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A
Support for this podcast and the following message come from Dignity Memorial. For many families, remembering loved ones means honoring the details that made them unique. Dignity Memorial is dedicated to professionalism and compassion in every detail of a life celebration. Find a provider near you@dignitymemorial.com hey, it's Rachel. Before we get going, I just wanted to share a little bit of news. Very good news. In fact, our episode with Jason Reynolds was just picked by Apple Podcasts as one of the 10 best best podcast episodes of 2025, which is such awesome news. I'm so happy. Not just because the show is being recognized. That's obviously great, but because Jason is being recognized.
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B
Jason was so vulnerable and he just.
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A
Spoke from a place of such complete honesty.
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B
It really resonated with me and I know a lot of you.
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A
I still think about that conversation all the time. So if you missed it, be sure and go back and listen. We're also going to drop it in the feed next week on Thanksgiving with a little bonus content question with Jason Reynolds. Thank you so much for your support. It means the world. And if you haven't yet, please leave us a review. We really, truly appreciate it. And now on with the show.
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B
What's a way in which you're trying to be a better person?
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C
I think this is very common amongst people living with chronic illnesses, but I have a lot of anxiety around making plans. I want to be a person who says, yes, I will be there. I will show up with flowers. And I don't always please know in advance if I'm going to be able to be there.
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A
I'm Rachel Martin and this is Wildcard, the show where cards control the conversation. Each week my guest answers questions about their life, questions pulled from a deck of cards. They're allowed to skip one question and to flip one back on me. My guest this week is Suleika Jawad.
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C
I went through a lot of loss at a young age and I think when you experience that kind of deep loss, there's a way in which it can make you want to guard your heart. And the truth is I would experience any amount of grief to experience those loves.
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A
I first saw Suleika's name in the New York times. It was 2012 and she was writing a column about dealing with leukemia when.
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B
She was just in her early 20s.
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A
That column became the basis of a best selling memoir called Between Two Kingdoms. Since then, she's become sort of a spiritual guide to countless people who also.
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Live in the in between the space between sick and healthy.
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A
Her story is also interwoven with that of her husband, the musician John Batiste, in the documentary called American Symphony. Zuleika's latest book is called the Book of A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life. I'm so happy to welcome Suleka Jawad to Wildcard.
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B
Hi.
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C
Hi. I'm so excited to be here.
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A
Okay, so round one is the memories round.
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B
Are you ready?
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C
I'm ready. Let's do it.
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A
Let's do it. First three cards you pick, Suleika. One Two or three?
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C
One.
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A
One.
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B
What do you admire about your teenage self?
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C
Hmm. Okay. I've been thinking about this a lot because I've been rereading old diaries of mine from my teenage years. And what strikes me about those journal entries is that they're pretty wild. They're full of lies about boys. I said I kissed, that I never did. They move between, you know, the daily recountings of my life and then fictions, fictional tales about the sort of aspirational woman I was trying to become, hoping to become, with much cooler outfits and lives and much later curfews than I actually had.
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B
Interesting.
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C
And so that sense of freedom and play around identity is something that I think we lose as we get older. We feel like we have to pick a singular purpose. We need to identify a path. And when I look back at those old journal entries, I see someone who's having fun with possibility instead of feeling fear about it. That's a lot of fun. And so that willingness to experiment on oneself is something I admire about my younger self.
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B
But in explaining that you called them lies, which feels like a little bit negative.
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A
But there were just. This was a young girl who was.
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B
Just, like, trying things on for size.
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C
Trying things on for size and daydreaming.
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D
Yeah.
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C
In a way that was uninhibited and having fun with it.
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B
Were you an angst ridden teenager? Who were you when you were an adolescent?
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C
As a teenager was, I guess, angst ridden. My father's a professor, so a French literature professor. So I was reading Sartre and Camus and having, like, my deep existential.
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B
I mean, how can you help it?
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C
Epiphanies about my finitude and all kinds of stuff. But I was also a little bit of a hellraiser. And in a very specific way, like, I was a good kid, but I was rebellious because I think, you know, from a very early age, I never fit in. I was the kid who showed up on the first day of kindergarten not speaking a word of English. And in elementary school, that was a source of shame. And by the Time I got to be a teenager, I sort of leaned into my misfit hood and started to have fun with it. Yeah.
