Field Notes #9: Suleika Jaouad's Between Two Kingdoms, Isolation Journals, 100-Day Project
Hello! Welcome to Field Notes #9 — collections from recent travels on this Odyssey of the Body, sharing favorite glimpses of life wisdom, nourishing recipes, movement, art and exercises, and other tips. Field Notes comes out every Wednesday.
1} Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted
If you haven’t heard of Suleika Jaouad and her exquisite writing on illness, let’s talk. Bring a mug of tea. Settle into a comfy chair.
Suleika Jaouad is a journalist, bestselling author, and community builder. At age 22, she was diagnosed with leukemia. She wrote a column for The New York Times called “Life Interrupted,” and more recently, last year, a memoir, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted.
I first read Between Two Kingdoms when I was compiling the Gold Foundation’s 2021 Summer Reading List for Compassionate Clinicians, which includes this book and 8 others.
“Between Two Kingdoms” refers a quote by Susan Sontag: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Suleika found herself in between those two spaces after nearly 4 years of cancer treatment. Well, but not well. Grappling with how to live in the land of healthy people.
She writes:
“I’ve spent the past fifteen hundred days working tirelessly toward a single goal—survival. And now that I’ve survived, I’m realizing I don’t know how to live.”
She decided to take a road trip, solo with her pup Oscar, a winding drive across America to meet readers of her New York Times column who had reached out to her, who had turned into friends. She has only just learned to drive.
The book chronicles her cancer diagnosis at 22, and that difficult journey, and her epic road trip afterwards. It’s an amazing memoir.
Read more about Between Two Kingdoms, including an excerpt.
2} Suleika Jaouad’s Isolation Journals community
As you might imagine, Sueika is intensely thoughtful and wise. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, she started an online journal community for all of us isolated in our homes, calling it Isolation Journals.
Every Sunday, Isolation Journals emails a prompt, often from a fellow writer or artist. The prompt is always a deep and beautiful well of humanity, as if a cherished friend is writing to you. The Sunday prompts are free; you can sign up here.
For $6/month, you are also invited to the monthly Hatch writing hour, which is virtual; an Isolation Journals book forum; video studio visits with writers and artists; a Dear Susu advice column by Suleika; and more.
You can read posts and chime into threads that are only open to paid subscribers. It’s a wonderful community.
Learn more about Isolation Journals.
3} 100-Day Project
It’s been more than a decade since Suleika was diagnosed with cancer, and I was reading her words and her story as originating now from the vantage point of someone who had gone through a traumatic experience, a near-death spell, and was writing from the other side.
That’s where I feel like I stand most days now, 15+ years from my own cancer diagnosis in my 20s, and with any other illness worry faded into the background: in the vicinity of the Kingdom of the Well. (There is no hard boundary to either kingdom, as you might imagine; we all reside somewhere on the ground linking the two.)
Then, a few months ago, in December, an Isolation Journals email arrived, titled, “A personal update.”
Suleika shared that she was back in the hospital. The leukemia had returned.
No, no, and no!
NO.
But it was true.
I think all of us who had grown to love Suleika from afar were shocked and bereaved, and we’ve been holding her in our collective hearts more tightly ever since.
This brings us to the last of the Field Notes today. In a recent update, Suleika wrote that she has been discharged from the hospital after a bone marrow transplant and will be entering a difficult stage.
“I’m currently on Day +30 post-transplant, and this next phase will not be easy. While I’m thrilled to get to sleep in a real bed and to have home-cooked meals, the truth is, I’m in rough shape—I’m very weak, in need of a wheelchair or walker to get around. Each day for the foreseeable future, I’ll go to the hospital for outpatient treatment, and I’m anxiously counting down the days until my first post-transplant biopsy. To get me through, I’ve decided to do a new 100-day project.
When I’ve done 100-day projects in the past, they’ve been so powerful—both the sense of creative possibility and the organizing principle it affords: your day becomes centered around one small creative act. What I also love about this project is doing it in community, drawing inspiration and a sense of accountability from loved ones.
I’m going to begin on April 1—which also happens to be the two-year anniversary of the Isolation Journals. I’ve asked some of my family and friends to join me in starting their own 100-day projects, and now I’m inviting you.”
As Suleika talks about in a podcast episode with Tim Ferriss, her family joined her in the 100-day project during her first leukemia diagnosis. Her father wrote stories about his childhood in Tunisia, which he compiled into a book for her. Her mother, an artist, painted a ceramic tile each day, which she assembled into a shield that hung over Suleika’s hospital bed for protection. And Suleika wrote every day.
I was moved by this idea of the 100-day project and doing it in community. It reminds me of the marvelous Akimbo Creative Workshop, too, which also follows 100 days of creative practice.
The point is not the daily quantity, but simply moving a creative part of you every day.
It could be writing a paragraph, drawing a 5-minute sketch, knitting a bit, playing a song on the piano, or putting on jazz music and doing the Charleston in your living room.
Creativity is such a human part of life. It is healing and anchoring at the same time.
I’m going to join Suleika in this 100-Day Project, and I wondered if you might want to join, too. It begins April 1. I’ve decided I’m going to write a poem a day. I’ll post some of them on Instagram.
I’d love to hear what you might bring into your life in these 100 Days. You can also get more updates on the 100-Day Project straight from Suleika by signing up for her newsletter.
I hope you all have a week ahead full of creativity and gratitude. I’ll see you back here on Sunday.
To our journeys and healthier days ahead,
Brianne