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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky · Suleika Jaouad · 31 Mar 2026 podcast

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.

And so the truth is that in a way, as strange as it sounds,

Getting sick freed me

from those expectations.

I couldn't be a productive person.

I couldn't climb a ladder and have a certain kind of career.

And the irony is that when I got sick, because I couldn't do those things, because I was shuttling between the hospital and my childhood bedroom, I allowed myself to pursue the thing I'd always wanted to pursue, which is writing.

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