How to Turn a Mistake into Magic with Suleika Jaouad
May 23, 2024
Glennon Doyle:
All right, Pod Squad, welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.
You should know right away that I personally have been waiting for this day for a very long time. I have kicked everyone else off the podcast for the day. Sorry, but there will be no sister, no Abby today because our guest today is so brilliant and important and has so much to teach us about how to live that I just wanted to leave as much space as humanly possible for her to speak as much as possible.
Today we have Suleika Jaouad, who is the author of the unbelievably beautiful book, Between Two Kingdoms, which everyone that I know has read several times. 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, 50 other places since then. 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. She’s 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, Suleika, thank you for that reframe. I’m not a hermit. I just appreciate artistic solitude.
Suleika Jaouad:
That’s right. Doesn’t it sound so much better that way?
Glennon Doyle:
You’re so good at that. Hi.
Suleika Jaouad:
Hi. I’m so happy to be here with you.
Glennon Doyle:
Have we ever spoken to each other in real life?
Suleika Jaouad:
I don’t believe so.
Glennon Doyle:
I feel like we have, because I’ve spoken of you so often with Liz, a mutual friend.
Suleika Jaouad:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. How are you? I hate to do this to people because I actually hate it when they do it to me, but I don’t think that there’s any other way we can start this interview other than saying, can you introduce yourself to us? 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?
Suleika Jaouad:
I was at a dinner party a couple of years ago with Esther Perel, and it was about 10 people, which is enough people that everyone ends up splitting off into groups and nobody really talks together. And she had such a brilliant opening question, the way Esther Perel always has brilliant opening questions. 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.
I am a writer. I think before I was a writer, I was a reader. There’s nothing that I love more than both the refuge and escape that stories offer us. I am 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 informing how I live and how I work. 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, is trying to figure out how to live in a body that doesn’t always feel well, while not letting that hold me back from dreaming as big as I can dream, from imagining myself in the future, from 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.
Glennon Doyle:
Your life from the outside looks very big. Things are always happening; your documentaries. The American Symphony was… I can’t talk about it. Just everyone, 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? How does someone who doesn’t feel good all the time create these things that then on the outside are so big? How?
Suleika Jaouad:
Well, I think one of the interesting things about living with an illness and having limited energy is that you have to get really clear on what you want to do and who you want to spend time with. 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 ten-year plans and fifteen-year plans. And I was living in the way that I think a lot of us do, 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 because suddenly, the future became a scary place. It’s hard for me to make long-term plans because I have no idea how I’m going to be feeling.
What that’s done for me in terms of my every day is that I’ve had to 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. And then, if I can do anything else beyond that, it’s a bonus. 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 ended up being more creatively generative.
I’m a total homebody, like you. I spend as much time at home as I can. And 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 last those first couple of hours to do the work that’s most important to me. 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 ambition is constantly bumping up against my limitations.
Glennon Doyle:
Tell me about your ambition/creativity. I mean, this is one of the things I find so fascinating about you is… Suleika, she’s in scenes. I don’t know if this is from your book or from the documentary or just Liz… I have no idea, okay. But you’re in a hospital bed in the middle of a painful treatment, you’re upset, but not because of what’s going on in the room. 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. 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?
Suleika Jaouad:
Transplant.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. You woke up with some vision issues. Right?
Suleika Jaouad:
Mm-hmm.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, so she had trouble writing. So then what did you do?
Suleika Jaouad:
I started painting. I just 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. 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. I moved back home into my childhood bedroom and ended up spending the better part of that next year in the hospital. 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, and I did not read a single one of those books.
And I spent a year feeling deeply angry, deeply frustrated, deeply defeated because it felt like the ceiling had caved in on me and whatever plans I’d had prior to that were no longer possible. 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 had tried to push me to figure out how to make it useful.
And so it took me a year of really struggling of not painting, not writing, instead trying to set the world record for the number of Grey’s Anatomy episodes watched consecutively, and really being in such a low-down place to get to the point where I realized that when your life implodes, be it 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. And the choice for me was that I could wallow in this thing that had happened to me, 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.
