2 But that's what you do too. That's why it was so emotional for me watching because I don't know John.

Speaker 2 I only know him from his work, which I guess is actually true of you too, but you and I were besties.

Speaker 3 We know each other. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But one of the things that made me so emotional about that scene is watching the other musicians look to John to figure out what the hell are we going to do? John's in the front.

Speaker 2 These musicians, John has believed in them, brought them all here.

Speaker 2 The moment is that they are all looking to him like, oh my God, do we, if John had broken down and run off the stage, they would have been like, okay, that's what we're doing.

Speaker 2 But that's what you do. Like you, with the isolation journals, people look to you in their moments of

Speaker 2 nothing's going as planned in their fault line moments. And you

Speaker 2 smirk and keep playing. And then everybody else keeps playing.
To me, that was a metaphor just as much of you as of John. So what is that? Because when I think about what Alok said about

Speaker 2 all of the pain pain in the world

Speaker 3 is from

Speaker 2 people

Speaker 2 being afraid of death. So they're trying to control each other.
They're trying to protect each other.

Speaker 2 It seems to me that you never protect yourself.

Speaker 2 You don't protect yourself.

Speaker 3 You don't protect yourself. You don't.
You don't.

Speaker 3 To a fault.

Speaker 2 What is that? Why do you not protect yourself? You feel it all. You show up.
You don't save it for yourself. It's something important.
You're getting at something there.

Speaker 3 You know, I am a deeply fearful person, a deeply anxious person. I have always been.
My first instinct is to control, to

Speaker 3 do my due diligence, to manage risk. And

Speaker 3 I think

Speaker 3 what living with an illness for a lot of my adult life has done is it's forced me to surrender because there is no control when you're in that situation.

Speaker 3 You have no control over the mysterious happenings in your body. You have no control over your schedule.

Speaker 3 I think we've had to reschedule this podcast two times because I wasn't well enough to do it the first two times, which I was totally horrified by because I've been looking forward to this so much.

Speaker 3 But also, I've just had to accept that that's how it is,

Speaker 3 that I can make plans, but that if I cling to those plans too much, if I'm too rigid, it's a recipe for endless discouragement and defeat. And I think that's true for most of us.

Speaker 3 Things do not go according to plan.

Speaker 3 But instead of clinging to that, of trying to control it, of trying to muscle through no matter what, which I've tried to do and I know makes me miserable, i've had

Speaker 3 to

Speaker 3 get limber and flexible like a jellyfish like the jellyfish

Speaker 3 yeah they don't have bones to keep them rigid yeah

Speaker 2 and then the service piece it feels like you lead with curiosity and love you pick your three things a day

Speaker 2 that you're going to go deep on.

Speaker 2 And then there's something about about

Speaker 2 service. And I don't know if you call it service, but you have a huge community of people who show up so that you can lead them through something creative every day.
So what is that?

Speaker 2 What part of you is drawn to community and serving even when you are so limited in energy?

Speaker 3 Yeah, you know, I think I've never been interested in

Speaker 3 giving

Speaker 3 self-help advice. I've never been interested in speaking from some mountaintop of wisdom.
I think I'm interested in the struggle. I'm interested in the process

Speaker 3 of

Speaker 3 how we navigate these in-between places. And I want to show that.
I don't want to show the end result.

Speaker 3 once I've figured something out because first of all, I'm always eternally figuring the same things out.

Speaker 3 The universe is always bopping me over the head with the exact same lessons over and over and over again.

Speaker 3 But I'm

Speaker 3 passionate, I think,

Speaker 3 about

Speaker 3 sharing stories, be it my own

Speaker 3 or reported stories or the stories of others, where people dare to reveal their most unvarnished vulnerability when they haven't figured out how to tie everything up in a neat bow or to package everything into a tidy little takeaway.

Speaker 3 I'm interested in that in-between place.

Speaker 3 You've talked so beautifully about finding purpose in the pain.

Speaker 3 And I know what it's done for me when I read a book or I read something by someone where they dare to show that kind of vulnerability.

Speaker 3 And I think to myself, wow, I didn't know you were allowed to say that. I didn't know you were allowed to write that.

Speaker 3 I didn't know you were allowed to feel that and to feel that sense of recognition, to feel that sense of being known. And so in my own work, I'm always trying to get to that place,

Speaker 3 to the untidy truth beneath the truth, beneath the truth. Because, you know, we live in this age.
You said earlier, I seem to have a big life.

Speaker 3 If you spend any time on social media, it feels like everybody has a big life, or certainly a bigger life than you do. And I think it's so easy to live under that

Speaker 3 illusion that somehow people are navigating their struggles in a better way than you are, that they keep a tidier house than you do, that they have a more Instagrammable couch than whatever it might be.

Speaker 3 And so, my act of service is

Speaker 3 chronicling the messy middle without knowing what the destination is or where it's going to lead.

Speaker 2 Thank you for that service.

Speaker 2 I want to know this because I want to know what you're deciding to spend your creative energy on. Is it true that you're writing two books right now? Or you have two projects or something going on?

Speaker 2 What's happening? And what are you doing?

Speaker 3 So I'm working on two books. and I just want to say

Speaker 3 every time I'm in a fallow period where I'm not being productive, like when I was in the hospital, I couldn't do my book tour, I couldn't do so many things that I'd wanted to do, and I felt kind of bad about myself.

Speaker 3 And I was like, I'm painting these stupid paintings for myself, and I'm having fun with it, but whatever, that's not my career, it's like a thing I'm doing on the side.

