YouSaid · the spoken record

Suleika Jaouad

lines on the record: 97
first: 2021-06-01
most recent: 2021-06-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Contribute a journaling prompt. And so that's what we've done every week for the last year. We've put out a new journaling prompt that's free and that's accessible to everyone, whether you're an artist or a lifelong journaler or you're very skeptical about the idea of writing in a notebook and are curious to check it out. But I think, you know, the biggest thing that struck me is the sense of community that's formed around the project and more specifically around these journal entries that some people are willing to share. And it's just been an affirmation for me of the fact that survival is really its own kind of creative act. And that when we Dare to be vulnerable, we learn again and again that we're more alike than we are different.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So at the beginning of the pandemic, I was struck by how familiar it all felt, that experience of navigating the world with a mask of walking around with gallons of hand sanitizer, that sense of hypervigilance. All of it was so similar to what I'd experienced when I was sick, except that, of course, we were all living it together on a global scale. So I had the idea of returning to that 100-day project that I'd done with my friends and family, except this time I wanted to open it up to a bigger community and I wanted to invite people to journal alongside with me. And so I reached out to some friends, different artists and writers and musicians. I reached out to a couple of my heroes and idols and asked them if they might be willing to”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I would put it at the top of the Holland tunnel for all the busy commuters. Dressing and frantically driving to work.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is something that a friend told me Benjamin Schwerer, but I don't think it was his own mantra. I think it's one that's been passed down to desperate artists and writers who are trying to get unstuck. So, I can't take credit for it.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That has been my kind of mantra in any kind of writing I do, whether it's reported features or fiction or my own stories, but really writing towards that thing that you either don't want to know or that you don't understand and want to know better”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So often writing teachers will tell you to write what you know, but I often find that I write what I want to understand. And so at that time that I had that conversation with Cheryl, I was very much. Needed to be out of that in between place at all costs, but it wasn't until I had that conversation with her that I began to ask myself, why am I in this in-between place? Are other people in this in-between place too? What is there to be learned here? What is there to be observed? And so when I did eventually end up writing the book, I kept a post-it note above my desk that said, If you want to write a good book, write what you don't want others to know about you. If you want to write a great book, write what you don't want to know about yourself. And to me”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And I'll just say, you know, I have tried on some dreams for fit in the last couple of months where I've written a day in the life of a particular dream and come to the conclusion that that is not in fact my dream. So it's helpful in a number of ways I find.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Writing a future dream in the present tense has really kind of helped assuage that fear. And strangely, some of the things that I've written in those entries have happened. And again, I don't want to get too woo-woo. We're not talking about manifesting here, but I do think there's power in putting something to paper. And like we've been talking about asking and stating what you want and really clarifying what that is for yourself.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have been doing a journaling prompt for the last couple of months called A Day in the Life of My Dream, the idea initially came from my friend Holly Jacobs, and you write a day in the life of your dream couple years out, and you write it in the present tense with great specificity from the moment you wake up until you go to sleep. And the reason I love this prompt is because, like I was saying earlier, one of the strange remnants of being sick is being afraid to make plans for the future. I'm very comfortable being pinned to the present, but I still think in 100-day increments and maybe six month increments. But when I go any further beyond that, I start to feel that sense of fear. Well, what if something thwarts the plan between now and then? What if I get sick? What if, what if, what if? And so that act of”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, gratitude is often on that list. I mean, I think the idea of the two feel us is to kind of just jot down bullet points. And often what I'll do, even in my journaling, is expand on, say, gratitude with more specificity, but they're more kind of like my north stars for the day.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that shows up often on my to-feel list is some version of breathing, which might sound strange, but I especially around this book launch and after the year we've all had, I'll catch myself in these moments of busyness where I realize I'm not taking real breaths. I'm almost holding my breath. And so that's one thing that's usually at the top of my list. And I do a breathing meditation every day. So in some senses, it kind of correlates to the actual breathing meditation that might be on my to-do list. But yeah, breathing. Very simple. Very crucial.