Susan Zimmerman: Welcome, Suleika. Suleika Jaouad: Hi, Susan. SZ: I'm going to dive right in
with "American Symphony." I would love to first say thank you for sharing your story with us
in this gorgeous documentary. Can you share a little bit more
how this project came to be? SJ: So the director
of “American Symphony,” Matt Heineman, who is
an extraordinarily brilliant filmmaker and a dear friend of ours, says that if you end up
with a project that you started with, you're not doing your job rig
ht because you weren't listening
along the way. And that proved to be true in ways
that we couldn't possibly imagine. I knew Matt through my own work. Jon had worked with him
on his last film, "The First Wave," that took place during the pandemic, and he and Jon started
talking about the idea of a short process film that was going to follow Jon
as he composed what he called “American Symphony,” which was his reimagination
of what a symphony would look like if it were created in the 21st century.
And Jon was committed to really upturning
what we think of as a symphony. He wanted to travel all across
the country to recruit jazz musicians and blues musicians
and classical musicians and Indigenous musicians and musicians who don't know
how to read music and to figure out how to bring
them all together. So initially, that was the film, and about a week after we decided
to move forward with that project, on the very same day I began chemo and the same week I learned
that after a decade-long
remission, my leukemia was back, Jon was also nominated for a record historical number of Grammys. And so right from the beginning
of the filming process, the initial conceit changed. And it was the kind of project and really a testament to Matt's style, where we weren't too worried
about figuring out what the story was. Matt specializes in cinema verité, and so he followed us from sun up
until we went to sleep every single day for about seven months. And at the end of that process, we had 1,500
hours of footage, which, as you can imagine,
is a lot of footage. But we knew that we wanted
to document all of it, to document what it means
to be living a life of contrasts, what is required of us
when we're in the belly of the beast and how creativity and our individual and joint, sort of, creative language
inform that project. SZ: For two people, who are very much the directors
of their own creative projects and worlds, how did you negotiate creative control
in your work with Matt Heineman,
especially in such vulnerable
and personal circumstances? SJ: You know, it wasn't easy
for either of us because we are used to, you know, captaining
our own creative ships. But I think, you know, surrendering
to the process was really important. We didn't want to get
in the way of the filming. But we were also very much
creative partners with Matt. And I'm not sure that a film like this
would have been possible without deep trust with the filmmaker and ongoing conversations
about what we were c
omfortable with and what we weren't, and we had those conversations daily. We had them weekly and monthly. And the truth is that when I decided to participate in this film, I had no idea if I was going
to survive long enough to actually see the finished product. And what Jon would always say is: if nothing else comes out of this, we'll have the world's
most beautifully shot home videos to share with our families and loved ones. So it was really, you know, a process that required trust. It requir
ed a leap of faith, and it required surrendering the kind
of creative control that we're used to. SZ: You also shared,
in a recent “Isolation Journal”: "When the ceiling caves in,
it's terrifying and disorienting. Yet those moments have also been
the most fertile stretches of personal and creative growth for me. A couple of months after my second
bone marrow transplant, I was rehospitalized due to complications, and I told one of my nurses
that I get my best work done there, and I joked that it
had become
my favorite artist’s residency.” Can you share more
about these creative periods during extremely
challenging circumstances? SJ: Yeah, so I want to go on record
and say that, you know, these moments when the ceiling
caves in on you, when you can no longer
assume structural stability ... don’t suddenly fill me
with creative inspiration. It's the very opposite. I had so many plans, both professional and personal, before I learned of my relapse. I was getting ready
to write a reported bo
ok that would require me to be on the road
for long stretches of time. Jon and I were talking about getting
married and starting a family, and I moved through my own version
of the five stages of grief. And the first is shock, often mixed with fear. And then I get to a place of defeat. But something interesting happens when the possibility of productivity
