Survival Is a Creative Act

Kate Bowler: What do we do when the worst thing happens again? We can imagine that there’s some kind of quota on suffering and trust us, we have hit it. The bad thing has happened and now we’re through, right? Tragedy must strike somewhere else now. That should be the law somewhere, we made it. But then, but then, but then. I’m Kate Bowler and this is Everything Happens. We all have to learn how to live out our beautiful days and our terrible ones and all those in between. And at the heart of this podcast and this community is a desire to mine collective wisdom, to borrow one another’s courage and to nudge us gently toward hope. And today’s conversation will do exactly that. Suleika Jauoad is an Emmy award-winning journalist, best-selling author of Between Two Kingdoms and her latest, The Book of Alchemy. And if you haven’t seen it yet, you must watch the documentary she made with her husband, John Baptiste, called American Symphony. It is gorgeous and moving and lives into so many the questions that we all have about how to live with hope and faith in the face of difficult realities. But even more than all of her titles, Suleika lives with a particular kind of courage, the kind that stares very real fear in the face and then paints a giraffe holding an IV pole. Today we’re talking about how creativity is central to survival. And this is not a conversation about fixing your life, it’s about staying awake to it and finding a tiny window of agency that allows something new to be born. Suleika, my dear, hello, this is the best part of my day. Thank you so much for being here.

Suleika Jauoad: Hi Kate, I love you. I’m so happy to be here with you.

Kate: Okay, for people who might be unfamiliar with your story, I wondered if we could just start there for a moment. You were diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of leukemia first when you were 22, and since then, you’ve had just seasons, like seasons of remission where things felt possible again, seasons of relapse when things felt small and terrifying. And you are the person that I immediately think of as someone who understands the scope and breadth of the longevity of an illness and the way that we are marked by like spring and then fall and then spring and fall all over again. And you live like this, like with the capacity to hold both.

Suleika: It’s the longevity of illness. But I also think it’s the longevity of the human condition.

Kate: You’re like, you’ve been human longer than you wanted to be.

Suleika: I’ve been human for 36 years, and some things have happened in those 36 years. And, you know, I found out this last summer that my leukemia was back for the third time and the kind of news that makes you feel like you have a sort of Damocles hovering over your head that’s gonna fall at any moment. You know, it’s interesting. My first diagnosis at 22 was so traumatizing. I had no sense of what it means to confront one’s mortality in this way, of what it means to have to exist in the kingdom of the sick and to learn all the protocols and medical use and all the things that come with it. This time around, I have been committed to giving my illness the time and attention it requires of me and not one second more. I am so over it. I’m so bored of the dramatic phone call from the doctor. I’m like, oh, I know this story. I’ve watched this movie before. It’s like the worst kind of deja vu. And I spent about a month after I got that news in bed. I just couldn’t, it really snowed me in. I couldn’t keep up my newsletter. For the first time ever, I went dark with no explanation, no like polished little note saying like, I’m taking a break or you know, whatever. I just couldn’t even bring myself to do that. Instead of immediately pivoting into action and to slapping on that like courageous, I need to be strong, I need rally all my people and figure out what to make of this place, which has always been my default. Not necessarily because I’m particularly good at those things, but also because I believe that we’re conditioned to feel like that’s how we need to respond to difficult moments. But for the first time, I just gave myself the permission to fall apart for a month. And to be scared and to be sad and to be wildly unproductive about it without even some sense that like, okay, I can do this for a week and then I have to get back to work. And I like, I was just like, no, I might get back to my life or I might not like that’s the place that I was in. And about a month into that, I realized I don’t want to do that anymore. I didn’t necessarily want to swing to the other end of the spectrum either, but I really felt like for the first time I just got to a place of surrendering to the inevitability of what it means to be human, which is to say that these seasons come and go and sometimes they go on for far longer than we want them to and sometimes. You’re in the season for as long as you’re in the season and that’s it. You know, it’s not to say I don’t feel sad or scared about it, I do, but I feel very like a deep sense of humility about it.