And so, ultimately, for me, that choice was born out of despair, because I didn’t want to do the wallowing way anymore. I needed to find some kind of light in that darkness, and that set me on the path of writing. 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. 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 important 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. And so the thing that I had always reached for, the thing that’s always gotten me through the most difficult passages, was writing. 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. And I did it purely for myself, without any expectation of outcome. I was using watercolors, which are fluid and hard to control, and that seemed like a pretty good medium for someone who couldn’t see very well. And it became this reprieve for me from the fluorescence of the hospital room, from the drabness of the hospital room.
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.
Glennon Doyle:
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, but you, as a creative person, are completely undiminished by them. Is ambition the right word? Because when I look at you creating, painting so beautifully, and I think it’s… If I remember correctly, did that start from nightmares or fever dreams you were having, and you did not want to be afraid of them, so you started painting them?
Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Is that ambition? What is it about you that is unable to not put on the outside what is happening to you on the inside?
Suleika Jaouad:
One of my favorite words in the English language is alchemy, and it does feel like a kind of alchemy. It’s taking the thing that you’re most afraid of and seizing some agency over it, re-imagining 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, that process of alchemizing, whatever it can be… And I’ll give you a really stupid example.
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. It was an ugly, clunky walker, and I hated it because it reminded me of how weak I’d become. And every time I used it, I’d measure where I was at physically with where I’d been a couple of months before. 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.
Glennon Doyle:
Of course, you did.
Suleika Jaouad:
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. I think for me, that process of alchemizing the pain into something creative and fun and purpose-driven, has been the sort of guiding principle for me throughout my life.
Glennon Doyle:
We just had a beautiful conversation with Alok, who is an artist and an amazing human. And Alok was talking about how Alok believes that all of the horrible things that happen on our earth, whether it’s war, guns, bigoted laws, all of it, even numbing drugs, all of that, is a result of people being afraid of death. 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, it feels to me like you are an example of doing the opposite of that. Because alchemy through art is a bit of control. It’s taking back control.
Suleika Jaouad:
It is.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s like the universe hands you something, and you’re like, “No, I’m going to make that beautiful. Nope, I’m going to make that beautiful. Nope, that too. That too. That too.” But you, in the face of uncertainty, in the face of fear of death, choose not to control, but to create. Does that feel like that’s ringing true, and is that a conscious decision?
Suleika Jaouad:
It is a conscious decision, and it resonates so deeply. I mean, I have been 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. 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. 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 for more than a decade, after I first got sick, I lived in complete fear of relapse. 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. I didn’t believe, based on my past experiences, that 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.
I think sometimes when your worst fear comes to pass, it can be so liberating because, instantly, 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. And I don’t know that I am afraid of death, but I think for me, the question has been just that. It’s how do we not just survive, but live? And so that has been the focus for me.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, it’s distilled for you so you can see it clearly. But all of us are between two kingdoms, right? Every last one of us and every single one of us is an unknown. 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 the in-between, 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. It can’t be security or safety, which is an illusion anyway.
Suleika Jaouad:
Totally.
Glennon Doyle:
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? If it’s not comfort, what are you looking for in each day that makes you say, I lived today?
Suleika Jaouad:
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 finitude, has been really helpful because what it’s done is it’s woken me up. It’s woken me up 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.
And so for me, it’s accepting that finitude. Instead of feeling kind of un-moored because you’re in a liminal space, understanding that it’s the great equalizer. All of us are in transition all the time. 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.
I started to cry when he said that. And he asked me what was wrong, and I said, “It’s the word indefinite. 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.” 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, 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 if it’s your last? Do I empty my bank account and go on vacation and possibly declare bankruptcy later? Do I eat ungodly amounts of ice cream for every meal? I don’t know. 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.
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. And that, instead, what I’m trying to do is not to live every day as if it’s my loss. It’s to live every day as if it’s my first, to wake up with a sense of awe and curiosity and wonder that a newborn baby might. That doesn’t look like crossing off bucket list items. It often looks like the simple things. It looks like play. It looks like taking my dogs for a walk in the woods. 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.
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 following the threads of my curiosity and the things that bring me joy.
Glennon Doyle:
What are you curious about these days?