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B
Okay, we're gonna get more into it through cards.
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C
Okay, let's do it. Let's do three more.
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B
Still in memories. 1, 2 or 3?
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C
2, 2.
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B
How do you consciously try to emulate your parents?
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C
Wow. Okay. This is perfect because my parents are here with me today, and I believe they're listening. So my dad is someone who is a real dreamer. He's retired now, and he spends his retirement walking about 7 miles every single day in the park while listening to stories. And he is someone who really values that kind of daydreaming. And so I think I inherited that from him and have cultivated that very intentionally. Daydreaming. He's daydreaming.
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B
Intentional daydreaming.
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C
Yeah, intentional daydreaming. Big daydreaming. My mom, I think what I inherited most from her is a dedication to a daily creative practice. So my earliest memories are coming home from school and going straight up to the attic of her house, which she transformed into her studio. And I would sit on the ground and just play. She taught me about pointillism by using Q tips to dipped in paint to make dotted landscapes. She gave me charcoal and encouraged me to make as big of a mess as possible. And she's someone who really doesn't believe in mistakes in creative work. She's someone who always says, like, whenever you think it's bad, that's actually where the energy is. Keep moving deeper into that. So that's a lesson that I've carried with me from childhood until now. And that sense of freedom to make a big, glorious mess in my creative work, to try new things, is something that I consciously try to emulate.
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B
And the daydreaming and the gift of a daily creative practice, I imagine dovetail for you, because in daydreaming is imagination. And so the two gifts that they gave you intertwine.
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C
Absolutely. And it's something that I didn't quite understand as a kid. Like, I always thought my parents were weird compared to other parents in upstate New York. I was so embarrassed by my mom, who had short hair and would show up at the bus stop on cross country skis wearing a backwards baseball cap, which now I think is incredibly cool and iconic. But at the time, I just wanted to fit in. I remember begging my parents to let me legally change my name to Ashley in the fourth grade.
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B
Oh, Ashley.
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C
I wanted to be this all American girl, like the American girl dolls. And it was Just never going to happen for me.
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E
No.
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B
We should just say your mom is Swiss by heritage, right? French Swiss. And your dad's from Tunisia originally.
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C
Correct.
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B
And this reminds me, though, in your book, in your first book, in your memoir, you talk about how it was a two way street of creative gifting between you and your parents. Because at some point when you were early in your diagnosis and things were really, really hard, and this is probably in the lead up to your first bone marrow transplant, your dad started writing like he started whatever, turning his own daydreaming into his own kind of writing practice. And that might not have happened had you as a family not been enduring this horrific thing.
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C
So my dad had always been a writer in a kind of scholarly context, but he never wrote in the first person. He was very private about his upbringing. And that first summer in the hospital, I spent about six weeks inpatient. And I was really struggling. I was angry, I was scared, and I didn't know what to do with myself within the four walls of this tin room that I found myself in. So a friend came up with the idea of A Hundred Day Project, which is an idea originated by the designer Michael Barut. And the concept was really simple. We were each going to do one creative act a day for 100 days. And my dad chose to write a childhood memory every day for 100 days. And by the end of that, actually he wrote 101 and a nod to, you know, of course, 1001 Arabian Nights. And so he ended up compiling those memories into a booklet that he gave to my brother and me. And it was such a gift to get to know the version of my dad as a child, the version of my dad at around the same age I was. And he's now actually working on a memoir inspired by that Hundred Day project.
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B
That's amazing.
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C
Yeah, yeah.
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B
Just that there would be a circle, you know, that it would be a gift that. A creative gift that you give one another that creates something else is a special outgrowth of all that. Okay, three new cards still in Memories. 1, 2 or 3?
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C
3.
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3.
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What's an ordinary place that feels extraordinary to you because of what happened there?
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C
This is a hard one. Skip.
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B
Oh, Skip.
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C
Now I'm scared. I already used it up.
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B
Okay, so here we go. What's an early experience of appreciating beauty?