Kate: When you almost get humiliated, that’s exactly the transition feeling though, like that’s so in it. Like, I’m leveled. But then like I am humbled is such a close relationship to that. Like, okay, then it is.

Suleika: I’m humiliated by it and I’m humbled by it. You know, this is the one certainty. We are born and we die. I, you know, have spent so much of my adult life feeling anxious about the next biopsy. I just want to, I just wanna live my life as best as I can. And so it’s really, it’s been a big scales falling from the eyes moment for me. And I think I’m, as a result of it in a place of real freedom and permission that I don’t think I’ve ever allowed myself before.

Kate: Oh my gosh. Thank you for telling me that. Because the realization moment, the one where you feel sort of like you’re just getting stripped down to the studs. You have to take off all the clothes that you wear for the life that you had. And then I feel sometimes like I go almost immediately into like, I was thinking about it lately, like New Year’s Day diet mode. Like you’re like, okay, well then, then I have to. And and it’s like a regimen. So for you to let yourself not know if you wanted to come back to productivity or talking about it or any of the have-tos, sounds really like you got to some pretty deep, like a deep place. We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere. I love when you say survival is a creative act. I wondered if you could tell me a bit about that.

Suleika: So, you know, I feel like as kids, we’re so deeply, innately creative in a way that we have access to all the time. You know, we play make-believe, we’re constantly tapping into our imagination, we’re making like gloriously messy finger paintings without any conception or concern for if they’re good or they’re bad or if you’re doing it right or wrong. And as we get older, you know, we lose that sense of experimentation. And playfulness. We lose that connection to the creativity that lives in all of us. And we get self-conscious. We start to compare ourselves. We started to worry about things like if I put a lot of hours into this, what does it amount to? What’s the outcome? And if there’s no outcome, what’s the point? And we start to believe that we’re good at creativity or we’re bad at it. And I think a lot us from the time we’re really young have these deep creative injuries.

Kate: That’s such a perfect phrase, like the moment you’re like, oh wait, I’m not good at, I’m judging my creativity.

Suleika: Yeah, exactly. And where you think maybe I can do this privately, but I should never do this in any sort of outward facing kind of way. But with my first diagnosis and each of the relapses since, I’ve come to realize that being sick requires a tremendous amount of creativity. When the chemo sores in your mouth make it too painful to speak, you have to find other ways to feel connected and to commune with your loved ones. When you’re stuck in a hospital bed for many weeks and you can’t even open the window, you do have to tap into your imagination to travel beyond those confines. And whether or not you’re creative in terms of your work, everything we do requires creativity. A fight with your husband requires creativity, cooking requires creativity! And once I started to think about survival as its own act of creativity, it shifted something inside of me. So I’ll give you like a really concrete example. Three years ago, I underwent a second bone marrow transplant and when I went into the hospital, I was like, I’ve been here before. I know it’s gonna help me get through it. I had kept a journal in the form of a 100-day project the first go around, and I was cool, cool, cool, I’m gonna write my way through this. This is how I figure out who I am, that’s how I ground myself, it’s where I make sense of the world. And fast forward a couple of days and I had a complication that resulted in my vision being impaired for about three weeks and I could barely see anything. I was seeing like triple and I couldn’t write with any semblance of ease and I certainly couldn’t journal. You know, some younger version of me would have felt really frustrated. But I’ve had my plans implode enough times that I know that to hold to them is just like a recipe for added despair and that there’s an invitation there to make some kind of a creative pivot. Instead of writing in my journal, I started keeping a visual journal of the weird nightmares and medication induced hallucinations I was having and these nightmares I was having were terrifying to me. But in the act of transcribing them in water color, they became interesting to me and even strangely beautiful. And by the end of that month, my entire hospital room was plastered in these bizarre paintings. And that to me is, you know, it’s the alchemy I’ve come to look to when everything goes to shit. And when I really find myself with two choices, which is to be in despair, and to find some way to creatively make it my own, to become the handler of what plagues me or the handler of my fears rather than the handled.