Speaker 3 Whenever

Speaker 3 I feel

Speaker 3 like I'm not working

Speaker 3 in hindsight, it always ends up being the period of time that leads to the deepest work.

Speaker 2 Yes, it's like the Matisse thing or whoever the hell like was laying on the couch and they were like, what are you doing? And he was like, I'm working.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 2 When I get to the paint, it's not even the work. It's like all the pre, I'm becoming the person who's going to do the next thing.

Speaker 3 Exactly. You're in that chrysalis space of becoming.

Speaker 2 Can I just say one thing?

Speaker 3 I love your painting. Oh.

Speaker 2 I love it so much. When I see like a picture of you painting and that's not the point, it's a bigger picture.
I take a screenshot of it and then I zoom in to try to see the painting.

Speaker 2 I love it so much. I feel like

Speaker 2 I have gotten to this point in my life where words, and maybe I'll get out of it, but like words are just not true enough. Like words are annoying the shit out of me.
I can't

Speaker 2 get a grip grip on, and so color feels so much truer to me. I can feel it.
Yes. It's not a filtered through this language thing.
It feels direct totally to my heart. So I love your painting.

Speaker 2 Okay, I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Speaker 3 No, but it's exactly that. So one of the books I'm working on, which I never thought

Speaker 3 at the time would end up being anything, is a book of those paintings and essays accompanying them. Okay.

Speaker 3 And the other book I'm writing is about journaling because that is exactly a perfect example of a thing I do every day that I don't think of as work work because it's not part of my schedule.

Speaker 3 It's not part of my to-do list, but it has been the through line my entire life. And it has been that tool for alchemy for me of just writing.

Speaker 3 and showing up on the page as my most unedited, unvarnished self without giving any thought to punctuation or grammar and just following that thread of curiosity wherever it goes.

Speaker 3 And so the painting and the journaling are both things that I have done for myself for so long without thinking about them too much or thinking of them as productive in any way or tied to my work work.

Speaker 3 But so often,

Speaker 3 Work work, especially as a writer, doesn't happen when you're hunched over your desk and banging your head against your laptop.

Speaker 3 It's when you're out living and growing and feeling uncomfortable and shedding old skins.

Speaker 2 Will you come back when those books are out and talk to us about the painting?

Speaker 3 I would love it and the journaling.

Speaker 2 I love you, Suleik. You are an example of how to live.
So many of us are watching and learning from you. Thank you for being here today.

Speaker 3 Well, I love and adore you. And I love this beautiful pod squad that you've built.
So thank you for having me on.

Speaker 2 And the time on pod squad, we will link to all things Zuleka because I know you're going to want to find her. And by the way, pod squad, the person we're talking about when we say John, just request.

Speaker 2 Why don't you tell us, Zuleka, who John is.

Speaker 3 Okay, so John is a very dorky, awkward boy I met when I was 13 years old at Bandcamp. John to the world is John Batiste, musician.

Speaker 3 I don't even know how to explain him.

Speaker 3 Thinker.

Speaker 2 Revolution.

Speaker 3 Brilliant, beautiful human being,

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 a walking embodiment of love.

Speaker 2 Can you just tell me we're ending, but I've been repeating this quote from the documentary to my kids, and now I'm blanking. What did he say?

Speaker 2 It's going to sound how it sounds until it sounds how it sounds.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I say that all the time.

Speaker 2 I say that all the time. My kitchen's

Speaker 2 the cookies are burned, whatever. I say, you know what? It's going to sound how it sounds until it sounds how it sounds.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 2 That's it.

Speaker 3 It's the best. It's the best.
Yeah. And I hope you start painting.

Speaker 2 Suleka, I paint every day. You do? I paint every day now.

Speaker 3 Amazing.

Speaker 2 If you walked into my house, you would say, oh, how many little kids do you have? It looks like a bunch of four-year-olds have painted.

Speaker 3 I love it.

Speaker 2 It makes me so happy and you were a big part of it.

Speaker 3 So we'll talk about that another time. One thing I highly recommend, just quick note, I'm about to paint this whole back wall of my office for fun.

Speaker 3 And then I might paint over it in white if it turns out to be a disaster.

Speaker 2 That's a great idea.

Speaker 3 But start painting on all of the things.

Speaker 2 Okay, Abby will love that. She's already following me around the house with a drop cloth.

Speaker 2 And also, where did the easel come from in your house? The easel that's in the architectural digest.

Speaker 2 Important question for podcasts. It's so beautiful.
Where do I get that easel?

Speaker 3 Okay, so 60 or 70% of the things in our house, it comes from Facebook Marketplace. I am the queen of Facebook Marketplace.
I'm obsessed.

Speaker 3 Type antique easel into Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, and you two can score gold.

Speaker 2 Okay, nice. Alchemy, more alchemy.

Speaker 2 All right, Suleika, we love you. We love you.

Speaker 3 Pod Squad, we'll see you next time. Thank you.
Thank you. Bye.

Speaker 2 If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us if you'd be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things?

Speaker 2 Following the pod helps you because you'll never miss an episode, and it helps us because you'll never miss an episode.

Speaker 2 To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner or click on follow.

Speaker 2 This is the most important thing for the pod. While you're there, if you'd be willing to give us a five-star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful.

Speaker 2 We appreciate you very much.

Speaker 2 We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wombach, and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey.

Speaker 2 Our executive producer is Jenna Wise-Berman, and the show is produced by Lauren Lograsso, Allison Schott, Dina Kleiner, and Bill Schultz.