Suleika Jaouad:
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. They’ve survived five mass extinctions on the planet. They were here before dinosaurs and trees and flowers and fungi, 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-
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, I get that.
Suleika Jaouad:
… a perfect description of how I think of myself. So yeah, I’ve been reading a lot about jellyfish, and I’ve been painting jellyfish and allowing that painting to emerge without thinking too much about it. And only after the fact, maybe decoding, why jellyfish?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, because I think I read that you said that 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?
Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah. So I was a week out from a bone marrow biopsy when I started painting these jellyfish, and a 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. And 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 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.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you tell me a story about a time or a person who has been a good friend to you during this? What does it look like to 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?
Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah. I think 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. 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. I’ve been the recipient of that kind of distance in silence. I’ve also been the person 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 about being sick is watching people 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. 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. 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,” 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.
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. I could only have one to two people during very constrained visiting hours. And so I was really isolated in this hospital room.
My friend, Behita, one day 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. 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. And, of course, everyone was staring at her as they were walking by. 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, and that was it, and it just filled my whole day with joy.
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, and that was it.
I think 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. I love you. I’m going to keep being here.
Glennon Doyle:
What does that look like in a marriage, in a relationship? 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? I love all of your metaphors so much, Suleika. And then with someone who it’s easier to have the illusion that they’re not? How does that work itself out in a marriage?
Suleika Jaouad:
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.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s a normal.
Suleika Jaouad:
It felt like, yeah, totally normal. But it felt like we were leading these polar opposite, parallel existences, and it felt really important to us that we be inhabiting the same existence.
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, and because of the pandemic, we were waiting until we could have some big blowout weekend extravaganza in New Orleans for the second line parade. 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.” 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 and bread twists for rings because we didn’t have time to get rings. And it was this act of love, but also of defiance, that really set the tone for the coming months.
For us, 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, 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. It felt like 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.
We were, in spite of everything 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 trying to figure out how to bridge that distance and to find creative ways to do it.
Glennon Doyle:
I remember watching those scenes where John would call you, and you would tell John about your paintings. And I just remember thinking, this is the most beautiful relationship of two artists. John is out doing 40 million Grammy things, I don’t know, with Billie Eilish and whoever. You are painting these very like Frida Kahlo, very gorgeous in your hospital bed, and he is talking to you about your paintings. 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.
Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
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.” All the things that you do and that John does, they all feel like beautiful defiance. What do you mean by that?
Suleika Jaouad:
I think, especially when you feel enveloped in darkness, to find the light, to hold onto the light can feel like a radical act of defiance. And so for us to spend our time on the phone talking about paintings and talking about lullabies rather than whatever that morning’s blood tests showed, although we, of course, we were talking about that too, but to keep the focus on the thing that allows us to find the light, was our way of re-imagining this period of our lives, re-imagining 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. I’m a little more sensitive to rejection. But yeah, I think his attitude is, “Oh, you’re telling me I can’t do this. Let me find a creative workaround and show you that we can.”
Glennon Doyle:
There’s this moment in the documentary, American Symphony, which everyone on earth is talking about, so I feel okay talking about it. It’s like the culmination of the film at the end, and you’re at Carnegie Hall 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 and your recovery from your latest treatment, and he’s on stage with an entire symphony orchestra. It’s his moment. And a few minutes in 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. My jaw… on the ground. Sorry, go ahead.
Suleika Jaouad:
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. 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 N-95 mask on, and I needed to be there to see this. It was such an important moment for him creatively. He’d brought together this orchestra. He wanted to reimagine what an orchestra in the 21st century would look like. 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, and so he was already really nervous going into this.
The symphony starts. It’s in the first movement, and all of a sudden the power went out on stage. And you see it in the doc, where all of the musicians are like, “Oh, shit. The power’s out. What do we do?” You see the panic and the whites of their eyes, and everyone’s just kind of holding their breath. And John paused, and then he smirked, and he just started to improvise. And he improvised this beautiful piano solo for about 10 minutes. He kept going, thinking, “Let’s hope that they’re figuring out how to get the power back on stage.” He played for 10 minutes and the power went back on, and they continued with the symphony.
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, 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. I think most of us, myself included, would run off the stage sobbing and profusely apologize to everyone and call it a night.
