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
Except that word bravery is not the mere fact of having been sick or having endured some kind of pain.
It's where I see that strength is in our response to the inciting event.
So I felt brave when I began writing in the hospital.
I felt strong when I turned it into this column that I later went on to write about.
I felt not like a hero.
I don't think I've ever felt like a hero.
And I'd be very suspicious of anyone who does think of themselves as a hero.
But I felt courageous when in the aftermath of my illness, when I was really trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do with my life, I made a choice to take things into my own hands and to embark on a very long, slightly inadvisable road trip that I went on.
Because in those moments I was choosing something.
I was not the passive agent and an experience I wouldn't have opted for.
I was active.
I was engaging.
I was making decisions.
So I became obsessed with this very question when I found myself, you know, on paper, finally cancer-free, but off paper, more lost than I'd ever been.
And I was really struggling with re-entry, which is a word that we use in the context of veterans returning from war, but we don't use it as much in the context of surviving a traumatic experience like a long illness, right?
And I expected to feel grateful for that.
I expected to feel stronger for it.
And it was the very opposite of that.
I had never been more lost in my life.
I knew that I couldn't go back to the person I'd been pre-illness and I was no longer a patient, but I had no idea who I was.
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