is taken away from you. And when I’m able to move past
that grief and that fear, and to start to get curious
about the isolation and the sense
of solitude
that comes with, you know, having been brought
to your knees on the floor by some kind of life event. Even though it doesn't feel
like I'm doing something, I'm in the chrysalis. I'm as larval and goopy
and unformed as I ever feel. And what these periods
of being extremely sick have done for me is that I've had to get
good with my own company. I've had to get good with quiet,
with having no plans. And of course, that's not a luxury that we're all able
to carve out for ourselves. But
when I'm able to surrender
to that not knowing, interesting things emerge. And I had, you know,
the misfortune and privilege of having been through this once before. And I knew that to go into this treatment, to enter the hospital
for many weeks and months with expectations of what
I was going to do from my bed or trying to hold on
to whatever plans I'd made before, was going to be a recipe
for frustration and defeat. And sure enough, pretty shortly after I entered
the bone marrow transplant uni
t, I was on two medications
that caused my vision to blur and double. And so the thing that I had always
reached for in times of duress, which for me is writing,
wasn't as easily accessible to me. It was frustrating,
it was hard, it was halting. And instead of trying to keep doing that, I decided to be open
to whatever felt good. And for the first time
since I was a little kid, I picked up some watercolors
and some brushes. I transformed the bedside table
in my hospital room into my little palet
te of paints, and I began painting
the nightmares I was having, the fever dreams I was having, and transcribing them onto the canvas without any expectation of doing
anything with these paintings other than that they simply felt good. What I love about watercolor
is that you don't have much control. Watercolor is all about the beautiful, happy accidents. And so that felt like an apt medium, given the fact that my circumstances were very much mirroring
that lack of control. I've come to believe t
hat survival
is its own kind of creative act. When you can't speak because the chemo sores in your mouth
make it too painful to speak, you have to find new ways to communicate. When you're confined to a bed
for many weeks and months, you have to find new ways of traveling
in your imagination. And really, it requires complete surrender and an openness to whatever may emerge, and also a curiosity
about the changes that are happening and trust that something
will come out of it, even if it's just i
n terms
of my own personal growth and the reshuffling of the priorities. Though often, well, it doesn't feel
that way in the moment, it's ended up being my most
fertile creative stretches where I’m pushed to experiment
and to create in new ways. Not in spite of my limitations,
but because of them. And it becomes a process
of finding purpose in that pain and trying to alchemize it into something
interesting and thought-provoking, and maybe even useful and beautiful. SZ: This leads me to think
abo
ut 22-year-old you, you know, with your
first leukemia diagnosis and your “Life, Interrupted” column
in The New York Times. How did that column come to be, because I feel like your journey now,
you were pulling from these resources, but how then did you come
to the conclusion of, "I need to write a column about this,
and I need to share this with the world?" SJ: So I first got diagnosed
with leukemia when I was 22, and overnight, I lost my job, I lost my apartment, I was working as a paralegal
i
n Paris at the time, but hoping to become
a foreign correspondent. And maybe worst of all,
I lost my independence. And 22 is such a funny age where, you know, you're no longer a kid, yet, you're not a fully
formed adult either. And so that sense of
in-betweenness accompanied me from my very first day in the hospital. And I spent a really difficult
first year of treatment, I spent about eight months, cumulatively, of that first year
in isolation in the hospital where I wasn't able to leave my roo
m. And when I went into this, not knowing anything
about what it means to be sick, I remember packing a suitcase
full of books like "War and Peace" and cheerfully announcing to my parents that I was going to use
that first summer in the hospital to read through the rest
of the Western canon. And let me tell you,
naivete has a short shelf life. And that was true for me. I didn't read a single one of those books. And I felt really angry. My treatments were not working, my leukemia was becoming mor
e aggressive. I was enrolled in a phase 2 clinical trial that hadn't yet been proven
to be safe or effective. And I was really struggling with a sense that my life had been interrupted. My life had been put on pause at a time when I was watching