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reason I do that is because I think there's a way in which otherwise I kind of tumble into my tasks for the day ahead first without a clear sense of intention and that to feel us is really a remnant of when I was sick, when I had about three hours of usable energy in the day, which meant that I had to get very specific. I wanted to spend them with and what it was that I wanted to feel.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have to follow the line of thought through to its end without worrying if it's dumb or if it makes any sense. I actually do most of my first drafts in my journal so that I can kind of trick my brain out of that space of thinking, oh my gosh, I'm writing for a publication or I'm writing for a deadline to that quieter space of I'm exploring and I'm experimenting and I can follow an idea without worrying about where it's going to lead me. So I use the journal for all kinds of things. I also this might feel a little woo-woo to some of your listeners, but I'm a big list fan and probably like some of your listeners, I have very long to-do lists that I keep for myself. But before I get to my to-do list in my journal, I often start by writing a to feel list.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've been keeping a journal pretty much since I was old enough to hold a pen. And part of why I've kept this practice is exactly what you're saying. It's this one rare space where you get to show up as your Most unedited self and the stakes are very low because it's for your eyes only. And I find that in writing in a journal, I open up a dialogue with the self. It's a space where you can examine things big or small. And so I journal every day. It's the first thing I do. I wake up. Let my dogs out into the backyard and I make myself a cup of coffee and I write in my journal and I like to write by hand because There's no backspace bar. There's no possibility of editing.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say that that sunlight and vulnerability is the best disinfectant for darkness. It ceases to be a terrible private experience when you hold it up to the light and when you see it refracted in someone else's experience.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having any pretense of armor or toughness was really the thing, I think, that helped me get through that moment and that's helped me get through so many other difficult moments. Because there's a really beautiful thing that happens when you meet someone with your vulnerability, which is that it creates a reverberation and that vulnerability begets vulnerability, begets vulnerability. And I think it allows for an intimacy and a sense of connection that you can't have when you're trying to mask the kind of painful or ugly parts of yourself. And, you know, I'm reminded of something Nadia Boltz-Weber says about shame, which is that sunlight is the best disinfectant for shame.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be acquired and desired. But I've found that my own kind of tough skin, especially in those moments of darkness, is unhelpful. As much as I want to kind of armor myself or not allow myself to wallow in those moments, I've become an advocate for a different approach, which is a kind of tender skin approach of trying to allow myself not just to be vulnerable, but to share that vulnerability. And so in a way, for me, the road trip aside, just having these conversations. With people who had lived some version of that darkness to be able to speak the unvarnished truth of what I was feeling without.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll share two things. The first is a journaling prompt that I use when I'm in that place of stuckness or darkness. Because I think when you're in that place, it's impossible to imagine. Light beyond it. So, what I've done in those moments is I actually make a list of all the hard things I've survived. And the reason that I do that is because I need to remind myself of my and my body's proven track record of resilience. So I'll literally jot down every difficult thing I've survived big or small and just the act of writing those down brings forth that kind of muscle memory, that trust that you've moved through difficult passages before and that you can again. And the second thing I'll say is I don't know about you, Tim, but like I was raised in a pull yourself up by the bootstraps type of house where the notion of tough skin was very much something”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going on a road trip, and it's so nice to have normal parent worries. And so their support, I think empowered me to do this thing that felt scary pretty much every step of the way until I got to the last third of the trip and really started to kind of relax into driving and to feel a new sense of confidence. And by the end of that road trip, I didn't feel necessarily like I'd found my way back to the kingdom of the well, so to speak. But instead, I felt like I had learned to make a kind of home in the wilderness of the in-between. And I felt like I had stepped into a new iteration of self that allowed for my past. And my present to kind of come together and coalesce.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Practicing and building those muscles of independence, of being out in the world on my own two feet was the best possible thing I could have done for myself. And to this day, I say that road trip was the best decision that I've made in my life. And interestingly, you know, my parents, a lot of people. Said to them when I left for the bird, aren't you worried about her doing this? It seems like a completely terrible, irresponsible idea. And my mom, to her credit, said, of course, I'm worried about her going on a road trip, especially as a new driver. But that's exactly what you should be doing in your 20s. You should be keeping your parents up at night because.