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C
So my mom has always been such a beauty hunter. She's someone who, every time I go home on my bedside table, there will be a single clipping of a flower from her garden in a vase. She knows how to arrange things even if it's a lunch plate and just something artful. She says she cooks by color. The more color is on the plate, the better the food. And so an early experience of beauty for me was transforming my childhood bedroom. I found a giant fallen branch on the sidewalk outside of her house and I lugged it inside and I fastened it to one of the legs of my bed so that it hung like a kind of awning over my bed. And I remember hanging ornaments above it. And you know, obviously this was a total whim, but it, it was the sense of finding something, yeah, that one might consider trash worthy and transforming it into something that created a sense of magic. It was my own sort of self styled mobile and I remember lying in my bed and looking up at these branches glittering with these little ornaments and feeling such delight and also such power that I could, that you made it. I could fashion something out of nothing and transform my room in such a way.
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A
Support for this podcast and the following message come from Lisa. Your days are packed. Meetings, deadlines, commuting, so when you finally hit the mattress at the end of the day, you need it to deliver. Lisa's lineup of mattresses are tailored to how you sleep, with premium materials that deliver serious comfort and full body support. Visit Leesa.com for 30% off mattresses plus get an extra $50 off with promo code wildcard. That's L E-E-S A.com promo code wildcard.
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D
This message comes from GiveWell. When you give to a nonprofit, how do you measure success? What is the real impact on people's lives? GiveWell researches the highest impact opportunities around the world. Over 150,000 donors have confidently used GiveWell's research, collectively saving an estimated 300,000 lives. Make a tax deductible donation@givewell.org first time donors can have their donation matched up to $100 as long as matching funds last. Select podcast and NPR at checkout.
- [15:08]
A
This message comes from Apple Gift Card. Finding the right gift can be tough, but Apple Gift Card lets them choose their own story. They can use it for books, ad, free podcasts, subscriptions and more. The possibilities are endless. Visit Apple gift card.apple.com to learn more and gift one today. Okay, before we start round two, I want to talk about what is going.
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B
On in your creative life.
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A
This past spring you published your latest.
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B
Book, the Book of Alchemy, right? Came out in April. It is this beautiful confluence of there's some of your story in there, there's memoir that is the Connective tissue between these essays from these prominent writers and other thinkers who then will write a short essay with a prompt, and it invites the reader to then think on that question and write for themselves. And I wonder if there has been a prompt that one of your friends.
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A
One of these essays wrote for you in this book that you're like, oh.
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B
My God, that opened up a new thing for me that I hadn't thought of.
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C
I mean, there's one in particular that in the last year, I've returned to again and again. It's called just 10 images by Ash Parsons Story. And the premise is really simple. She writes about having a newly adopted son who ends up in the NICU with lots of health challenges. And she's a writer, but at the time was so consumed by what was happening with her son Zion, that she didn't have time to sit and really think clearly. But she also knew that she wanted to remember what was happening. And she was having so many feelings and so many thoughts and so many realizations. And so what she would do is, is write just 10 images from the last 24 hours in her notebook. And I've been doing this because I learned a year ago that the leukemia was back for the third time, which is obviously really scary. And I find it to be such an interesting way of fact checking my experience variance of my life, especially when I'm having a hard week. Because if I'm in chemo and feeling awful, it's so easy for that to be the story I tell myself about the week that I just had. And when I push myself to stream of consciousness, write 10 images, 10 scenes, what it often yields are these quiet, sweet, beautiful moments that I wouldn't have otherwise noted. And what I think is so cool about journaling is that I find when I write something down, it makes its way into my memory banks in a way that otherwise might have gone unnoticed, unremembered. And so I've done my own twist on it. Sometimes I'll do just 10 images from the last week, and I'll go through my camera roll on my phone and I'll find photos. Photos of like, our senior toothless dog, Lentil, napping in a patch of sun. And I write that scene just these simple little mundane moments that I otherwise wouldn't dwell on, otherwise wouldn't seem noteworthy, and they anchor me back in what actually nourishes me day to day.
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B
I'm sorry to hear that your cancer's back.
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E
How.
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B
How does it sit with you a third time?