Glennon Doyle:
I would call my sister from the stage.
Suleika Jaouad:
Totally. What I loved most was his smirk. It was again, that little mischievous act of defiance. And when you ask people what their favorite part of the symphony was, they said, “The piano solo.” It was the mistake that ended up being the magic.
So I think for whatever reason, because of the various twists and turns of our individual lives and our joint lives, that’s 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, trying to make something magical and unexpected out of it. I still get shivers, by the way, just thinking about that moment. I’m getting anxiety just thinking about it.
Glennon Doyle:
I will for the rest of my life. I will for the rest of my life. I think that watching 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 is just… I mean, the makers of the doc had to be like, “Hell yes. If we could have a metaphor at the end.” It was just, oh, nothing is going as expected. This is you’ve planned this, you have every expectation in the world. It’s fucked.
Suleika Jaouad:
Totally.
Glennon Doyle:
Record scratched, it’s fucked, and then the smirk, and then the watch me make this beautiful.
Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah. 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. Let us have this one moment without drama.”
Glennon Doyle:
No, you are not allowed, because you keep making things so beautiful. 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. She can’t sit. But during that scene, she was standing up at the couch. I was leaning forward, sweating. It felt like John was going to tell us how to do life, which is what he did in that moment, and what you always do.
Suleika Jaouad:
I think it’s a different form of showing up, and in that moment, he had to show up for the symphony, but he also showed up for himself. He was like, “I have worked too hard 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 and have fun with it.”
Glennon Doyle:
But that’s what you do, too. That’s why it was so emotional for me watching; because I don’t know John. I only know him from his work, which I guess is actually true of you too. But you and I are besties.
Suleika Jaouad:
We know each other.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. 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. These musicians, John has believed in them, brought them all here. 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’ve been like, “Okay, that’s what we’re doing.” But that’s what you do. With the Isolation Journals, people look to you in their moments of nothing’s going as planned in their fault line moments, and you 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 all of the pain in the world is from people being afraid of death so they’re trying to control each other, they’re trying to protect each other, it seems to me that you never protect yourself. You don’t protect yourself. You don’t protect yourself.
Suleika Jaouad:
I don’t.
Glennon Doyle:
You don’t.
Suleika Jaouad:
To a fault.
Glennon Doyle:
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.
Suleika Jaouad:
I am a deeply fearful person, a deeply anxious person. I have always been. My first instinct is to control, to do my due diligence, to manage risk. And I think 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. You have no control over the mysterious happenings in your body. You have no control over your schedule. 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.
But also I’ve just had to accept that that’s how it is, 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. Things do not go according to plan. 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 it makes me miserable, I’ve had to get limber and flexible-
Glennon Doyle:
Like a jellyfish.
Suleika Jaouad:
… like the jellyfish.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, they don’t have bones to keep them rigid.
And then the service piece, it feels like you lead with curiosity and love. You pick your three things a day that you’re going to go deep on. And then there’s something about 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? What part of you is drawn to community and serving even when you are so limited in energy?
Suleika Jaouad:
Yeah. I’ve never been interested in giving self-help advice. I’ve never been interested in speaking from some mountain top of wisdom. I think I’m interested in the struggle. I’m interested in the process of how we navigate these in-between places, and I want to show that. I don’t show the end result once I figured something out. Because first of all, I’m always eternally figuring the same things out. The universe is always bopping me over the head with the exact same lessons over and over and over again. I’m passionate. I think about sharing stories, be it my own 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. I’m interested in that in-between place.
You’ve talked so beautifully about finding purpose in the pain, 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. 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. 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, to the untidy truth beneath the truths, beneath the truth. Because we live in this age… You said earlier, I seem to have a big life. 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 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 Instagramable couch, whatever it might be. And so my act of service is chronicling the messy middle without knowing what the destination is or where it’s going to lead.
Glennon Doyle:
Thank you for that service.
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? What’s happening, and what are you doing?
Suleika Jaouad:
I’m working on two books. I just want to say 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. 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 a thing I’m doing on the side.” Whenever I feel like I’m not working, in hindsight, it always ends up being the period of time that leads to the deepest work.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, it’s like the Matisse thing or whoever the hell was laying on the couch, and they were like, “What are you doing?” And he was like, “I’m working.”
