Suleika Jaouad: "What Almost Dying Taught Me About Living"
Plus other Sunday thoughts, the In-Between Place and how wellness is not a destination.
As a physician, I am familiar with illness. How it presents, how to hunt for it, where to look for a treatment, what to give and when, how it changes everything about a person’s life forever.
We are all shaped by illness. All marked by what we witness of it, if not directly in experience.
As a communicator and an artist, I am aware of the power of words and song to open up new worlds of understanding. How symbols and sonic are able to bridge the divide between the Afflicted (for now) and the Unafflicted (for now), the Knowing (only what modern medicine has revealed) and the Knower (the one who is sick and knows the depths of their own experience best).
Words connect us.
It’s why stumbling on this powerful TED talk by Suleika Jaouad (shared below), cancer-survivor, award-winning journalist, author and speaker - was so insightful.
We must not underestimate the gift it is to work in health. And for all the wounds and sacrifices living that life of service may bring - especially in a pandemic - true health care is understanding that ‘wellness’ is a transient, oscillating state we are all dancing between, from season to season, until the end of (our) time. And sharing our stories, as humans, on whatever side of that porous, binary divide we currently find ourselves in: heals us. Empathy, and building a society and system that values this, will always transformative.
Suleika summarises it beautifully:
…In the end, I think that’s the trick. To stop seeing our health as binary. Between sick and healthy, well and unwell, whole and broken. To stop thinking that there’s some beautiful, perfect state of wellness to strive for. And to quit living in a state of constant dissatisfaction until we reach it. Every single one of us will have our life interrupted. Whether it’s by the rip chord of a diagnosis or some other kind of heartbreak or trauma that brings us to the floor. We need to find ways to live in the In-Between Place, managing whatever body and mind we currently have.
And as she so wonderfully put it in an interview: I think healing is a thing that we will all do, for the rest of our lives.
Where are you now in your healing journey?