This is MPR's Life Kit. I'm back Harlan, Life Kit's visual and digital editor.

These days a lot of people feel in between, myself included. We can't go back to the lives that we had before COVID,

to all the plans that we held in early 2020, but we don't yet know what the future holds.

We're kind of in a holding pattern in that liminal space between what was and what will be.

We're adrift and that can feel really isolating. Journalist and author Celica Jawad gets it,

perhaps better than most. At 22 shortly after graduating college, she was diagnosed with leukemia

and all of her big dreams for the future were put on hold. It was one of those moments

that creates an irreparable fracture in your life. There's the person and the life you had before

and everything that comes after. Celica spent four years going through treatment, much of it

in physical isolation because of her weakened immune system. And she was told that she had a 35%

chance of long-term survival. During those four years of in between, facing fear, uncertainty,

and loneliness, Celica found a way to channel her isolation into creative solitude.

While much of the outside world laid beyond her reach, she turned to writing to regain

narrative control of her life. It became the place where I began to interrogate my predicament

and to try to excavate some meaning from it. That writing practice led to a New York Times column

chronicling her experiences as a young adult with cancer and eventually her best-selling memoir

between two kingdoms, a memoir of life interrupted. Today, as a cancer survivor and fellow pandemic

human, she's dedicated her career to covering those living through interruption. Every single one of us

will have our life interrupted, whether it's by the record of a diagnosis or some other kind of

heartbreak or trauma that brings us to before. We need to find a way to live in the in-between

place, managing whatever body and mind we currently have. In this episode of Life Kit, we'll talk to

Celica about working through isolation and interruption and the art of creative resilience.

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