my friends begin their lives, you know, travel the world,
start careers, get married and all the other big and small
milestones of early adulthood. After I learned that the treatments
weren't working for me, that a friend of mine came up
with the idea of
a 100-day project, and the premise was really simple. We decided we were each going to do one
creative act a day for 100 days. And for my project, I decided
to keep the bar very low, knowing how unpredictable my energy was, and I decided to recommit to the thing
that had been my companion from the time I could hold a pen,
which was, keeping a journal. And it didn't matter how much I wrote. Sometimes it was many pages,
sometimes it was a sentence. Occasionally it was the F-word, which felt apt f
or that particular moment. But in the course of keeping that journal, something interesting began to happen. Prior to this project, I, you know, of course, was not in a place where I could become
a foreign correspondent in the way that I dreamed of. But I realized, in keeping my journal, that I was using it
as a kind of reporter's notebook. I was writing about all the things
that felt impossible to talk about with my loved ones. I was writing about the sense of guilt and being a burden, that can
come with being sick. I was writing about navigating
our health care system. I was writing about the patients
I was befriending in the cancer unit. I was writing about the nurses
and the various characters in my medical team. I was writing about sexual health, I was writing about shame, I was writing about what it feels like
to fall in love while you're falling sick. And by the end of that project,
I realized that, you know, while I couldn't travel the world and report on the stories of others,
I did have a story to tell, and that I was reporting
from a different kind of conflict zone. I was reporting from the front lines
of my hospital bed. And so, like the good millennial
that I am, I decided to start a blog. It was in the weeks leading up
to a bone marrow transplant, and I knew that the odds
were stacked against me. My doctors told me point blank I had a 35-percent chance
of long-term survival, and I think it lit a kind
of fire under me. Staring your mortality straight in the eye
c
an be a great motivator. There's no longer this illusion
of endless time. Time to eventually get
to the things that you want to do, time to figure out what you want
to contribute in whatever, you know, small or big way, to the world. And so I kept this blog for a couple
of weeks and I took it really seriously. I would write every day, and through an old
journalism professor of mine, it got sent to Tara Parker-Pope, my wonderful editor at The New York Times, and we had a couple of email exchanges
, and she called me and invited me
to contribute an essay. And I took a deep breath and I said, "Thank you, but I'm not interested
in writing an essay. What I'm interested in writing
is a weekly column, because so often illness stories
are told from the vantage point of someone who survived. But I want to write from the trenches
of that uncertainty." And I went on and on and on. And to my surprise, she said, "OK, we'll try it for a couple
of installments and see how it goes." And I had never bee
n published before, I'd never had a byline, and this pitch that I had just performed would have seemed wildly presumptuous
to pre-diagnosis 22-year-old me. I would have been grateful
for a fact-checking position. But that's the thing
about confronting your mortality, is that ... it can make you brazen. And I knew that I didn't have
time for internships and fact-checking positions. And so for the first time in my life, I said exactly what it was
that I wanted to do without any expectation, but I
knew I needed to try for it. SZ: The response to that column,
"Life, Interrupted," led to your subsequent
road trip across the US to meet some of the people
that wrote to you while you were in the hospital. You spoke about this journey
in your 2019 TED Talk, and you wrote about it in your memoir,
"Between Two Kingdoms," your New York Times best selling book. Can you share first, a little bit more
about the title of the book, and then how did the process
of making this trip and writing it impact
you and your readers? SJ: So I ended up spending
four years in cancer treatment. And throughout those four years, the goal was always
to eventually be cured. And I hadn’t given much thought
to what would happen after that, in part because it felt like
such a tenuous, flimsy hope. And to my great surprise, when I did get the all-clear
from my doctors, when the port was removed from my chest and I was sort of released
from the medical bubble, instead of feeling great excitement, and instead of qui
