Suleika Jaouad

I get that.

What do I want and what's actually important to me and what am I striving for because I actually want the thing I'm striving for or because I'm caught up in –

A momentum that's pushing me forward.

Because I think it's what makes me good and what makes me valued and valuable.

I don't... I relate so deeply to that.

I got my first diagnosis of leukemia at 22, and I spent much of the next four years in the hospital watching...

my friends and peers accelerate into adulthood, you know, getting jobs and getting married and all the other big and small milestones of early adulthood.

And I felt so profoundly stuck.

And I think with each diagnosis, I felt...

an added sense of urgency around time and making the most of time, while also, to your earlier point, having these moments of, what is the point of all of this?

There's nothing quite like staring your mortality in the eye to strip away all the BS, to make

to have a sense of clarity about what really matters to you, who really matters to you, how you want to fill your days.

And what I'm clocking into in myself is that feeling of making up time, of doing the most that I can with the time that I have is often at odds with what really matters to me.

And for me, the guilt and the gratitude

It feels gendered in the sense that I want so badly to be good.

And...

that striving to be good for me is what exhausts me.

It's what leaves me feeling empty and wrecked with fatigue at the end of the day.

When I learned two summers ago that the leukemia was back a third time and that this time it was incurable,

I'll be living with this illness for the rest of my life, however long or short that is.