Suleika Jaouad
speaker
1,033 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 29 May
Suleika Jaouad’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I had no idea how to live my life or what that would look like.
And I began to take a great interest in people who had figured out how to move forward without staying crystallized and in that trauma.
because we all know people, and I was one of them for a very long time, who stay in that survival mode.
And for a very long time, I was more comfortable in survival mode than I was dealing with everyday life.
But I knew intuitively that the key for me was going to be to figure out how to shift out of surviving and into some form of living.
I just didn't know how to do that yet.
And so what that looked like for me was going on this road trip and interviewing different people who had experienced all kinds of life interruptions.
I interviewed a man on death row in Texas who at the time that I met him had spent more than half of his life in solitary confinement and was facing the death penalty and had no expectation of ever, you know, getting out alive.
And something that struck me about him was the way that he talked about community.
One of the very first questions he asked me was, how did you spend all that time in the hospital?
And I said, I played a lot of Scrabble.
And he responded, me too, and explained to me that he and his neighboring cellmates would make boards out of scraps of paper and call their plays out to each other through, you
And that made a lot of sense to me because I think that community, whether it's a pre-existing community or one that you have to construct for yourself in the aftermath of an experience, is crucial to figuring out how to move forward.
Because, of course, you can't really move on from a trauma.
Like we said, you have to learn to carry that forward with you.
And so for me, aside from my wonderful friends and family, finding people who had been where I'd been, who were where I was, was really important.
And being able to have frank conversations.
about what that experience was like, where I didn't feel the self-imposed pressure to say, I'm alive, I'm so grateful, which of course on some level I was, but was glossing over all the complexity and the day-to-day challenges of really figuring out what it meant to take my place among the living.
The second thing I'd say is that when you've endured a trauma, the impulse can be to stay in a very small, safe place.
Because when you've had the ceiling cave in on you, you no longer assume structural stability.
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