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C
You know, the bad Thing is that I've been this. Been through this three times. And the good thing is that I've been through this three times. And so I feel like I have the tools that I didn't have at 22 to navigate this. And you know, Elizabeth Gilbert, who was recently on Wildcard and who's a dear friend of mine, earlier this week said something that stuck with me. She said, transformation equals liberation plus loss. And with every relapse, with every bout of illness, there has been tremendous loss and there has been a tremendous sense of liberation from obligation, from expectation, self imposed and external. And with each of these moments, and I think for any of us who's had to confront your mortality face on, there's a real clarity about what's important and what you want to do with the energy that you have and who you want to spend it with. And that I do think yields a kind of emerging from some chrysalis and a feeling of being transformed again and again. Sometimes not in ways that one would choose. I certainly wouldn't have chosen this for myself. But I think it's. It's a realization that my time here is limited. All of our time here is limited. And that's not such a bad realization to carry with you day to day. In some ways, it feels like a privilege. It makes things very clear in terms of what I want to do and what I don't. And this notion of having endless time to do the things that are important to you, to spend time with the people you love most, has evaporated for me. And that's a welcome shift. Yeah.
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B
Thank you for sharing that. Also, congratulations on your paintings because you are leaning into that part of your creativity, which I think is another thing your mom must be so proud of because you had an art show with her last year. Right. And painting is something that you took up when you were your second bone marrow transplant, is that right? And you couldn't really journal through that, so you started drawing, painting.
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C
I started keeping a visual journal. I had lost my vision temporarily as a result of this cocktail of medications I was on. And old me would have felt this, like, deep sense of defeat, like another thing that isn't going the way that I'd planned. But because I've been through this before, I knew that to hold to whatever ideas I had of how this is going to go was just going to be a recipe for frustration and disappointment and bitterness. And it's that notion of alchemy that the title of the Book of Alchemy speaks to that I try to tap into in those moments, that sense of transmutation where something seemingly worthless, like lead, can be transformed into something valuable like gold. And so I was having these really terrifying, literal fever dreams and medication induced hallucinations of things like a giant giraffe that doubled as an IV pole. And I was scared to go to sleep at night because I was scared of whatever it was my subconscious was going to serve me. But the second I started to paint those hallucinations, it became interesting to me. They became beautiful.
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B
Curiosity is a good cure for a lot.
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C
Yeah, absolutely. And by the end of that hospital stay, I had plastered the walls of my hospital room in these daily paintings. And one of the young women who would come every day to clean my floors told me one day that she would always clean the floor of the hospital room longer than necessary because she liked the way it felt in there. She was like, it's like a weird art gallery in here. But I think that sense of permission to return to those early loves from childhood, not just as side hobbies or things you do when and if you have time, but as something that I really make space for is a new element to my day to day. Hmm.
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B
Thank you for that. Okay, we're going back in.
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C
You ready? Let's do it.
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B
Let's go. Round two.
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A
Round two.
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B
Saleh Jawad.
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A
Here we go. Three new cards. One, two, three. This round is insights.
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C
Ooh. Three, three.
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A
What's something you thought about yourself that.
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B
You had to unlearn?
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C
This is maybe personal, but it's what first came to mind. I never thought I could have a long term relationship, let alone a marriage. I thought of myself as someone who. And maybe this is a function of having grown up the way that I did, where we moved around quite a lot, especially in my younger years, where to me, as a result of that moving, relationships had a shelf life. And I think in the romantic arena, I just never thought that I was someone who could find my person. I don't even know that I believed in such a thing. And it's so surprising to me to not only be married, but to be married to someone I trust so deeply that I admire so greatly. And that's not to say we have a perfect relationship, but I think like a lot of kids who watch Disney movies, there's an expectation of what a marriage or relationship looks like that is unrealistic. And when I got to my late 20s, John was instrumental in this. He's, you know, my. My book is dedicated to him because he's my teacher in a Lot of things, one of them being creative alchemy, but the other being in showing up. And one thing he said to me that that really changed the way that I viewed all of my relationships. As he said, the goal is not to have a perfect relationship. The goal is to be a person who shows up and who puts in the work when things get hard, because they will get hard. And he is someone who does that in every area of his life. And I feel like I learned that from him. And, you know, we've known each other forever. We met at band camp when we were about 13, 14, and we've been together now for 12 years. But I had this notion that you may have sort of fireworks in your honeymoon phase, but as a relation progresses, it gets harder or worse perhaps. And my experience of this relationship has flipped that on its head and has changed the way I navigate my friendships, my work relationships, where now I am someone who, when things get hard, I want to put in the work. And I believe that it's possible to get to the other side of a conflict or a moment of tension or disconnection and not only move through it, but for the relationship to be stronger for it.