ckly and organically folding back into the world of the living, I found myself deeply stuck. And to my great surprise, the hardest part of my cancer experience, on a personal level, began once the cancer was gone. I very quickly realized, you know, of course,
that I was no longer a patient, but that I couldn't go back
to the person I'd been pre-diagnosis. And I had no idea who I was and how to find my footing
among the living. And I was struggling to figure out how to carry the imprints
of this
experience. Out of my group of 10 cancer comrades, as we called each other -- young people who I’d befriended
during those years in treatment -- only two of us were still alive. So I knew how lucky I was to be alive, I knew that ... I didn't just want to be
someone who was surviving but living, because after all, you know, what was the point
of having endured all that I'd endured if not to live a good life,
a meaningful life, a beautiful one? But I didn't have the tools to do that. And without,
you know,
a cavalry of doctors and nurses and friends checking up on me, I realized, you know, there was no
road map for the way forward and that I was going
to have to create one for myself. And so I spent this lost year
trying and failing and trying and failing to move on, only to realize, you know, that we don't get to move on
from the painful parts of our past. As much as we want to, you know, we can't compartmentalize them and stow them away because they always bob back up
to the surface an
d often with a vengeance, and that instead I was going to have
to figure out how to move forward with the imprints of my illness, both on my body and on my mind. And so one of the very first things I did, because I was still
in a place of feeling afraid, feeling, you know, ironically, afraid of the outside world. I was comfortable
in the hospital ecosystem to really, first of all, give myself the time to properly heal
from that experience, but also to figure out what was
on the other side of tha
t fear. And so I learned how to drive, and I ended up returning
to some of the letters I'd received from readers
of "Life, Interrupted," who had shared with me
their own experiences of aftermath, of figuring out how to do
the hard work of recovery and figuring out how to do
that hard work of moving forward, with whatever had happened. And so I decided to sublet my apartment. I borrowed a friend's car. I got a bunch of camping gear, and I embarked on a different
kind of 100-day project. A 100-day
, 15,000-mile solo road trip
with my dog Oscar as my co-pilot, and to visit some of these strangers
who had been lifelines when I was at my sickest, and to talk to them about that experience of in-betweenness. So to wrap this up, the title of the book,
"Between Two Kingdoms," is a reference to Susan Sontag's
essay "Illness as Metaphor," where she describes
how we all have dual citizenship in the kingdom of the sick and in the kingdom of the well, and that it's only a matter of time
until we use
that other passport. But what she didn't talk about
was that liminal space between the two, where maybe you're not
either sick or well. And that became the premise of that book. It's figuring out how to exist
in the messy middle. SZ: That book launched during COVID. Something else that was beginning
at that time was the "Isolation Journals" in April of 2020. Can you share what
was the inspiration for this project, especially at such a unique
moment in time? SJ: In the early days of lockdown, as
the world was shutting down, as we were all having to pivot
and to put our plans on hold and to figure out how to live our lives within very, you know, major constraints. So much of that experience felt
bizarrely familiar to me. Everything from wearing
a face mask and, you know, walking around with gallons
of hand sanitizer to being isolated at home. And, you know, isolation is its own epidemic, one that predated the pandemic and one that continues now. And I decided, on April 1, 2020, to share
what has always helped me transform that sense of isolation
into creative solitude and connection and even community. And I launched a newsletter called "The Isolation Journals." It's a free newsletter, and we invited our larger community
to do their own 100-day project. And so every single day, for 100 days, we had a different guest contributor
write an essay in a journaling prompt. We had artists and writers and musicians
and community leaders. One of my very favorite essays
and prompts came f
rom Lou Sullivan, a seven-year-old, two-time
brain cancer survivor who shared this game
that he played in the hospital called “Inside Seeing,” which was essentially
his take on meditation. And within 48 hours, we had
over 40,000 people who'd signed up. And it was extraordinary
to see what can happen when we dare to share our most vulnerable, unvarnished stories. And the reverberation that that creates. And so that newsletter
continues on to this day. We have over 150,000 community members. And e