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So meaningful, and each of those people, I call them my road guardians, illuminated a different aspect of what it means to be in the aftermath of a trauma. I'm reminded of a line by Victor Frankl. He says, between stimulus and response, there is a space. And that space is our power to choose a response. And our response lies our growth and our freedom. And so each of those people that I visited had essentially Chosen a different and interesting response to the stimulus, whatever that was for them, illness or some other kind of heartbreak that had brought them to the floor. And so Learning from them”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To learn to work with my limitations and to accept them. And every day I would drive a little further and a little longer before I would do my McDonald's parking lot nap. I was camping by myself between these different stops to visit the people on my list. And that in and of itself was its own edifying experience. I was almost modeling the kind of independence that I did not have and forcing myself through a kind of self-imposed exposure therapy to learn that I could be alone, that I could take care of myself, that I could even camp in the woods and be okay. But it was the conversations that really, I think, made this trip.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think to sit alone with your thoughts in a car for many days, many hours is it can feel like a torturous form of self-experimentation. And it definitely felt that way in the beginning. It was also really physically challenging for me in those early weeks on the road, I would drive for two hours or three hours and be so wrecked with fatigue that I'd pull over and park in a McDonald's parking lot to nap. And so I was making very slow progress. But the interesting thing about being on this road trip for as long as I was and I was on the road for roughly about a hundred days was that I started to feel better and not in the sense that these long-term permanent side effects of my illness disappeared. They didn't, you know, that fatigue, that compromised immune system chased me across state lines. But I began”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thickest thinking to myself if I'm going to survive this, it has to be to live a good life, a meaningful life, a happy one. But I wasn't doing that. I was doing the very opposite of that. And I knew that I couldn't continue on the way I was. And so when I say stuck, I worry that sounds light for what I was feeling, but it really, it really kind of bordered on a sense of desperation, a feeling of I cannot continue on like this. I need to find a different way forward.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just want to say that I'm so glad you brought that up because you know that loss stuck here was a year of great depression for me, of great shame because I knew that I was one of the lucky ones. And in my darkest moments, I remember wishing that I was still sick or that I would get sick again, not because I wanted to have leukemia, of course, but because I missed the hospital's ecosystem. I missed its inhabitants. I understood them. It was being on the outside, being among the healthy that really made me feel like an imposter. And that sense of missing something that you shouldn't miss was so unsettling to me. And I remembered, you know, at my very...”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that, you know, even though it felt safe, it was still a small, stuck place or I could thrust myself into the bigger expanses of the world and try to figure out what was on the other side of that fear. And so it wasn't really a choice.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, do the world's most dramatic U-turn and pulled over, and my hands were shaking, and I thought to myself, I am certainly not a good enough driver to be doing this. I don't think I'm well enough to be doing this. What am I thinking? I'm about to go visit a bunch of people, most of whom I've never met before. But there was also this sense that if I stayed, I was going to stay in that small stuck bubble that I'd grown accustomed to living in. I was terrified of everything. Weirdly, after spending years in the hospital, I'd grown comfortable there. I understood how that world worked. It was the outside world that was frightening to me. And I knew in that moment that I had a choice. I could either stay in that stuck place.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me just start by saying that I began my road trip in New York City, more specifically, in Midtown. And the first five minutes of my road trip were the most terrifying five minutes of my life, which is saying a lot given what I just been through. I remember Twisting the keys in the ignition, putting my turn signal on, I had Willie Nelson's on the road again playing. I was really trying to set the vibe for myself. And I turned unto 9th Avenue, and I saw this man out of the corner of my eye in the bicycle lane waving his hands at me, flapping them. And I thought, hmm, that's strange. But then again, weird things happen in New York City all the time. And I kept driving. And suddenly I heard this chorus of car horns. And I looked up and realized all the traffic was coming in my direction and that I was driving the road, a one-way avenue.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our list of people who can join us in end times. And he went on to say, we've learned from this last week that you have pretty much no practical skills. Yeah. but you can you can be her scribe because everyone needs to have a job and i said i'll take that”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was well again. And so I'd kept that letter, and she was, you know, she didn't fall into the category of a stranger because we met. But I'd kept that letter because at the time the possibility of traveling, of riding on horseback, of going to Montana seemed so far away. But I would kind of daydream about it. And so she and her family were definitely one of the more eventful stops on this road trip. But even though we couldn't have come from more different worlds and backgrounds while I was there in Montana, I was struck by this sense of community they'd built at the end of my time there. One of the ranchers said to me, so we've been talking and you can be on our list. And I was like, what list is that? And he said,”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was actually from a woman who goes by the nickname salsa. Yeah, of course. Who I very briefly met at First Ascents, which is this incredible nonprofit that offers outdoor adventure trips for young adults with cancer. And she had been the volunteer camp mom who was charged with cooking and making sure we were well fed and nurtured for our week at camp. And I loved her immediately, in part because she kept a bottle of hooch, as she called it, and a little purse inscribed or embroidered with prayer scripture. But shortly after that trip at camp, I'd ended up in the hospital and she had sent me this beautiful package with a letter in it inviting me to come visit her and her family on the ranch in Montana and to ride the range on horseback.