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B
I mean, people who read your first memoir will know that you did have another long relationship, and this was with the person who was with you during your diagnosis and your first bone marrow transplant. And it's so exceptional, it's like you can't even compare it to your relationship now because you were going through such an extraordinary thing. But did you not think, I mean, you say that what you had to unlearn was that you couldn't, was that you could be in long term relationships. Did you not think that, that you could see yourself in long term partnership when you were with him or at that stage of your life?
- [27:50]
C
I think I did. But, you know, the stress of my illness, especially at such a young age, made it such that the cancer in a way metastasized to that relationship. And so when I got sick a decade later, and by then I was with John, my very first all consuming fear was, is this going to harm this relationship? Is this going to be the end of this relationship? And that was based on the story of what had happened the first time around. And it was the very opposite of that. The day before I was admitted to the bone marrow transplant unit for my second transplant, John was like, let's get married. Let's get married today. And I had this kind of like shocked reaction. And he was like, this is what you do in the face of These things, you double down on love. And it's a kind of defiance totally in the face of life's knife twists and plot twists. And instead of thinking of this period of time as this awful thing that has happened, we're also going to think of it as a time where we made this deep commitment to each other and where we prioritize love. And so in the course of 24 hours, we threw together a tiny little living room wedding. We ordered fried chicken sandwiches and had champagne. There were, like, five people there. We hadn't even moved into our home yet, so there wasn't a stitch of furniture. We had, like, rugs on the floor. And John rented a piano just for the. And we didn't even have rings. We used red twists.
- [29:43]
B
I saw it because it's an American symphony. The documentary is so good.
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C
And I walked into that bone marrow transplant the next day on cloud nine. I was the happiest I've ever been. And I was so excited. And it really was.
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B
They're like, we don't usually get people walking into their bone marrow transplants so giddy with delight.
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C
Exactly. And it really did feel to me like that forever lesson that I'm always learning of holding the brutal facts of life and the beautiful ones in the same open palm. And life is not a binary. We're not either happy or sad or well or unwell. Most of us are existing somewhere in the messy middle and trying to hold it all.
- [30:34]
B
Yeah, that was good. Oh, shisha.
- [30:38]
A
Was two hours. Okay.
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B
Three new cards. One, two, or three?
- [30:41]
C
Two, two. Hmm.
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A
What's a sound that instantly puts you at ease?
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B
Hmm.
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C
So I'm a very quiet person. I'm very soft spoken. I need quiet to work. My husband is someone who is prone to bursting out in spontaneous song at all hours of the day or night. And one of my favorite sounds is the sound of his laughter. And he's someone who can make himself laugh. And I sometimes hear him in the kitchen and no one else is around, and he is cackling and hooting so loudly, and it always makes me so happy and makes me feel this sort of contagious sense of playfulness and lightness. Mm.
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B
Has he always been that way?
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C
He's always been that way. He lives in the world of his imagination and all of the funny things that go on in there. Yeah. Are you.
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B
Is he pretty good about inviting you in there or.
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C
Absolutely. Okay. But sometimes I don't even need to be invited. Just hearing that raucous hooting and cackling is enough to just get me laughing. I don't even need to be in on the joke. Yeah, that's a beautiful thing.
- [32:16]
D
This message comes from Charles Schwab. When it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices like full service, wealth management and advice when you need it. You can also invest on your own and trade on think or swim. Visit schwab.com to learn more.
- [32:31]
E
This message comes from Michelin More than a tire company Michelin is an innovation company. From connected mobility to clean materials and now taking on one of the toughest mobility challenges space developing an airless wheel for space exploration designed to withstand the extreme conditions at the moon's south pole. Michelin isn't just making exceptional tires, they're helping build a better future. Motion for life more@michelinman.com y-michelin innovation support.
