I’ve followed Suleika Jaouad since reading her 2012 New York Times column, Life Interrupted, portraying life as a young leukemia patient. Now, in The Atlantic, Jaouad talks about The Art of Survival
“Art” refers to “skill acquired through experience, study, and/or observation”—and not putting paint on canvas to illuminate aspects of survivorship, although Jaouad does that, too. Jaouad had to learn this art because after her release from the hospital, she realized “that she no longer had any idea how to live among the well.”
In a 2019 TED talk, What Almost Dying Taught Me About Living, Jaouad describes a few of the many difficulties of re-entry into the well world: ongoing physical and emotional pain; less clarity than when at her sickest; and heightened uncertainty.
What I hear her describing is the “art” piece of what I call Healthy Survivorship: the science and art of making life the best it can be after a diagnosis. Jaouad offers wisdom with her encouragement to “stop seeing our health as binary between sick and healthy, well and unwell…and to find ways to live in the in-between place, managing whatever body and mind we currently have.”
She’s thrilled about the awards and heaps of public praise for accomplishments she achieved while deathly ill, but “sometimes worry that I’ve become the kind of person who makes people who are not ‘suffering well’ feel like shit.” she confesses. That’s why she’s candid about her art including times of despair and paralysis…and finding the hope needed to live as well as possible in her changed life.
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