Kate Bowler: Hello everyone, it’s Kate. I’ve got a quick announcement before you go fold laundry and answer more emails or forget where you put your keys again. My new book, Joyful Anyway, comes out April 7th, 2026. I think this might be my favorite book I’ve ever written. It’s about the kind of joy that shows up. It shows up when life might feel like a never ending loop of doctor’s appointments or logistical chaos or just whatever emotional plot twist arrived this morning. So if you’ve ever thought, is joy still possible? I wrote this for you. And pre-orders make a huge difference. So thank you. I am so grateful for your support. This is Everything Happens and I’m Kate Bowler. There’s a sense of pressure that shows up when we start taking stock of our lives. Where we thought we would be by now. Who we imagined we’d be. How this season was supposed to feel. And that can leave us feeling behind. Our reflex when that pressure hits is usually to fix it, to optimize it, and to get moving again. But what if, just hear me out. This is an invitation to something else. What if, instead of rushing toward the answers, we learned how to live inside the questions a little longer, the ones that don’t resolve neatly, the ones don’t make us more efficient or impressive. They might even hurt us sometimes, but they do make us honest about where we actually are. That’s where today’s conversation begins. Today, I’m talking to one of my very favorite people on the planet. Suleika Jaouaud. Suleika is, of course, a speaker and a writer. She is the author of the best-selling memoir Between Two Kingdoms and The Book of Alchemy, which is this lovely journaling book. Her work and her entire life explores illness and creativity and just how we live with so much uncertainty. So, yes, she is our perfect kind of person. She’s the person that I trust to have an honest conversation about our possibilities and also our limits. We’ll talk about our love of ambition, where we might be able to resist turning ourselves into a self-improvement project. She is the person who helps us try and the person helps us pop the brakes. Thanks for listening. You’re gonna love her.
Suleika Jaouaud: Our broad theme for the month is inspired by one of my favorite Rilko lines about living the questions now, and then someday, far in the future, gradually without even noticing it, living your way into the answers. So my first question for you is, a question you’re living inside right now without trying to resolve it and just inhabiting.
Kate Bowler: I was thinking about this, will I always feel this achy? Will I always this kind of like the rawness of being incomplete and never done? And will it always hurt so much? Because sometimes you see that ache be transformed into something beautiful and like. Like the blues, like all these gorgeous forms of music that take those minor keys and make them sweet. But sometimes it just like does not feel sweet. It just feels like freaking awful. So lately it’s just like, will the ache always hurt this much? And is that so necessary that I just, like why haven’t I gotten used to it by now? Why does it always feel like a surprise?
Suleika Jaouaud: So when you’re trying to live inside of a question without rushing to make meaning of it, to fix it, how do you do that?
Kate Bowler: I guess it always helps, I suppose, when I see it in other people, that there’s no such thing as a done life. I remember when I first got sick and I was like, I just need to make it to, I think I said 50, and I’m 45 now, and like, and then I don’t think I ever felt, like, I think at the time I was, like I just needed to wrap this up. And now I’m like, oh my gosh, I’m just like desperate to. Does through just to feel done. So I guess like noticing it in other people gives me a little compassion. Looking back on my older self gives me little compassion, but maybe just like trying to find some part of it that feels like in the smallest, like the smallest loveliest possible thing kind of at least gives me like a, you’re very good on that, hon, cause you’re so good on like small agency. That sometimes feels a little bit like, well, it doesn’t mean I’m stuck, it just means I’m aching.
Suleika Jaouaud: Yeah, and I think it’s especially hard for people like us, which is to say type A people who like to have the answers or at least know what you need to study to get the A grade that will offer some semblance of certainty. And I’ve been thinking about that too. You know, another forever favorite line is Joan Didion’s line about how we’re well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be. And I have that same experience when I go back and reread my journals from my teenage years, from college, and all of the questions I had then I still have now. And there’s something very humbling about that. And there’s a debunking of the myth of arrival or certainty. And when I can rest in that, it doesn’t make the ache more bearable, but it makes it more normal.