- [33:04]
A
For this podcast and the following message come from Dignity Memorial for many families, remembering loved ones means honoring the details that made them unique. Dignity Memorial is dedicated to professionalism and compassion in every detail of a life celebration. Find a provider near you@dignitymemorial.com this message.
- [33:26]
D
Comes from Progressive Insurance. Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
- [33:45]
B
So now we are in the last round. Beliefs okay, here we go.
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C
Okay, three new cards.
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B
Beliefs round 12 or 3?
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C
3. 3.
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A
What's a way in which you're trying.
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B
To be a better person?
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C
I think this is very common amongst people living with chronic illnesses. But I have a lot of anxiety around making plans. I want to be a person who says, yes, I will be there. I will show up with flowers. And the reality is that I can't always, and I don't always know in advance if I'm going to be able to be there. And so I am now trying to be really honest about that. And so when I make a plan, especially if it falls during a week when I'm in treatment, I'll say there is a 50, 50 chance realistically that I'm going to be able to show up. If you're okay with that, we can make a tentative plan. If you're not, that is perfectly all right. But I'm just trying to be honest about my limitations. I had a situation recently with someone I love very much who asked me to be at something that was important to them and I didn't make it. And they understood all of the contextual factors and yet they were sad and disappointed. And I was so grateful to them for sharing that with me because both can be true. You can understand and you can feel sad or disappointed. And you know, I never want illness to be the trump card. That means that people can't feel the things that inevitably they're feeling anyway. And so it's holding you or they're disappointed by you.
- [35:51]
B
You still want to know that you don't want to necessarily be protected from all of it because then that's not like a normal relationship.
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C
And I think the learning for me in that particular situation was, was that I wasn't able to show up, whatever it was, that evening or that afternoon. But that doesn't mean I can't then show up in a different way the next day, whether it's by sending flowers or some other form of showing up. It doesn't. You don't have to show up always with your body, but there are gestures that one can make, especially in moments of celebration or grief or some other milestone. And I think I kind of shifted into this all or nothing place of, well, if I can't go, I can't go. And actually this is a very important event that was happening for this friend. And so I was really, really grateful for that feedback. Three more.
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B
1, 2 or 3, 2, 2.
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A
What's the most religious thing about you?
- [37:01]
C
Hmm. I am a very ritualistic person and I love a routine. It changes all the time because like any other self employed artist or writer or musician, no one day or one week looks the same. But no matter what, I have my things that I do in the morning. I'm a very early riser and I really treasure those early morning hours before the rest of the world wakes up, where no one's emailing you, no one's calling you, and I get to be alone, alone with my thoughts. And I do the same things every morning that feel not just religious in the sense of something that I'm deeply committed to, but they feel sort of sacred and spiritual to me. And the first is that I write every morning and try to, even if it's a sentence or two. And I go out in nature, I have three dogs, which means that I have no choice but to go outside. And I really love starting my day outside, whether it's a city park or somewhere. Yeah, somewhere more bucolic. That's what I do. And the journaling is an important part of that. The Buddhists say that meditation is remembering. And I guess for me, whatever it is that I'm doing in the journal, whether it's a sentence or a three page entry or some doodle or even a to do list. Feels like a kind of remembering.
- [38:51]
B
Your husband is a Christian and devotedly so.
- [39:00]
C
Do you.
- [39:02]
B
Has he. I mean, obviously he has shared what that means to him. Is that something that you. You understand and appreciate about him, or is it something that you have developed your own curiosity about?
- [39:20]
C
I deeply appreciate it about him and I am very curious about it. He's never belonged to a church, but for a while we did this survey of every church in New York City where we would go every Sunday and just kind of experience it. It was so interesting and so beautiful. And I'm so moved by the rituals of religion. We have off of our bedroom this kind of little closet style room that's a prayer room. And he goes in there and reads scripture every morning. I go in there and I do my journaling.
- [39:56]
B
There's a parallel.