Kate: I love thinking about that, because those paintings, like the giraffe holding up the IV bag, it had that Edward Gorey feeling sometimes where the things that scare you are also the things that you have to make a relationship with. I love the feeling of the Play-Doh description. You’re making it into something else and it’s not for something except that  the making it inherently, it takes you somewhere. It’s wild that it takes you somewhere.

Suleika: And it always does. And I guess, you know, to go back to what we started with, it’s like the fear will always come. I think in a lot of ways I’m an exceptionally fearful person, even pre-illness. And I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to wrangle that fear, which is to say to dodge it, to plaster over it, to control it rather than to collaborate with it, which I think is what this new season has brought about. I’m in collaboration with my fear. It’s here, it’s not going away. But when I dance with it and I get curious about it, the fear always gives me what I need most when I’m able to do that.

Kate: Sometimes it gives me a feeling, like even if it’s, you know, I can be like, okay, it’s nothing. It doesn’t have to be anything. But it gives a little feeling of like, it’s not just a job, it not just like a checklist, like I’m on a little quest. Like I can, it was almost like it draws an arrow somewhere, even if its just for me. But it feels like an arrow, doing it..

Suleika: Yeah. And I know for me, and I think I’ve always been like this, and part of this is probably just a product of existing in a culture that values productivity over everything.

Kate: And then I start to value productivity as the most important thing about me.

Suleika: Absolutely. But I need to, I’m always looking for ways to lower the stakes for myself to shed whatever external or self-imposed expectations I have and to get back to that space of childlike wonder and curiosity and trusting your intuition because you’re not worried about looking foolish or being humiliated and you’re just creating from that really honest place.

Kate: My son’s creative act recently, he’s just digging a huge hole in the backyard.

Suleika: I love that.

Kate: Like just a huge, but I mean like four hours a day, it’s like created skin irritation. He started like covering his whole arms with band-aids before I was like, you know, it will make it more stressful, you have to take them off. But every day he’s like, just got to dig my hole. Just gotta see where I can go. And I’m like, you’ll probably just go about six inches down. But then it was filling with water every time it rained and then he like went into the garage. He’s not that old, went and learned to use a sub pump like a good little Menonnite, and I was like, I could tell his whole world is like lit up by this enormous unhelpfully large ruining my backyard, hole.

Suleika: I love that. I want to fly down and come help him dig that hole just a little deeper. That sounds so fun to me. I don’t want to cross off some big bucket list items. I don’t want to live every day as if it’s my last. It’s exhausting to live that way. It is exhausting to feel pressure. To have every interaction be meaningful. To carpe diem the shit out of every single moment and like squeeze the juice. I don’t wanna do that, I’m tired of doing that. I’ve tried to do that. I’ve done it enough. It’s stressful and anxiety-inducing and I’m over it. What I do wanna do is dig a big hole in my backyard just for fun because that’s what lights me up. I wanna return to that wonder, to that idea instead of living every day as if it’s my first and feeling a sense of freedom to do what excites me and what makes me feel alive and what nourishes me and that’s never the big things. That’s my own version of digging a hole. Cuddling my little hairless, toothless, senior rescue addition to the family wolf pack.

Kate: Oh, I love that. I really love that, hon. We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. I’ve really just started thinking a lot about the power of ritual, like not the five-step, easy plan to a happier, better, more productive life, but like just how important they are regardless of any value add. And my Catholic friend, it’s always good to have a lovely priest friend, Father Ron Rollheiser, he talks about how ritual is something that’s meaningful, like whether it benefits you or not. And that really reminded me of you and like this daily creative practice that you’ve been encouraging so many people to do.

Suleika: In the book, I write about journaling, but really journaling I think is like a very capacious term. Journaling is almost a placeholder for ritual for me because it’s not necessarily writing with paper and pen. It comes out in all kinds of ways, but it is taking that moment in a consistent daily way where I’m doing something intentionally for myself and I can sometimes I literally will write one sentence or do one little sketch of something. It takes me less than 30 seconds. Other days it is like alighting the candle and like my cup of coffee in the morning and really luxuriating and you know my three pages. It’s moving through whatever internal resistance I have or whatever excuses I can talk for myself that I don’t have time. And showing up for myself, sitting down, and taking a moment to be in conversation with myself and to check in. And I think it’s really hard to do that. It’s so easy to wake up and to tumble head first into a never-ending list of to-do’s. And to wake up the next day and do it all over again. And even on your weekends, and you’re like tackling your home, whatever it might be. And it’s, you know, I think it’s that shift from human doing to human being. And I have been doing my whole life, much like you. You know, I was born with some internal drive or what, I don’t even know where it comes from. I don’t know if it’s good for me. I don’t know if it’s, I don’t know, something I need to work out on therapy and like, you know, break down in clinician-directed counseling. I don’t know. But I do know that, like, I want that pause. I want to take a beat before my to-do list. I want cultivate ritual even if I don’t t feel like it because no one’s gonna make you do it otherwise and everything goes by in a blink.

Kate: That’s such a good idea. I think there’s a kind of deep hopefulness with the way you’re talking about the desire to just, to participate in making something new. It really reminds me of my lovely friend, Linusia Rouse. She’s, she’s a mixed media artist and she, she, she said something that just stuck with me forever. She had just experienced the loss of a baby. She was overwhelmed by having to like pivot back to starting this enormous art project. And I think it was the person at the, I don’t know how canvas stores work, but like the person selling canvases that said, like, this canvas won’t be blank forever. I wondered if that’s just how you think about the creative life as this small bits of hope making. Just whatever this is, it won’t be blank forever. Whatever this is there’s still something new that’s going to be born. Whatever could have been meant for despair, I can nudge it toward good. It feels sometimes to me like the only true lies is just the only true, like complete untruth is despair, that there’s nothing for us in the worst moments.

Suleika: I think, like to me, the opposite of creativity is stasis. And so what you’re saying resonates so deeply with me because yeah, there is a great comfort and knowing that nothing lasts, no bad feeling lasts, no good feeling lasts. And as long as you’re keeping the energy moving, it’s always in flux all the time. There’s always, I was gonna use a word I never use, there’s something about creative living that really feels miraculous to me. You make something where there was nothing before or where there is something different before and it does feel like a kind of alchemy, this like transmutation of something that might be considered base or worthless into something noble and precious, that shift from lead to gold or sometimes gold to lead. But either way, you know, you’re in motion, you are in movement and that canvas, that felt blanket is no longer blank. And I find a deep sense of comfort in that and that’s what really helps me navigate like all the many what ifs I feel. I had a biopsy last week, I haven’t shared this, and I kept saying to John and to my parents, I was like, I always need my biopsies to go well, but I really need this one to go well, like I’m about to have this book launch and go on a tour and I’ve been working so hard on this. And I just like, I need to be focused. I need to have energy. Like, I just need this one to go well. And of course it’s the one that did not go well, that showed a jump in the amount of leukemia in my body. And after I get back from this tour, I’ll go straight back into treatment and probably a clinical trial. And there was a moment where I felt tempted to be like, this has ruined everything. I’ve worked so hard and blah blah blah and to like feel really bad for myself. And obviously I’m not happy about this news, but you know, again, that sense of motion. I’m like, okay, this is happening, not happening right now. I still get to go on my tour and do my book launch and then this other thing will be happening, which sounds scary to me and not particularly fun. But within that movement, there will be other movements and other ways in which I can enact my own kind of alchemy. And I don’t know what that is yet. And I know what it looks like, but I know it’s available to me always. And I feel deep comfort in that knowledge that that kind of creative living, that that alchemy is there for me whenever I’m ready, you know, to wrinkle it.