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Experience of isolation and of facing mortality, even though it was in a very different context. And so those were the people. That really impacted me, and I started keeping them in a little wooden box because I knew I wanted to be able to return to them. And so those letters and that wooden box became my itinerary for the road trip.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But one day, as I was being rolled out of my room to get a CT scan, I passed his door and I knocked on the little window, and we waved. And just that moment of connection, the fact of knowing that there was someone else who was living what I was living gave me a source of strength and a sense of community that sustained me throughout that bone marrow transplant process. But that experience was one that I had with so many people and not just with people who were undergoing cancer treatment. I heard from a high school teacher in California named Catherine who'd lost her son to suicide a few years earlier. I heard from a family of survivalist ranchers in Montana, I heard from a Young man on death row in Texas who never been sick a day in his life. He did a thousand push-ups just as his warm-up to start off each morning who related to that.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not because of the side effects of the chemo or because I'm about to have this terrifying procedure, but because I'm late for a deadline, which was such a healthy reorienting of my anxieties in that moment. But what I didn't expect when that first column and video launch was this sense of connection and possibility I would feel to the world outside my windows. And that first day I received so many letters from strangers around the world. I received an email from a man who was also undergoing a bone marrow transplant for leukemia and happened to be in the room right next door to my hospital room. And we couldn't meet because we were both in medical isolation and the derm risk was too high.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The column launch my first week in the bone marrow transplant unit. And I'm not sure that I'd given much thought to what would come of it because of the nature of my illness and my prognosis. I wasn't thinking very far ahead. I was truly trying to survive each day. And in fact, the future had become a very scary place for me because I didn't know if I would get to exist in the future. So I was purely focused on the work. There's a photo of me in the bone marrow transplant unit where I have a vomit bucket under one arm and I have my laptop under the other arm and I'm crying.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because all of this, of course, would have seemed incredibly presumptuous to pre-diagnosis me, pre-diagnosis me would have been grateful for a fact-checking position or an unpaid internship. But the truth was that I didn't have the health or the time to pursue those kinds of things. And in a strange way, my circumstances and my cancer and my pregnosis had made me brazen. And the editor was quiet for a minute and said, all right, we'll try it for a couple of installments and see how it goes.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I told this editor that what I actually wanted to do was to write a weekly column, to write from the trenches of treatment without knowing how my story was going to end and to really give ink to that experience of illness and youth. And then I went on and said, you know, maybe if there could be a video component, that would be really cool too. Because I know how hard it can be to read when you're sick and I want to make this project as accessible as possible. And I went on and on and on and stopped and was immediately horrified by everything that I just blurted out.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I should just back up and say that at that point, I was about two months out from a bone marrow transplant. And a bone marrow transplant is this incredibly risky procedure. And my doctors had told me that I had about a 35% chance of long-term survival. And so that just to give you the context of the frame of mind that I was in. I took a deep breath”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gone into this whole thing thinking that maybe my parents and my grandmother and a couple of friends would read it. I received a phone call from an editor at the New York Times asking me if I might want to write an essay. And I paused and very politely thanked her and told her that I wasn't interested in writing an essay.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that project was really what became the source material for the column. But because I'd never been published before and because I was, you know, 23 at that point, like the good millennial that I was, I first started by creating a blog, which felt manageable. And so that's what I did. I watched YouTube videos and figured out how to put together a very simple blog and I started to write and to take it seriously and to treat it as a job. And it felt really good to have a job to do other than just being a patient. And about two weeks later, after I started this blog, it had been circulated and had racked up a significant number of views or at least what felt significant to me because I”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I couldn't be a journalist in the way that maybe I'd imagined graduating from college. I wasn't going to be a war correspondent or a foreign correspondent. I was in fact reporting from the front lines of my hospital bed on a different kind of conflict zone.