- [39:57]
C
Yeah, there is a parallel. And I grew up, you know, in an interfaith household in the sense that my dad was raised Muslim, my mom was raised Catholic. Neither of them are religious, so they're deeply spiritual people. And so I think I had that model of a marriage where you can have great respect and even partake in certain ways and see the deep value in it without necessarily having to assume espouse the exact same beliefs.
- [40:38]
B
Last one, Suleika.
- [40:40]
C
Okay. I could do this all day with you.
- [40:43]
A
I know I could.
- [40:44]
B
I totally could, too.
- [40:48]
C
Okay, last one.
- [40:49]
B
One.
- [40:50]
C
Two or three? One. One.
- [40:56]
B
When do you feel connected to the people you've lost?
- [41:01]
C
This is such a good one. You know, I've lost a lot of people in the last 15 years of my life. I had the great joy and privilege when I was 22 and I was sick of befriending some fellow patients. I was desperate for friends who understood what I was going through. And as someone who was one year too old for pediatrics, but often decades younger than the other adult cancer patients, anytime I saw someone under the age of 30 at the hospital, I would pounce on them and be like, can we please exchange numbers? And can we please hang out? And what that yielded was this incredible friend group of fellow patients. My friend Max Ritvo, who is a brilliant poet. My friend Melissa Carroll, who's an incredible artist. She's the reason that I paint in watercolor. And most of my friends died by the end of my 20s. I think two of those 10 friends are alive now. And so I went through a lot of loss at a young age. And I think when you experience that kind of deep loss, there's a way in which it can make you want to guard your heart. Because to open yourself up to new love is inevitably to also open yourself up to new loss. And I've had to work through that. And the truth is, you know, I would experience any amount of grief to experience those loves. And, you know, they say the depth of your grief is the measure of how much you loved. And I do feel so connected to them. One of the hardest things when I got sick three years ago was returning to that same hospital where I'd made all those wonderful friends and wanting so badly to be able to call Max and Melissa, for example, because they were the ones that we had a kind of unofficial buddy system. We'd go with each other to chemo, we'd show up at each other's doors with pizza and pre rolled joints when the chemo nausea was really taking grip. We'd answer the phone calls in the middle of the night when the anxiety and insomnia crept in. And I felt this, you know, deep raw sense of grief that I hadn't felt in a while. And that's the funny thing about grief. You know, they say time heals all wounds. And I don't think that's true of grief. Grief is not linear. It really does feel like these waves, these kind of peaks and valleys where for me, three years ago, it felt as raw as it did the day I learned of their deaths. And I felt so sad and I felt such deep longing to be able to be in conversation with them. And, you know, I get to be in conversation with Max through his poems, through my own writing. He was always one of my first readers and he was so funny. And with Melissa, when I started painting, like, things would come back to me that I hadn't thought of for a long time. She loved watercolor because you're not the sole agent of the paint. You're in collaboration with the water. It's a kind of aquatic dance, and you can't control watercolor. It kind of blooms and bleeds on the paper and has a will of its own. And she said, I love the messy accidents of watercolor. I love how the seeding of that control can turn into something beautiful. And what an apt metaphor for life. And so I feel connected to them through my illness. I feel connected to them through my creative practice.
- [45:13]
B
You know, I wonder, how is it to be the person who got to live longer of that group of friends, so many have passed. Was that a struggle to be the person who survived?
- [45:31]
C
I Think it was a struggle in my years of remission. You know, I think the awful thing about someone, you know, watching someone you love die, especially when they're so young, is, like, you get older, and they stay the same age. And so I relapsed at the age of 33, which was around the age Melissa was when she died. And. I think, you know, I think I. At every major milestone in my life, I feel that kind of bittersweet twinge of, you know, even, you know, getting married. In the back of my mind, I'm thinking to myself, oh, this person will never get married. With every birthday, as I get older, it's that. Yeah, that sense of, on the one hand, moving further away from the shared slice of life that you had together, while also, you know, feeling. Feeling that they're there with you. And, you know, one thing I loved about Melissa and Max in particular, and my first book, Between Two Kingdoms, is dedicated to them, is I think. And I believe this to be true of myself, which is that my illness is the least interesting thing about me. What I admired about them was not the mere fact that they were sick. Lots of people get sick. It's how they responded to their illness. And so Max, in the last months of his life, published his first poem in the New Yorker and wrote two books. And he just used what was happening as grist and made it his own. Melissa, she started making these haunting, beautiful self portraits in watercolor. And so each of them, I think, are people I look to as I navigate these new challenges now about how I can be the handler of my fears rather than the handled. Mm. It's weird.
