Suleika Jaouad

Never occurred to me to apply to an MFA program.

The idea of student loans, of then emerging with those student loans and trying to write an op, like none of that felt like an option.

So I felt like journalism was a middle ground.

It was like a real job that would allow me to write, but that didn't feel so tenuous and uncertain.

And because I spent much of my life in Tunisia and in Switzerland, where my mom's from, and spoke those two languages fluently, I was interested in reporting on what was happening in North Africa because the Arab Spring or the Jasmine Revolution had just begun in Tunisia.

Okay.

But the truth is I was also a hot mess at 21 or 22.

I was also thinking about law school.

Again, reading, writing, I guess being a lawyer involves both of those things.

So I was working as a paralegal and really just trying to figure out how to reconcile, again, the things I knew I already loved with a definition of

being good and being successful that at the time was rooted in safety and what made sense.

The journalist David Brooks has spoken about the distinction between resume virtues, the things that make us attractive in the modern marketplace and eulogy virtues that

traits that were often remembered by once we're gone.

Were we kind?

Were we brave?

Were we humble?

And I was very much focused on my resume virtues.

But the reality is, I think even before I got sick, I already felt behind.

And that's the sickness, I think, of...

American capitalism and exceptionalism, I felt so far behind my classmates in college because I didn't come from the same world of private schools and no one in my family had gone to college in the US and I felt like a constant outsider.