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Observing my hospital room and the world around me in a different sort of way, I was recording snippets of conversations between the nurses by the coffee station. I was writing about the different patients I was meeting. I was jotting down funny little anecdotes that would come up. And I was writing about more serious topics, about the ones that made me feel uncomfortable or ashamed I've wrote about the infertility I wrote about the experience of falling in love while falling sick. I wrote about navigating our insane healthcare system. And by the end of that, I realized that even though”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first was that I had to do it every day, but that it didn't matter if the quality was any good and it didn't matter how long my journal entries were. So sometimes it was several pages, often it was a paragraph. Occasionally it was one word. Sometimes it was just the F word, but that's what I did. Journaled every day for 100 days, and something interesting began to happen during that journal ink process. I found myself.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At some point during that first year of treatment, my friends and family came up with the idea of doing something called the 100-day project. And the concept was really simple. We were each going to pick our own project and do something creative every day for 100 days. So my dad wrote 100 childhood memories about growing up in Tunisia that he compiled into a little booklet and gave to me. My mom, who's an artist, painted a ceramic tile every day for a hundred days that she assembled into a shield and hung above my bed and told me it had protective powers. And so for my 100-day project, I decided to keep the stakes very low. And I returned to the thing I've always done in difficult moments, which was journaling. And I created a couple rules for myself.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think that kind of binary thinking, especially as we live longer and longer lives, means that that border is porous and that much of us end up spending our lives somewhere between the two. And so removing that sense that I had to be a denizen of one or the other and allowing myself to exist in that messy middle. I used to think of it as the kind of wilderness of survivorship was where I was when I left for that road trip. And my hope was that that trip and the people I met along the way would form a kind of breadcrumb path back toward some semblance of existing among the living.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I rented out my apartment and used the funds from that to pay for my road trip. And I reached out to all of these different people to let them know I'd love to meet face to face. And I left home.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that's what I did. I learned how to drive. And as I began learning how to drive, I started dreaming of going on a long road trip. And as I began dreaming of that, I began to imagine a solo cross-country road trip. And I didn't just want to go on some kind of touristy boondoggle, but I was really seeking out people who could offer guidance in this strange kind of limbo in between place that I found myself in. And so I ended up making a list of about 22 strangers, all of whom had written to me in response to my column about all kinds of reckonings and interruptions in their own life. And that's what I set out to do. I had this newly minted driver's license, which I'd had for about a month.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who I was and what that path forward was going to look like for me. So what I did was I started by confronting a smaller fear, but still a pretty significant fear for me, which was learning how to drive.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Simplest way for me to say it is that I understood I needed time to heal, which wasn't something that I'd allowed myself. I'd been pushing myself to figure out what I was going to do next and to kind of get back into the emotions of living immediately. But more than that, what I understood was that I needed to learn how to feel safe again in my own body. I write in the book that when this ceiling caves in on you, you no longer assume structural stability. You have to learn to live along fault lines. And so that really became my work. I wanted to feel safe in my body. I wanted to learn to become my own caregiver after years of being dependent on other caregivers. And more than anything, I wanted to carve out the time and space to figure out.”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we got to talking, and I explained to him some of the things I've been struggling with. And he said to me, it sounds like you have post-traumatic stress disorder. You have PTSD. And that was a revelation to me because I thought of PTSD as something that's reserved for veterans returning for war or someone who has experienced a kind of violence. It hadn't occurred to me that it also applied to emerging from a long period of life-threatening illness. And once I actually understood what it was that I was feeling, once I removed any expectations of what this post-cancer experience was going to be like, and I actually was able to confront the facts of what was happening face forward, then I actually began. To create a plan for myself”
2021-06-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #516: Suleika Jaouad on Invaluable Road Trips, the Importance of a To-Feel List, and Finding Artistic Homes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT