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

“Created for myself or sought out in treatment I no longer had in the wake of treatment. And so I really had to invent my own. But this notion of recovery is something that I spent a lot of time reflecting on. The word recovery implies a return to something. And I think in that first year, I was really trying to return to the person I'd been pre-diagnosis and very quickly realized that that person no longer existed and that though the word may be implied otherwise recovering wasn't about a return to the old. It was a kind of brute, terrifying act of discovery. And what was helpful was I met a doctor who was, I was actually interviewing for a story.”
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, the truth is I didn't do much of that work that first year. I had done therapy while I was sick. I had gone to support groups for young adults with cancer. But in the aftermath of that experience, because of that projection that this was supposed to be done, I didn't have in place those same kinds of support systems and structures. I think when Someone gets diagnosed or when someone loses a loved one, if you're lucky to have friends and family, everyone rallies around you in that moment of acute distress. But in my experience and the experiences of so many other people that I've befriended or interviewed, it's the quieter weeks and months after that are the hardest because you don't have the cavalry running after you and you're left to your own devices. And so all those sources of support that I had”
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
“morning period sees ritualized ceremonies that allow us to shoulder complicated feelings that help us cross the distance between no longer and not yet. And what I realized was that there is no 12-step program. There is no rite of passage for when you survive a trauma like illness and that I was going to have to create one for my own. And so that's what I did.”
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
“Recovering and really uncovering who you are in the wake of that. And that instead I was going to have to learn to move forward with this experience, with these imprints on my body and my mind and to learn how to integrate them in my present. So I started thinking about the language of ritual and the roles of rites of passage in these transitional moments. We have birthdays and funerals and weddings and our mitzvahs.”
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 first year after treatment, I was hell bent on moving on from this experience. I wanted to be a quote-unquote normal young person. And I remember looking to my friends almost with an anthropological sort of eye, thinking to myself, like, what does a normal 27-year-old do in trying to do those? And I'd go out dancing with friends and then pay for it with three days in bed. I would try to force myself to write about something other than illness, to come up with something new. And I just couldn't. And what I came to understand is that moving on is a myth. You don't get to compartmentalize your most difficult passages and stow them in the past. You don't get to skip over the hard work of healing and grieving”
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
“Or children, given my high likelihood of relapse. Those were the questions I was swimming around in. But the other piece of it that I began to grapple with are the ways in which the hero's journey arc is projected onto survivors. There's this notion that when you emerge from Trial or a big trauma, you are better, braver, stronger for what you've been through. But I didn't feel brave. I didn't feel strong. I felt wrecked by this experience and had no idea who I was or how to find my way forward and what I'd expected to be the kind of final act of this illness experience, which was being cured was actually the beginning of a very different kind of healing.”
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. I remember the day I was discharged from the hospital and was finally done with these four years of treatment, getting a slew of text messages, congratulating me on being done. And that seemed to imply an end point that I very much wanted but didn't feel necessarily true or accurate because there were so many unanswered questions that I realized I suddenly needed to figure out like the ones you just named. How do I hold down a job if I need to nap for four hours in the day? How do you begin to date when you're coming out of an experience like this and you still have a port in your chest? Where do you even or do you bring up a cancer diagnosis without potentially scaring somebody away? Is it responsible for me to consider long-term commitments like marriage?”
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
“Eagerly and organically going to fold back into the rhythms of living. But instead I found myself grappling with this dissonance between what should be and what was. On paper, I no longer had cancer. Off paper I couldn't have felt further from being the healthy, happy 27-year-old woman that I'd expected to be on the other end of 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
“So, when I finish treatment, I still had a port, which looks like a little hockey puck under the skin below my right collarbone I had scars. I was infertile as a result of the chemotherapy that I did. I had extreme fatigue and a compromise immune system because of my bone marrow transplant that I underwent. And all of those symptoms were confusing and difficult for me to figure out how to carry because I think I was so fixated on a cure that when the cure actually came, I wasn't prepared for the ongoingness of illness or really of living any sort of trauma. And I had this notion that I was quickly and”
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
“Lucy Grayley was this incredible poet, and as a kid she'd had a form of bone cancer called ewing sarcoma and she survived that cancer, but because of the surgeries and the radiation that she'd had to her jaw, she had to have a number of different surgeries over the course of her life that left her disfigured. And so the book is less about the experience of cancer than it is about interrogating beauty and living with her face and the kind of long-term imprints of that experience across her whole life. And I was really struck by that book, especially later as I began to emerge from cancer treatment and as I Began to reckon with the imprints of my own illness on my body and my life and my sense of self.”
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
“International sensation that it did felt like no small gift at a time when it felt like I was really living in the shadows and that there was so much of that experience that wasn't known or that was awkward or complicated to talk about. And so that led me on this journey of reading these other books reading Lucy Grilley's autobiography of a face, of really seeking out writers who were giving ink to the experience of illness in a way that felt fresh and true and perspective altering.”
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 in treatment for four years, but that first year I spent about eight months of it in the hospital and in medical isolation. And so at some point, I started to seek out Stories that held a kind of resonance that were written from the trenches, whether they were fiction or memoir. And the first book of that genre that I read was The Fault in Our Stars, which is about two teenagers who fall in love and spoiler alert die at the end. But it was also an incredibly funny book. It was full of humor and full of the typical coming of age stuff that any young person lives. And that was a really important book for me, and not only because it held all the kind of nuances of that experience, but because it exploded into the mainstream. And the fact that a book about two young cancer patients could become the kind 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
“Those books is because of that profound sense of isolation. I could no longer relate to my healthy friends, but at twenty two, you know, I was a year or two old for pediatrics, but often decades younger than most of the other patients in the cancer ward. So I didn't necessarily relate to my fellow patients, at least not the ones I met at first.”
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
“Reading any cancer related literature because when I did, I often found that those books were written from the perspective of someone who'd survived and who was many years out, or I'd read about these cancer survivors who had done incredible things. They'd gone on to start research foundations or to run ultra marathons. And that made me feel bad about the way I was experiencing my illness. I think there's a lot of pressure, especially as a cancer patient, to be brave, to be stoic, to be graceful, to be someone who suffers well. And it wasn't until a couple months into that experience that I began to look for different kinds of books. And the reason I began to search for”
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 I should just say that It took me a while to arrive at those books. In those first couple of months, you know, I really had to shed my light. That kind of type A anxiety accomplishment because everything felt difficult. I barely had the energy to speak or walk much less down and read. And instead, I was busy setting the world record for the number of Gray's anatomy episodes watched consecutively. So that's what I did for my first couple of months. And I very much resisted”
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 I think more than the diagnosis itself was profoundly devastating. It was shocking, especially at an age where youth and health are supposed to go hand in hand, even if you don't know who you are or what you're going to do with your life, you tell yourself you have time. And suddenly... That relationship to time for me change pretty abruptly. I didn't have time. I didn't have the option of experimenting and taking different jobs and traveling the world or whatever those big and small milestones are of early adulthood.”
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
“Within my first week in the hospital, I was in medical isolation. I called it my bubble. I wasn't allowed to leave my room. I couldn't open a window and anyone who entered had to suit up in the equivalent of a hazmat suit or what looked like a beekeeper suit with gloves and a face mask and a surgical gown. And at some point during that summer, I learned that Not only had the standard chemotherapy treatments not worked for me, but that my leukemia had become much more aggressive. And that at that point, my only options were experimental clinical trials.”
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
“Much as was possible remain the person I'd been and to somehow figure out how to make something useful out of what had happened. And so I was admitted to the hospital for what was supposed to be a two weeks stay and what ended up being an almost two month stay. And I remember packing a suitcase full of books. I packed war and peace thinking to myself, this is one of those books that I've never read and this is finally, you know, the time to actually read it and to catch up on doing some of these things that I haven't had the time to do. But of course, I never ended up reading a single one of those books. I still have yet to read War and Peace and whatever notions I had about what illness was going to be like pretty much imploded.”
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 remember hoping. Maybe naively, maybe even a little arrogantly that this was going to be a short sojourn in the kingdom of the sick. I wasn't planning to unpack my bags to get too comfortable. I resisted even, you know, the label of cancer patient and was determined 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
“Bifurcating moments where your life fractures. There's a before and there's an after. And even though I didn't know much about my diagnosis or what the treatment would look like, I understood that I would never be the same.”
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 graduated from college with these vague notions of wanting to become a war correspondent or a foreign correspondent, but wasn't sure how to go about doing that. I think journalism, unlike a lot of careers, doesn't have a clear point of entry. There's no corporate ladder to climb, no kind of ideal starter job. And what I ended up doing was taking a job as a paralegal at a law firm in France. And I was excited to get the chance to live abroad and hoping to find time to write and to begin putting together some clips and figuring out what that path forward might look like for me. But before I was able to do any of that, my life was interrupted. It started with a mysterious edge that blossomed. To all kinds of symptoms and ultimately almost exactly a year after I graduated, I was diagnosed. It was one of those.”
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 also the year where the dean said that they were looking for more green-haired students. And so I didn't have green hair, but I think I fit into whatever that alternative category might have been of an atypical student. But that first year in college was really challenging. I had a kind of chip on my shoulder. I'm sure like a lot of other students did because I hadn't. Gone to a fancy school, and because I hadn't even graduated from my public school, I felt this need to make up that distance and to work very hard to try to catch up and to try to fill in some of those gaps in my education.”
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
“Program of music conservatory and taking these different classes. But just so you have a sense of how clueless I was on the part of the application where they ask you to list your AP subjects, I wrote down all the classes I'd taken at Skidmore, like modern dance. Women in literature Um Because I thought, well, these are college classes. I don't know what an AP is, but. Seems like these are appropriate to list here.”
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 figure out how to put together a college application and what that would look like because both my parents are not from the US, they had no sense of how to do that. So I ended up applying early decision to Princeton for two reasons. One was because of the creative writing faculty and the other was because of the orchestra that they had. And I hope that the proximity to New York City would maybe allow me to keep taking music lessons and keep sitting with my teacher. And so I wrote an essay making a case for why, even though I hadn't gotten my high school diploma, I'd gotten an equivalent, if not deeper and better education through this kind of unconventional.”
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 I guess what I mean by writing more seriously was moving from just writing in a journal, which is something I'd always done to actually trying different forms, writing poetry, writing sonnets and prose poems, writing personal essays, writing fiction, and really kind of exploring and exercising this new muscle and very consciously trying to develop it. And so ultimately I came to the conclusion that I wanted to keep exercising those muscles, that I didn't just want to study one thing and to sit in a practice room for many, many hours a day, but that I actually wanted to go to college. Although, of course, at that point, you know, I didn't have a high school diploma and I suddenly began to scramble.”
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 I remember loving the literature classes that I was taking so much that I actually started looking up the English syllabus at different schools in the region and assigning them to myself. And in the course of that reading, I remember reading in particular speak memory by Vladimir Nabakov and trying to write in his style and of course doing it probably very poorly with lots of purple prose but I started”
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 my plan at 16 because, of course, like a lot of 16 year olds, I thought I was far more mature and sophisticated and knew far more than I actually did was to study music and to go to conservatory and that these classes I was taking at Skinmore were just going to be the boxes that I was going to check to appease my parents. But what ended up happening was that I enrolled in some literature courses and I started to write more seriously and I was just like a sponge soaking up as much as I could.”
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
“Parents because it entailed waking up at about 4 a.m. every Saturday driving me forty five minutes to the train station and taking a three and a half hour train to New York City, which allowed me to get to Juilliard's campus just in time for my 9 a.m. music theory class. And because of all the traveling and all the performing, I was really struggling to keep up with the long hours and classes and schedule of a public high school. And so I ended up coming up with a deal with my parents, which was that I was going to drop out of high school and that in the place of high school, I was going to take classes at the small liberal arts college where my dad taught, where I could attend and take classes for free.”
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
“Which was this giant wooden object called the upright base. And I fell in love with it pretty much from the first time that I played it. But something about sitting alone in a practice room with my bass for many hours, I think, gave me a kind of discipline and focus that I hadn't had. But it also presented a different path forward. And I started playing very competitively and going to band camp and all the other things that you do when you're into music as a teenager. And that's what I thought I was going to do. I thought I was going to become a classical musician that I was going to play the bass in an orchestra. And when I was 16, I got a scholarship to go to the Juilliard pre-college program in New York City, which is very exciting. And also, again, very inconvenient for 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
“So I wasn't a very strong student growing up in part because I'd shuffled around to so many different schools, different grades. And it wasn't until my freshman year of high school that something began to click in for me. I'd been playing the double bass for a couple of years and really fell in love with the instrument. My mom had started me on piano when I was four and was very strict about me practicing and I absolutely hated it. But when I was eight years old, she'd given me the option of picking a secondary instrument. And so in my eight-year-old rebellious mind, I decided to pick the instrument that would inconvenience my parents the most.”
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 absolutely material for me. So I was familiar with Tunisian Arabic and my sophomore year of college, I got a grant to study Arabic and Morocco. And I remember my first day, I went to a restaurant and I said ati tabuna, which in Tunisia means could I have some bread. And the waiter and the wait staff burst out laughing. And it turned out that the Tunisian word for bread was a very Derogatory term for a part of the female anatomy.”
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, as a kid, I spoke French and Arabian. And when we moved back to the US, I was about five or six years old. And I showed up on the first day of kindergarten in upstate New York not speaking a word of English. And what ended up happening as I became more fluent in English was that Arabic sort of got wedged out. And French was the language we spoke at home. English was the language I spoke at school. But over time, I lost my Arabic. And so it was this very strange experience when I started studying Arabic as an undergrad and that I would read certain words or certain words would be uttered by the teacher and somewhere deep in the recesses of my memory something would click in and I knew what the word was.”
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 now need to fact check myself, but from what I remember the journalism class did not require an application. Or if it did, the barrier to entry was much lower. But I also think that at that point, I just spent this semester abroad in Egypt. I'd relearned my native tongue of Arabic. And I felt a sense of confidence, not in my writing abilities, but confidence in that I believed I might have an interesting perspective to offer, which was, you know, my own lived experience growing up in North Africa and the research and travels that I'd done in the Middle East. So it was less that I suddenly felt like I'd become a stronger writer or that I had new chops and more that I had a set of Ideas and experiences that I believe had some worth.”
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 know, I only mentioned that prize because it did the very opposite that the rejection I'd received as a freshman did for me, which was it gave me a sense of confidence and a sense that this might possibly be something that I could pursue. And of course at that age, I don't know about you, but I was so porous. I was so sensitive to outward feedback in large part because I wasn't sure what it was that I wanted to do. It's not that I didn't know what I was interested in, but I just couldn't quite bridge the gap between what I found interesting and what might actually be practical or possible.”
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
“Son had done. And that experience really electrified me. The notion that from the limitations of a college campus or even a dorm room, I could seek out two stories, two perspectives that you'd think might never actually fit together and not only pair them side by side, but create a kind of dialogue between two people from very different worlds with very different views and more than that, a sense of connection.”
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 think it had obviously been a very traumatic event for her and for her family. And so I asked her if she might be comfortable with me doing a little digging and learning more about who he was. And she agreed. And what I realized was that this young man was from the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank, which was a place I'd actually visited the semester before during a fall break. And so I ended up tracking down this young man's mother's phone number and skyping her from my dorm room. And what came out of that were these two side-by-side profiles of my friend and the suicide bomber's mother who felt a tremendous amount of empathy for my friend and for the other victims of what her”
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
“Exactly. But that was our assignment was to find a way to write a story from or about a kind of war zone. And so all semester I was racking my brain and trying to figure out what I could possibly write. And I ended up writing a profile of a classmate who'd been a soldier in the Israeli defense forces and who had gotten very seriously injured in a suicide bombing on a train station near her house when she was about 18 years old. And she'd undergone something like a dozen surgeries and still had nerve damage from the shrapnel. And so I sat with her for a couple of hours and interviewed her. And toward the end of that interview, I asked her if she knew anything about the suicide bomber, as she called. And she said she'd never been able to research anything about him.”