Kate Bowler: That line makes me think of Nora Ephron wrote like after a certain age, it’s just patch, patch, patch. I kind of like that feeling too, like maybe it’s okay to just feel like a little stitched in and like, Oh, oh, that’s coming undone like this, but like all the like.
Suleika Jaouaud: All the seams are showing. I kind of loved it. The first thing that came to mind in terms of what questions do I want to inhabit is like where to even begin. I have more questions than I have answers right now. But when I honed in on one in particular, the one that came up for me and I have it here was Where am I confusing momentum with meaning, and what happens if I slow the story down? Because I think sometimes what happens for me when I know I can’t live my way into the answer ASAP is that I generate activities and to-dos because that momentum feels like forward moving progress. But it’s not necessarily getting me faster or closer to the answer. It’s just distracting me from the discomfort of not knowing the answers.
Kate Bowler: Oh my gosh, that just reminds me of every closet I’ve ever taken apart when I felt like. You kind of get this Ferrari feeling. You’re like, if I could just get a little open road, I would feel differently. And I like hearing that you’re like no, I just went faster. And go further.
Suleika Jaouaud: Yeah, I’m just going spinning my wheels right here at home.
Kate Bowler: Really? True. I love making work when I feel scared. I just love it. I love, like, I can make a job and then I can whip myself up and then I can get angry at other people who won’t do my job with me. Like, come on, guys, we said we’d wallpaper, no? No one wanted to wallpaper right now?
Suleika Jaouaud: Sounds just a tad familiar.
Kate Bowler: We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere.
Suleika Jaouaud: OK, so our second prompt that I thought would be interesting to adapt into a conversation prompt with you is one of my favorite essays in the book. It’s an essay by Jedediah Jenkins called Forks in the Road. Can you think of a moment recently or maybe in the last year when something quietly shifted for you, maybe even before you for it.
Kate Bowler: This last year, I really tried to make measurable progress on some of the chronic pain I’m in. And I did it in the only way I know how, which is like, I try to run like a little experiment. I’m like, okay, I’m gonna give myself a certain amount of time. I got some of that wisdom from like other people when I was really trying to manage uncertainty and like give it a certain number of time and then create like a certain amount of things that you’re gonna do. So I tried like 100% of the wellness supplements. I tried like 100% of what I did was up to like three massages a week to deal with like joint instability and plus a physical therapy appointment, plus like perfect postural whatnot. And I was like fully convinced because I was told that if I have like incredible like supportive muscle and posture that I would finally get myself out of the biggest troughs of pain that I experience every day. When I look back over this year, it really didn’t change very much. There was an enormous amount of effort, an enormous amount of like then frustration, and then blame, self-blame, which I’m excellent at, and like really not a lot of change. So like, is there like that quieter place I need to get to that this is the place where I live, like this is room I’m in, and I’m not gonna get out of this room, so I need do different things.
Suleika Jaouaud: Hmm.
Kate Bowler: In the place.
Suleika Jaouaud: Sometimes the anti-shift is the shift. I relate to that so much. I was thinking about this last year and what the big shifts have been for me and mine in a way was its own anti-shift. I learned right before my book tour that there was a possibility I was going to have a third transplant over the summer. And when you get news like that, there’s a way in which you just become suspended in a waiting room. And I waited to make any plans for the summer, waited to commit to trips, thinking this may or may not happen. And I don’t want to be sad or disappointed if I make a plan and it can’t come to pass. And in the end, I obviously did not have a third transplant this summer. Anti-shift left me with was the realization that I’m kind of done being suspended in a waiting room. As you know, as someone who’s dealing with illness and chronic pain, it’s so easy to live your life in increments between the next biopsy, the next scan, the next thing that is going to make you feel better. And I’ve spent so much of my adult life doing that, and this summer it was just this sense of deja vu, and in a way it was a welcome anti-shift. I was very happy not to spend my summer in the hospital going through a third transplant, but it also made me realize all of the things that I’ve been putting on the back burner that I’m scared to make plans for because some part of me is either waiting for the sword of Damocles to fall or waiting for some miracle. But both of those things keep me in a holding pattern.
Kate Bowler: Oh wow, and that’s so like the way that you metabolize fear is one of the loveliest things about you. And I really just like, it gave me this weird image of like when I was, I don’t know, in high school. I remember someone I really liked and trusted was praying for me. And sometimes you’re a little suspect when people are praying, you’re like, where are you gonna go with this? But I liked this one. They said, sometimes we just wait and wait and wait and are hoping that God says go. Or like you feel that nudge, but like, what if you just go and then just wait until God says stop? And like, I like what you’re describing of like, what if we just let ourselves, let every lovely thing just go, and keep moving? And then like, and then let life stop us, because dear God, life like pulls the thread, and then you’re like not wearing a sweater anymore. So I really just love where you got with that. I find that very, it really makes me want to think about this year a bit differently.
Suleika Jaouaud: Yeah, it’s like I’d rather make plans and then have to adapt my plans than to have no plans at all.
Kate Bowler: And there’s something about plans, even though I know that we’re trying to be all tender with our hopes every time we make plans, but even the imagination of the lovely things are so precious. Even thinking about like, lately I started thinking about what it would be like if I’m so old and my best friend is there and we somehow are living in Costa Rica. And like, I also speak Spanish. I don’t have any means or plans to buy a home in Costa Rica. But I just realized how delightful it is to think about a dream coming true. And it’s a glimmer of something that might. And that there is something really beautiful about treating it like a little fire. You blow a little air into it.
Suleika Jaouaud: Yeah, a glimmer of something that might is such a lovely way of putting it. What are some other glimmers of some things that might?
Kate Bowler: Oh yeah, I had one thought. I thought for over nine years, what if I bought like five costumes? Like nothing, I’m like, what if it was like a, not like I have a really awesome chip costume, like an exotic potato chip costume that I’ve worn pretty recently, but like I don’t have like a cool tassely leather jacket. I don’t because I’ve never been to a cowboy something, but like what if that was awesome? Then I think that I might. So I was thinking like, what if I just buy five things for a thing I’ve never done and then just like try to find a way to do it, to be there. Even if at the end of the year I’m just like wearing all five in one day.
Suleika Jaouaud: I love this idea. We hosted our first ever New Year’s party. I hate New Years for all the reasons that I’ve already named in this conversation. It’s just so much pressure to stay up way too late, so much pressure for it to be epic, so much pressure to start the year with a big bang. And I usually rebelled by going to sleep at 8 p.m. and having a cup of tea. But this year we had a real party and someone asked me, what’s the attire? And on the spot, I just made up a dress code and the dress code was, wear something from your closet that you never get the chance to wear. Well, that’s awesome. One person showed up in their prom tux from the 80s. Someone else showed up in a wetsuit, miniskirt over it, and John wore a kilt over fleece overalls. And I went into my closet and I found this ridiculous yellow fur cossack hat that I bought at a flea market and was like, maybe I’ll wear this and then of course never did. And then I put on a fake leather trench coat and I have never felt more like myself than I did that night. And everyone unanimously agreed that their thing in their closet that they never get the chance to wear, some absurd costume, was actually their truest essence in costume form. And what it makes me think of is I’ve always had this vision that in my old age, when I give less Fs, I’m just gonna be a woman who wears costumes. Thank you guys. I think the time is now for us to start doing that.
Kate Bowler: I cannot tell you how much I love that. That, I’m sure that has to be true. I do feel this way on Halloween because I usually have like a really good Monty Python costume with the coconuts. It took me forever to dig out the coconuts, but like, and then I’ll just like clop behind my son. And I have a lovely neighborhood with largely first-generation immigrants who might not necessarily have seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And I do a lot of like yelling behind my son being like, it’s a funny reference, it was actually pretty good and it kind of holds up. But I do feel most myself in those moments. I like this permission. And I also just feel like the more random it is, the more bizarrely like the marrow of your bones it feels sometimes.
Suleika Jaouaud: Yes, when we stop trying to control and make it fit, we tap into whatever that frequency of intuition is. That sounded very woo-woo.
Kate Bowler: No, actually, not from you. My cup says the woo is strong with this one.
Suleika Jaouaud: Oh, how odd.
Kate Bowler: We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back.
Suleika Jaouaud: Another one of our recent prompts that made me think of you is to write a thank you letter to something that exhausted you. And I’m especially curious to hear your take on something that wore you out, but also taught you something you couldn’t have learned any other way. And because I’m speaking to you, I just want to go on record and say no forced gratitude is allowed here.
Kate Bowler: Okay, this is my honest, really real answer that at first sounds like a compliment to yourself in a job interview where you say you’re a perfectionist. But I tried too hard. I have never been someone with a very high sense of self-worth. It has often felt like a little sandcastle in there and that every wave will just knock it over. And that not having a natural feeling of worth is a very strange thing to scaffold. I have scaffolded it very well with the love of my friends. I built a really good version of self-perception and love with those little flying buttresses. But getting that feeling has been really tricky for me. And I found that ambition is the thing that I have used that has let me feel like I have an engine. Like I get to feel the pleasure of trying. I get to feel like I can go and actually, wait a minute, I learned something about what I can do by being like a terrible ambition monster. And then it brought me to the point of utter exhaustion. I don’t have those natural limitations because I don’t have a strong sense of boundaries or that my time is precious. I run out hard. And so I think ambition has been both an incredible gift to my sense of self and has been the terrible teacher that has run me dry. And so it began something in me and it has repeatedly ended something in me.
Suleika Jaouaud: I feel that so deeply. I think ambition would be my answer too. I feel like I am constantly working like I’m running out of time and also running myself ragged in doing so and sometimes actively making myself sick. And it’s just this two-headed creature that I don’t quite know how to wrangle, a sort of love-hate relationship with my own ambition. And I think maybe in some ways this is gendered. I don’t know that men always have such a complicated relationship to their own ambition. But my ambition is the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning, that keeps me moving, that keeps me filled with energy and excitement. And it’s also the thing that wrecks me with exhaustion day after day after day.
Kate Bowler: You feel like it’s trying to hack through the jungle because you’ve got to go somewhere. And if you didn’t, there would be no view, there would be no point. Like you have to go somewhere. But it does sort of feel like holding the blade from the wrong end sometimes. And it takes a while after tiring myself out to realize precisely how much it hurts. And I don’t really find anyone but my closest friends can tell me when it’s hurting, because I love the ambition of my friends. I love to see you try. When you try, it lights me up. It feels beautiful to see the people you really care about exercise their powers. And I think partly what feels so fragile about this is like holding a little baby bird—the ability to try is such a narrow window. And that’s why I always love that language of limited agency, like not everything is possible and not nothing is possible, but staying in that what is possible today place. So when I see my friends do it, it fills me. But I can’t always tell when I’ve stayed in that narrow window of agency or when I’ve just let that engine feeling, like you were describing before, take over—desperate to go somewhere.
Suleika Jaouaud: Is there a particular moment that you can point to where you felt that tension acutely?
Kate Bowler: Well, I think this last summer, I just had one of those professional years where you have a series of failures all in a row, and it just got me off my knees. I really had felt like I was building to something. And then July 1st, I had a series of financial setbacks, and I went from feeling like I was building something I had been working toward for at least a few years to having to almost fully start again. Let go of staff I really care about, take apart things I was really proud of. There was a lot of sitting in the bath staring into the middle distance for at least a few weeks as I was just kind of processing. I think we’re both wired similarly in that we get terrified of wasted effort. And when you don’t feel like you have that to waste, the temptation to be self-punishing is quite hard. Like, oh, I should have seen my way around it. When the truth is everybody fails. Everybody fails constantly. So the fact that it was a failure is not supposed to be this reckoning, but it really felt like a reckoning.
Suleika Jaouaud: I keep an inventory of rejections and failures in my journal and I find them so helpful because almost always, without fail, and sometimes it takes several years, I come to understand one of two things. The experience that asked me to give something up was at the very least useful information. And often more than that, it makes space for something else to emerge. It teaches me what my non-negotiables are.