- [48:05]
B
You wrote this line in your book that says, I don't believe going through something hard makes us wiser or stronger or braver by default. But I don't know, you seem wiser, stronger, and braver as a result of all the things. I didn't know you before, but, I mean, maybe your diagnosis just opened up a channel for you to share all that stuff with the world.
- [48:34]
C
Yeah. I think of Max, who we met some other pediatric cancer patient who was, like, 19 years old and who was kind of a jerk. And I immediately was like, oh, no, no, no. He's going through a lot. And Max was like, just because he has cancer doesn't mean he's not an asshole. And so I do think, you know, when these things happen to us, you do have a choice. You have a choice. So, yeah, having cancer does not mean you're brave or inspiring, but what you choose to do in the midst of navigating that illness can be brave and inspiring. And I'm always trying to move closer toward whatever productive agency I have available to me.
- [49:27]
A
We end the show the same way.
- [49:28]
B
Every time with a trip in our memory time machine. Ooh, I know, it sounds so exciting.
- [49:34]
A
So in the memory time machine, you.
- [49:36]
B
Go back and pick one moment from.
- [49:37]
A
Your past to revisit.
- [49:40]
B
It's not a moment you want to change anything about. It's just one moment that you'd like to linger in a little longer. Which moment do you choose?
- [49:57]
C
What immediately came to mind is this moment I had while I was on. When I finished treatment the first time around, I learned how to drive and I went on a 15,000mile solo road trip, which was very scary for me as someone who was a new driver and who didn't particularly like being alone. And I arrived to the sandhills of Nebraska and I had this moment with my dog, Oscar. At the time where we were camping, I had trout that I had fished. And I was tinkering away with my camper stove under this night sky just glittering with stars. And I felt, I think, for the first time in my life, not just a real sense of peace and confidence in my ability to stand on my own two feet, but I think for the first time, a real sense of delight and pleasure in my own company. Hmm.
- [51:13]
B
May we all feel that at some.
- [51:15]
C
Point in our lives, may we all take a solar road trip. I really think it should be a rite of passage.
- [51:21]
B
Yeah. And it's just the catching the trout that I don't know that I'm gonna be able to replicate. God, that's.
- [51:27]
C
Yeah, that was a one time thing for me. Just to be clear, I was really, you know, back to trying on identities for fit.
- [51:34]
B
This is super impressive. Salika Jawad's newest book is called the Book of a Creative Practice for an Inspired Life.
- [51:45]
A
It is out.
- [51:47]
B
Saleh Jawad, thank you so much.
- [51:49]
C
Thank you.
- [51:56]
A
If you like that conversation, you should go back and check out my episode with Jason Reynolds. As I mentioned at the top, it was just named one of Apple's 10 best episodes of 2025, which is super awesome. I'm so happy about it because it was an episode that meant a lot to me and it's so lovely that it meant a lot to other people.
- [52:12]
E
People.
- [52:13]
A
Jason is a beautiful person and that just comes across so clearly in that episode. This episode was produced by Summer Tamad and edited by Dave Blanchard. It was mastered by Patrick Murray, Wildcard's executive producer. Is Yolanda Sangweni. And our theme music is by Ramtin Arablouei. You can reach out to us@wildcardpr.org and you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna shuffle the deck and be back with more next week. Talk to you then.
- [52:42]
E
This message comes from NPR sponsor Rosetta Stone, an expert in language learning for 30 years. Right now, NPR listeners can get Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership to 25 different languages for 50% off. Learn more at rosettastone.com NPR this message comes from NPR sponsor 1Password. Forgot your password again. Skip the resets and sign in securely with strong unique passwords that autofill across all your devices. Try it free for two weeks at 1Password.com NPR this message comes from Mint Mobile.
- [53:20]
D
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