Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

While it might not be possible to move on from illness, I have to start trying to move forward with it.

when the body betrays you again and again, it obliterates whatever nascent trust you’ve restored in the universe and your place in it. Each time, it becomes harder to recover your sense of safety.

After you’ve had the ceiling cave in on you—whether through illness or some other catastrophe—you don’t assume structural stability. You must learn to live on fault lines.

To be well now is to learn to accept whatever body and mind I currently have.

Untamed fear consumes you, becomes you, until what you are most afraid of turns alive.

The power of story is to heal and to sustain, she wrote. And if we are brave enough to tell our own story, we realize we’re not alone, again and again.