Suleika Jaouad

And I think, you know, one of the things that was most interesting to me in that first year of illness was how quickly my priorities reshuffled themselves.

I had very limited energy.

I was on a ton of medications.

I maybe had about an hour or two or three on a very good day of usable energy.

And what that meant was that I had to get very specific about who I wanted to spend that time with and what I wanted to do during that time.

And like I said earlier, especially when you're young, but I think for most of us, we have this sense of endless time that we can get to it later.

And overnight, my relationship to time abruptly changed.

And I understood that there was an endless time.

In fact, in my case, there was likely a very finite amount of time for me to do the things that I wanted to do.

And, you know, it's interesting because I'm very interested in post-traumatic growth now.

But at the time, had you told me you can learn something from this, I probably would have punched you in the face.

As well, you should have.

So I really struggled in that first year.

I would seek out illness narratives and I'd read about someone who had gone on to run an ultra marathon or just start some foundation or to write, you know, a bestselling book.

And I hated those stories because they made me feel like there was a right and a wrong way to suffer.

Mm.

And at that time, I wasn't ready yet to figure out what I might learn from this experience, how it might enhance my life.

And so what I started doing instead was researching this long lineage of bedridden artists and writers that we have who, you know, wrote or created from the trenches.

Freda Kahlo was someone I was very drawn to because she didn't find herself on the other side of her physical pain.

She was in an automobile accident when she was 18 years old and ended up living from bed or from a wheelchair for large chunks of her life.