very Sunday we send out a newsletter with thoughts from me and then a new essay
and journaling prompt. But what's surprised me so much is that people interpret journaling
in all kinds of ways. Some people use the prompts
as conversation prompts, others use them as thought prompts. Some people reinterpret
the idea of journaling, not as old fashioned,
you know, pen and paper, but they'll paint to the prompts,
they'll do modern dances. And so it's really been such a nourishing, tender, life-giving
space. And I'm so proud of this thing we built. I know what it's like to feel alone, to feel like you're the only person
suffering in a particular way. But we have so many extraordinary
artists throughout time, from Frida Kahlo to Virginia Woolf to Audre Lorde, who have taken that space of confinement, who have reimagined
their limitations as creative grist. SZ: We have a question from Celia. “Our world tries to avoid having feelings,
but in ‘American Symphony,’ you said that you didn't want
to
develop a thick skin. You wanted to feel it all. Can you say more about how
that approach impacts your spirit and how you experience life
feeling it all and how others can do the same?" SJ: You know, as a culture,
we resist discomfort. We resist confronting the fact that all of us are here on this Earth
for a very short period of time. I'm not special, I live
a little closer to the veil, because of the nature of my illness. And as tempting as it can be, you know,
to compartmentalize that discomf
ort, to plaster over it, to numb it, I think there's also so much to be gained when you unguard your heart. And it's the hardest thing
in the world to do. I knew going into this
that it wasn't going to be easy. I had no illusions, not only about the toll
it would take on me and on my loved ones, but I also knew that there was
a lot to be gained if I could resist that urge ... to look away from the things
that scared me most. And rather to engage in them directly. I wanted to be open to all of it
. I wanted to be open to the beautiful things
and to the painful things, and to really learn how to hold
both of them in the same palm. Because in varying ways
and for varying reasons, that's the work that we all have to do. There is no binary. Life isn't either good or bad. We're not either happy or sad
or healthy or unhealthy. Most of us, you know,
exist somewhere in the middle, and depending on the hour
or depending on the day, we might shift from one to the other. Trying to do the opposite
o
f having tough skin, trying to have tender skin, is not something that comes easily to me. It's something I have to work at
every single day. But I know that for me, it's the only way I can shift
out of that survival mode and in to fully living and feeling alive. SZ: We have a question here from Lauren. "In your book, you shared
how cancer impacted your relationship with your previous boyfriend. Have you carried these lessons
and experienced with this return of your leukemia? Were you able to st
rike a better
balance as a caregiver/patient? And how did art making
and his music making affect your relationship
this time around?" SJ: The most surprising toll
isn't what happens to the body, it's what often happens
to your relationships. And so at 22, I was pretty isolated. The friends that I had played
beer pong with in college were not necessarily
the ones who showed up to sit at my hospital bedside as my hair was falling out in clumps. But more important than realizing who my real friends
were and weren't, I was so astounded by the people
who came out of the woodwork and who showed up with such generosity and support and really made me understand the value of cultivating community
and prioritizing that and investing your time
and energy in that. And so luckily, by the time
that I did have my recurrence, I had spent that decade
building a community, because as much of a cliche
as it sounds like, we all need a village and we especially need a village
when the ceiling caves in. And
so, when I learned of my recurrence, Jon was in the midst of perhaps his busiest
professional season of life. And I’ve known Jon
from the time I was 13 years old. I have watched him work so hard to get to a place where he was getting
the kind of recognition and invitations that he had, and it felt really important to me
that he not put his life on pause. And so we had to get creative
about how to stay connected to each other at this time where it felt like
we were living on polar opposite plane
ts. And so Jon came up with a beautiful
idea of composing lullabies. He would compose a lullaby
for me every single day, and send it off to me
as a kind of counterpoint to the hospital's many noises,
the beeping of monitors, the wheezing of respirators, the alarms that go off. And it was his way of enveloping me
with his presence, even when he couldn't physically be there. And I, in turn, would text him photos
