Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

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

What I wish I’d known then: Untamed fear consumes you, becomes you, until what you are most afraid of turns alive.

“Forgiveness is a refusal to armor your own heart—a refusal to live in a constricted heart,” he said, seemingly as much to himself as to me. “Living with that openness means feeling pain. It’s not pretty, but the alternative is feeling nothing at all.” —

When we travel, we actually take three trips. There’s the first trip of preparation and anticipation, packing and daydreaming. There’s the trip you’re actually on. And then, there’s the trip you remember. “The key is to try to keep all three as separate as possible,” he says. “The key is to be present wherever you are right now.”

Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts and to carry what lingers. It is learning to embrace the people I love now instead of protecting against a future in which I am gutted by their loss.

“You have to shift from the gloom and doom and focus instead on what you love,” she told me before bed. “That’s all you can do in the face of these things. Love the people around you. Love the life you have. I can’t think of a more powerful response to life’s sorrows than loving.”

May I be awake enough to notice when love appears and bold enough to pursue it without knowing where it will lead.

I told myself again and again, until I believed my own words: It is possible for me to alter the course of my becoming.

Wherever I am, wherever we go, home will always be the in-between place, a wilderness I’ve grown to love.