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 I think the place that I always found a sense of home was in books. I was a huge reader. I wrote, but privately in the confines of my journal. And it wasn't until I went to college that I started thinking about taking some writing classes. I actually applied to the creative writing program my freshman year at Princeton and was rejected and took that rejection pretty badly in the sense that it was I already had enough self-doubt and it was the outward confirmation that I needed that this probably wasn't a good idea for me to pursue further other than just in my spare time but my junior year when I was sifting through the course catalog I saw a journalism class that caught my eye and it was called writing about war And it was taught by a journalist named Zanasi Kimbanas. And the notion of writing about war from Princeton, New Jersey.”
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
“My dad's a professor. He taught comparative literature and French literature at a small school in upstate New York. And every time he would get a sabbatical or whenever he had the opportunity, they would both decide to go back to their homelands. But I think the bigger truth is that we were trying to figure out as a family where we fit, especially since we don't have family in the US other than just my parents and my brother and me. But I think like a lot of mixed kids, the notion of home was an elusive concept. In some ways, it still is.”
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 born in New York City in the East Village, but between the ages of two and 12, we moved constantly. I lived in Switzerland. I lived in Tunisia. I lived in the US, and I went to, I don't know, five or six different schools.”
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
“Which they thankfully said no to. But when you're a kid, you know, the idea of being unique is not necessarily a positive. You don't want to stand out. And my defining experience growing up was being a misfit in every culture that I was in.”
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 it was a name given to me by my dad who is from Tunisia and where I still hold a passport to and where most of my family and my dad's side lives. It's actually Zuleja in Arabic, but that would be a whole other pronunciation mess. So I won't make you call me that for my parents, my mom is Swiss. They were looking for a name that they could pronounce in all three of the languages that we speak in our family and in our home, one that would sound vaguely similar in French and English and in Arabic. But like a lot of kids growing up, I really disliked my name. I remember in the fourth grade begging my parents to let me legally change my name to Ashley.”
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
“No small gift. Actually, just a few months ago, one of the guys that I profiled Fernando Murillo, who was given a life sentence at the age of 18, was released from prison in part because of that story and the model inmate and the redemption he fought so hard for and achieved during his time behind bars. that conversation that I had while I was reporting the story still continues. I still talk to Fernando and some of the other people in the story. And so they've really had this unusual and long-lasting impact on my life.”
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
“Before they'd never had a chance to tell their stories on their own terms and their own words. A lot of them cried and I came to understand that it was this rare moment where vulnerability could be shown and expressed, especially in an environment in which, yeah, vulnerability is not only seen as a form of weakness, but it can also be a danger. So whatever plans I had for how I was going to report this story went out the window. It was an experience of sitting and listening and being present unlike any other reporting or writing work I've done in the past and to be allowed in those most vulnerable. moments was”
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 I'm reminded of the great Brian Stevenson's line about how the worst thing we've ever done doesn't define us. And at that point, I think I was in my late 20s. I walked into that prison with my own set of preconceptions or fears or anxieties about how that process would go in every single one of those was upended. I remember setting up in the TV room in the prison hospice with my tape recorder. And by day two, I had a long line of men waiting outside the room to be interviewed. And a lot of them weren't relevant to the story necessarily. But what I came to understand in these conversations was that most of these people had never been interviewed.”
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
“Was in the context of first or second degree murder and they were trying to find a sense of redemption and atonement through that work. And I was struck not just by the incredible compassion that they modeled, but a kind of restorative justice that they were practicing in not just taking care of themselves and reckoning with their past, but quite literally sitting vigil with fellow prisoners around the clock and being present in those most sacred final hours.”
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 vigil was a story I reported for New York Times magazine. I think it was two or three years ago. And I traveled to Northern California to a maximum security prison. And in that prison is one of the first prison hospices in the country, which might sound wildly depressing, but it was truly one of the most inspiring two weeks of my life, what makes the prison hospice so unique is that it's staffed by fellow prisoners who've been trained in hospice work and who are there caring for their fellow prisoners who are in the final days or weeks of their lives. And I ended up following three young”
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