Kate: Well, my deepest hope maker on the way you’re like, sometimes we feel so carried by the current that we feel like we’ll just be swept away. And for you to just like allow yourself to be taken with the current only as much as it needs to take you. And then to just like swim over here, swim over there, find the new little spaces in which to land on some little patch somewhere, hon, I’ve seen you do it over and over and over again. And I just want you to know how, um, how stunning it is to watch someone so beautiful participate in reality with such like profound hope and love. It creates genuine awe for me to watch you up close. Thanks for telling me all that. This is such a stunning book. It’s such a stunning way of living that you encourage us into and it’s such a beautiful community that you facilitate around you where people want to try, because they love to try with you. So thank you so much for doing this with me. This has been the best part of my day.

Suleika: And thank you for being one of those 100 in the book and for your essay and prompt on anti-blessings, which feels particularly apt for me right now.

Kate: That’s the like, the like good or bad, God bless it all.

Suleika: Exactly exactly I adore you.

Kate: I love you. What if creativity is a kind of miracle? The daily miracle of making something where there was nothing. A painting. A sentence. A garden. A meal. Summer, frankly, feels like the exact time to practice this kind of hope making. These longer days, the new life that has sprouted green all around us, the routines that have gone out the window. Maybe now is your chance to take a tip from Suleika and start your own creative practice, your own ritual. It doesn’t have to be fancy or perfect. You can just pick up some crayons or watercolors. Take photos of birds with your iPhone. Or write a journal response in your notes app every morning. Maybe even just try a new recipe, or take up hole digging. The act of creation doesn’t erase the fear or the grief or all that uncertainty, but it does give us something to do with all of this despair, a chance for us to become the handler of our fears, not just the handled, as Sulieka says. So, my lovelies. Here’s a little blessing for you, the makers. Blessed are you who have been handed a life you did not choose, a diagnosis or disappointment, another heartbreak or onslaught. You who know the ongoingness of pain and how boring its sameness can become. Here, creativity is not a luxury, it’s a lifeline. So blessed are you who pick up the pen, the brush, the thread, daring to create not because it fixes anything, but because you believe that what you make might carry you. Not toward healing necessarily, but toward becoming. Becoming someone with eyes to see beauty among the ashes and good amidst despair. Becoming somebody who finds a tiny window of agency and allows something new to be born here too. Becoming a hope-maker. Well, my loves, hey, before we go, here’s your invitation. What’s something you’ve made, especially when life felt out of your control? What has creativity meant to you in a hard season? I would love to hear from you. Call and leave us a voicemail at 919-322-8731. And hey, if you’re looking for a new ritual for the summer months, pick up a copy of the Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jauoad! It is full of essays and reflections from Suleika and her brilliant friends. And you might even find one in there from me. The team and I are really hard at work making new episodes for you. They will air this fall, so do not worry, we will be back. And in the meantime, we’re gonna re-release some of my absolute favorite conversations on creativity to help inspire you. Creativity is an act of survival which we can practice together. And just a reminder, all of our episodes are available to watch on YouTube. I’m @katecbowler over there and everywhere else. A big thank you to our generous funding partners, Lilly Endowment, the Duke Endowment and Duke Divinity School, and to the team behind everything happening at Everything Happens. Jess Richie, Harriet Putman, Keith Weston, Baiz Hoen, Iris Greene, Hailie Durret, Anne Herring, Hope Anderson, Kristen Balzer, Elia Zario, Anna Fitzgerald Peterson, Katherine Smith and Megan Crunkleton. And today I just wanna send a special thank you to Brenda Thompson and Gwen Heginbotham who have been a beloved part of our team. We love you and we’re so grateful for all the work we’ve made together, thank you. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.