of the little paintings that I would make. And so what that meant was
that when we spo
ke on the phone, the conversation wasn't just centered
around the latest biopsy results and blood tests and whatever
else was happening. It was centered in our love language,
which is a shared creative language, and gave us a way of expressing
what we couldn't express. SZ: Joey writes, "What do you recommend to someone who is trying to get
started with journaling but feeling a little overwhelmed
by the blank page? Do you have any rituals or any starting
places you can recommend?" SJ: Yes, in spi
te of the fact
that I've been a lifelong journaler, I go through many moments
where I feel daunted by the blank page, and that was kind of the original premise
of starting the "Isolation Journals." Sometimes we need to read something. Sometimes we need to prompt ourselves
to get out of, you know, to twist our mind out of its usual rut. Come join us at "The Isolation Journals." We have an archive of hundreds of essays
and prompts and journaling challenges. Or don't. But I'll offer you what helps
me when I'm feeling daunted
by the blank page. And it's actually something
I borrowed from my friend, the poet Marie Howe, and she told me
that when she's feeling stuck, she writes with her non-dominant hand
and a big scrawl across the page. "I don't want to write about ..." And then she writes into that. Another one of my favorite
journaling prompts from "The Isolation Journals"
is by the photographer Ash Parsons. During a period of time
where she was in the NICU with a recently adopted baby
wh
o was having major health issues, she began what she calls
“just 10 images,” which is listing just 10 snapshots
from the last 24 hours, stream of consciousness,
whatever comes to mind. And I love that prompt because it's in list form
and it's so simple. But more than just recounting
what happens in the last 24 hours, it's a prompt that's trained me
to look and to look again and to notice my day differently. But the beautiful thing about journaling, and the thing that makes it
so generative and i
nspiring for me is how low the barrier to entry is. You know, journaling
is not beautiful writing. It doesn't have to be
grammatically correct. It doesn’t have to be in full sentences. It can be whatever it is that you want. It's such an expansive form
that you can interpret and reinterpret however
it best serves you. SZ: I have one last question from York. York says, "Thank you for sharing
your experience and insights. One of the parts that resonated with me
was your experience of using creativ
ity while you were struggling
with finding purpose. Were you always able to focus
on creativity and if not, what helped you make that shift?" SJ: Liz Gilbert speaks so beautifully about the pressure of finding your “capital P” Purpose. And so, what she's always said is you have to be one percent
more curious than afraid. Any time I come up with some big,
ambitious creative project, I immediately get frozen in my fear
and daunted by whatever it is. And so I think curiosity is such
a gentler way i
n and such ... And it's a more honest way
into the creative process, where you don't hold to an expectation of how something should look or how something will come together. But you really give yourself
the time and space to explore the threads of that curiosity. The work I'm most proud of, the work that has surprised me and changed me as an artist, as a writer, are the projects I started
without that sense of output or expectation, be it, you know, that 100-day project
and keeping that journal
or even the paintings
that I started doing in the hospital. They were pure play and tapping into that sort of child space, of creating simply for the joy of creating without any regard
for if it's good or bad, but simply to explore. And so I try to trick myself back
into that space all the time. SZ: Thank you for sharing so openly
and vulnerably with us, as you frequently do. Bye for now. SJ: Thank you everyone, thank you Susan. [Want to support TED?] [Become a TED Member!] [Learn more at ted.co
Comments
Hope you continue to find healing in your journey 🙏
❤
Finding creativity and purpose in the modern world is as difficult as finding gold and copper amidst the rubbles of the aftermath of war.
Thank you for this. “Opening myself to whatever feels good” at a time when “complete surrender” and “trust that something will come out of it”….”becomes a process of finding purpose out of that pain” Makes me feel validated about what I have been going through and that I will come out the other side. It’s so hard, scary, and unsettling to have your life be in limbo and not knowing where you will land.
🌹🌹🌹
It's been really nice following TED.
the video is great. Thank you❤
We're gonna need Affordable Housing and a Mandatory Minimum Income.
