Suleika Jaouad

Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky

Prufrock LLC

Self-improvement, Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 31 March 2026

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bestselling author and artist Suleika Jaouad joins Monica this week on Reclaiming, for a profound conversation about creative alchemy, navigating uncertainty, and the defiant joy of living in life’s messy middle. Suleika retraces her path from being diagnosed with leukemia at 22, to writing her Emmy-winning New York Times column, “Life, Interrupted,” from her hospital bed. She reflects on the radical choice to marry her husband, Grammy award winning musician Jon Batiste, the day before a bone marrow transplant and how turning to watercolors when she could no longer write taught her that survival is always a creative act. Along the way, Monica and Suleika connect on the long shadow of narratives held by women, the power of journaling to find your way back to yourself, and the hard-won wisdom that comes from reclaiming a life you weren’t sure you’d get to live. Expect a conversation brimming with insight, gentle humor, and a powerful lesson in how to alchemize our deepest pain into our greatest purpose. Head to cozyearth.com and use my code RECLAIMING for an exclusive 20% off. And if you get a Post-Purchase Survey, be sure to mention you heard about Cozy Earth right here! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	And I kept saying to my doctor, like, I don't know how to deal with this level of uncertainty.
0:06.2	I don't know how to keep living my life when I don't know what's going to happen.
0:11.6	And he said to me the thing people often say, which is that you have to live every day as if it's your last.
0:17.6	And it was exhausting to try to make every family dinner meaningful to try to squeeze the juice out of every single moment.
0:32.1	It was just unsustainable. And so I had to shift to a gentler mindset of trying to live every day as if it's my first.
0:56.0	Suleka, Suleka.
0:58.3	Welcome to reclaiming.
0:59.9	Thank you for having me on. Oh my gosh.
1:00.6	This is just, I've been feeling the magic of this conversation all morning, and I just feel really lucky.
1:09.9	I feel the same way.
1:11.2	I adore you.
1:12.4	I've adored you long before I've known you.
1:15.2	And I'm just, yeah, so honored to get to sit with you and share this time.
1:20.7	Yeah.
1:21.2	I was thinking about that I think the first time we met was at TED when you did your TED talk in 2019.
1:29.8	I mean, I don't know that we had a proper connect.
1:32.9	I feel like we might have because I was so blown away by your talk.
1:39.5	Oh.
1:40.1	I was so blown away by it.
1:42.1	And the title, I wrote it down, what almost dying taught me about living.
1:48.0	I remember exactly, we didn't actually meet face-to-face, but you sent me a message.
1:56.2	And I was so surprised and so moved.
	...

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