Suleika Jaouad:
Exactly.
Glennon Doyle:
When I get to the paint, it’s not even the work. It’s like I’m becoming the person who’s going to do the next thing.
Suleika Jaouad:
Exactly. You’re in that chrysalis space of becoming.
Glennon Doyle:
Can I just say one thing? I love your painting.
Suleika Jaouad:
Ah.
Glennon Doyle:
I love it so much. When I see 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. I love it so much. I feel like I have gotten to this point in my life where words, and maybe I’ll get out of it, but words are just not true enough. Words are annoying the shit out of me. I can’t get a grip on… And so, color feels so much truer to me. I can feel it. It’s not a filtered through this language thing. It feels direct to my heart. So I love your painting.
Okay, I’m sorry. Go ahead.
Suleika Jaouad:
No, but it’s exactly that. One of the books I’m working on, which I never thought at the time would end up being anything, is a book of those paintings and essays accompanying them.
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. It’s not part of my schedule. 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 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.
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. But so often work-work, especially as a writer, doesn’t happen when you’re hunched over your desk and banging your head against your laptop. It’s when you’re out living and growing and feeling uncomfortable and shedding old skins.
Glennon Doyle:
Will you come back when those books are out and talk to us about the painting and the writing-
Suleika Jaouad:
I would love it.
Glennon Doyle:
… and the journaling. I love you, Suleika. You are an example of how to live. So many of us are watching and learning from you. Thank you for being here today.
Suleika Jaouad:
Well, I love and adore you, and I love this beautiful Pod Squad that you’ve built, so thank you for having me on.
Glennon Doyle:
Anytime. And Pod Squad, we will link to all things Suleika 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… Why don’t you tell us, Suleika, who John is?
Suleika Jaouad:
Okay, so John is a very dorky, awkward boy I met when I was 13 years old at band camp. John to the world is John Batiste, musician. I don’t even know how to explain him. Thinker-
Glennon Doyle:
Revolution.
Suleika Jaouad:
… brilliant, beautiful human being and a walking embodiment of love.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you just tell me… We’re ending… I’ve been repeating this quote from the documentary to my kids, and now I’m blanking. What did he say; “It’s going to sound how it sounds until it sounds how it sounds?”
Suleika Jaouad:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
I say that all the time. I say that all the time. My kitchen is a… the cookies are burned, whatever, I say, “You know what? It’s going to sound how it sounds until it sounds how it sounds.”
Suleika Jaouad:
Exactly.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s it.
Suleika Jaouad:
It’s the best, yeah. And I hope you start painting.
Glennon Doyle:
Suleika, I paint every day.
Suleika Jaouad:
You do?
Glennon Doyle:
I paint every day now.
Suleika Jaouad:
Amazing.
Glennon Doyle:
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.
Suleika Jaouad:
I love it.
Glennon Doyle:
It makes me so happy, and you were a big part of it, so we’ll talk about that another time.
Suleika Jaouad:
One thing I highly recommend, just a quick note, I’m about to paint the whole back wall of my office for fun, and then I might paint over it in white if it turns out to be a disaster.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s a great idea.
Suleika Jaouad:
But start painting on all of the things.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, Abby will love that. She’s already following me around the house with a drop cloth.
Also, where did the easel come from in your house; the easel that’s in the Architectural Digest? Important question for podcasts. It’s so beautiful. Where do I get that easel?
Suleika Jaouad:
Okay, so 60 or 70% of the things in our house come from Facebook Marketplace. I am the queen of Facebook Marketplace. I’m an obsessed type, anti-easel, into Craigslist or Facebook marketplace. And you too, can score gold.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, alchemy. More alchemy. All right, Suleika, we love you. We love you.
Suleika Jaouad:
Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
Pod Squad, we’ll see you next time.
Suleika Jaouad:
Thank you. Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
Bye.
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We appreciate you very much. We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle, in partnership with Odyssey. Our executive producer is Jenna Weiss-Berman, and the show is produced by Lauren LoGrasso, Allison Schott, Dina Kleiner, and Bill Schultz.