So the reason this video really didn’t get legs is firstly because of all the bow taking and booty kissing from the top. Secondly, they’re simply wrong. Creativity isn’t found in the face of adversity. Creativity exists because of adversity. It’s an instinct. More specifically, creativity is the fourth instinct. After the first three survival instincts: fight, flight and procreate comes create. This higher tier survival instinct (if you’ve read Csicszentmihalyi and it took) is the primary tool of human invention. Human invention is peak discovery process -our highest human cognitive function. You find such peaks when the worst is at hand - danger, imminent demise… do or die things. Not in ‘Aren’t we chic, bursting with elan, scintillatingly beautiful and culturally evolved’ kow-tow-athons. You find it when creativity has done it’s job - it’s original job evolutionarily; living to tell the tale of what you just survived. Something that almost took your life, and intelligence failed because it doesn’t have the 10X power of thoughts in time creatively has. These advocates for mediocrity have only preserved elitist institutional perceptions about the construct of adversity and creativity. They don’t want to see the link between creation and the bias of survival which is life or death. They’re fooled into believing soft, round pastoral shot making is filmic storytelling because they can’t accept the most creative thing humans do is war and vie for power with all the war methods they can create. They like baking. Because rubbing one out thinking of a statuette can’t be done on the proving ground of survival; history itself. I had to comment in shame of the ignorance this view proposes. Risk is what civilization does. It’s the only way to rewards. When humanity evolves past war, drama is going to be in real trouble- and these gentile platitudes may gave significance when a couple centuries without war have passed. Communities like this and their values is why film, and most storytelling forms are either dead or on franchise motivated life support.
Usually I like Ted speakers... but in this case I have never seen someone use So MANY Words to say absolutely ... Nothing....
ch 30 by @manwithbowl
Summarized with Chatbot Quintfox on ChatGPT 4 :) How to Find Creativity and Purpose in the Face of Adversity Suleika Jaouad's TED talk delves into her poignant journey through cancer and how she leveraged creativity and writing as means to navigate the tumultuous waters of illness and recovery. Through the lens of her documentary "American Symphony" and her initiatives like the "Isolation Journals," Jaouad explores the profound impact of facing mortality on creativity, relationships, and finding purpose amidst life's most challenging moments. Key Takeaways: 🎨 Embracing Creativity During Adversity - Jaouad highlights how creativity becomes a sanctuary during times of intense personal struggle, allowing for an expressive outlet and a form of healing. This was evidenced by her venture into watercolor painting during her hospital stay, an activity that provided solace and a way to process her experiences. - Example: Despite the challenges of chemotherapy, Jaouad found comfort and expression through painting, transforming her hospital room into a makeshift studio. 📝 The Power of Journaling and Community - The creation of the "Isolation Journals" served as a communal space for people to connect, share, and find solace through writing during the COVID-19 pandemic. This initiative underscores the significance of journaling not just as a personal practice but as a means to foster community and collective healing. - Example: The "Isolation Journals" attracted over 150,000 members, offering daily prompts that inspired diverse forms of creative expression. 💞 Relationships and Shared Creativity - Through her relationship with Jon Batiste, Jaouad demonstrates how shared creative endeavors can strengthen bonds, especially in the face of life-threatening illness. Their exchange of lullabies and paintings became a unique language of love and support. - Example: Jon Batiste composed daily lullabies for Jaouad, offering comfort and connection despite the physical separation imposed by her treatment. 🛣 Finding Purpose Through Pain - Jaouad's journey—from her initial cancer diagnosis at 22, through her column "Life, Interrupted," to her nationwide road trip—reveals how adversity can be a catalyst for finding one's voice, purpose, and the power of storytelling to transform personal tragedy into an avenue for connection and understanding. - Example: The "Life, Interrupted" column and Jaouad's memoir, "Between Two Kingdoms," illustrate how sharing her story helped others navigate their own struggles. Conclusion: Suleika Jaouad's narrative is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, showcasing how creativity, purpose, and community can emerge from the depths of despair. Her experiences illuminate the transformative power of storytelling, the importance of nurturing connections, and the courage to face life's adversities head-on, all while embracing the full spectrum of human emotion. Through her work, Jaouad invites us to find beauty in our battles and to remember that even in our most isolated moments, we are never truly alone.
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