Kate Bowler: I think one of the first reminders that was really good for me is that actually, I’m okay with failing. I know how to lose things. I’m actually good at that part. And I’ve built things back before when I thought I couldn’t. So it got me back to that place and I realized, well, this is not nearly as scary as other things I’ve built back before. So that reminded me of my incredibly high tolerance for risk, and that made me feel braver. Also, the existential thing is, you can replace all kinds of things that fall under the realm of professional ambition. You can replace them with other stuff. And that loss is not like other losses. So the more I lose things in a way, the taller I feel sometimes. There’s a feeling of being bulletproof.
Suleika Jaouaud: With each new recurrence, fear is greater, obviously, because my prognosis is worse. And yet, because I have practice at it now, the amount of space my illness takes up has become less and less—or I would say unnecessary space. I give it exactly the time and energy it needs, but not an ounce more because I’ve been here. I’ve done it. It’s like I’m bored of the déjà vu. I don’t feel bulletproof in the sense of feeling invincible. I know I am not invincible. I’m acutely aware of my mortality. But I feel a quiet sense of power each time the ceiling has caved in, with each new failure or heartbreak that I’ve survived, because I can look back at this record of failures and heartbreaks and losses and know that I survived them.
Kate Bowler: That is so badass and so beautiful and so heartbreaking because it makes everyone who loves you want to tell you that there should be no loss. But I just think this earned, gorgeous ability to look at precarity—I just wish there was a dial for this. Because it’s different than when you read business literature and they talk about people who have a certain kind of risk appetite, but from a place of all-conquering invulnerability. Like, whatever, I’ll just build back better. But yours sounds like this dial of when you know things can come apart, when you have a high capacity to accept fragility as a precondition for risk. That to me is a very different kind of acceptance of the world and then rising up than if you thought you could just always win.
Suleika Jaouaud: That you can solve for it in some way through your supplement regimen or through whatever it might be. And I think that’s really it—it’s surrendering to the precarity without letting it hijack every day.
Kate Bowler: There’s this story I heard one time and I did nothing with it except that I put it in my heart. But this phrase stuck with me. It comes from this old myth about a man named John the Conqueror. And the description of him said he was a bottom fish. He could go deep. And this profound acceptance of both sorrow and strength is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever heard as a description of that deep, quiet, awful strength and knowing. I was like, damn, that’s one of the most intense ways of being brave I’ve ever heard.
Suleika Jaouaud: Wow. I want to be a bottom fish. I want to be a bottom fish. Thank you, Kate. I’m probably going to call you immediately after this is over so we can finish our drinks and get into all the things that would be inappropriate for this conversation. What a gift.
Kate Bowler: Loves, it is not a huge leap to imagine that you know this ache too—that unsettled feeling that something is missing or gone or that you’re living in a kind of perpetual waiting room. But what Suleika and I kept circling back to though is this: that there are different engines that can move us through a life. Sometimes that engine can be ambition, like building on or at least planning something that pulls us forward. And sometimes that engine is quieter. It’s noticing. It’s staying. It’s admitting that this is the room that you’re in. This is the life that we have. And we might as well put up some better wallpaper. So here’s a blessing for both kinds of engines. For those idling, unsure, staring at the wall of the room they didn’t choose. And for those revving hard, dreaming big, maybe a teeny bit of a monster right now. May you stop apologizing for the pace that you need. May you rest without calling it failure. And may you reach without feeling shame. And may today’s motion or stillness be enough. Thank you, darlings. So this conversation took place as part of Suleika Jaouaud’s Isolation Journals. It’s that writing community that she hosts on Substack that offers structure without pressure. Honestly, Substack is just the greatest place on the internet. So come find me there. I’m at katebowler.substack.com and I’m going to post daily reflections for Lent and they are totally free. And thank you so much to my team here at Everything Happens that allows everything to happen. Jess Ritchie, Harriet Putman, Keith Weston, Megan Crunkleton, Anne Herring, Hailie Durrett, Eliza Zonia, Anna Fitzgerald Peterson, and Katherine Smith. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.
