Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

It gets me thinking about the other ways we mark the crossing of thresholds: birthdays and weddings and baby showers, baptisms and bar mitzvahs and quinceañeras. These rites of passage allow us to migrate from one phase of our lives to another; they keep us from getting lost in transit. They show us a way to honor the space between no longer and not yet. But I have no predetermined rituals. They are mine to create.

I’ve grown afraid of the world and my ability to navigate it alone. I want to expect nothing. To ask for nothing. To depend on no one. To find out what lies on the other side of the in-between place. To start living again.

But living with a life-threatening illness for so long has changed my relationship to fear. It has trained me to be on high alert for the countless potential dangers lurking in my body and beyond. I am jittery and

claw your way back into motion.

The difference, this time, is that the rite of passage is of my own making.

recovery is not about salvaging the old at all. It’s about accepting that you must forsake a familiar self forever, in favor of one that is being newly born. It is an act of brute, terrifying discovery.

The notion that reentry is an ongoing and difficult process is usually referenced in the context of veterans of war or the formerly incarcerated, not to survivors of illness.

Some traumas, I learned, refuse to remain in the past, wreaking havoc in the form of triggers and flashbacks, nightmares and fits of rage, until they’ve been processed and given their proper place. This helped me understand why the horror of my cancer did not end on my final day of treatment but surged in its aftermath: The haunting feeling that something terrible could happen again at any moment. The nightmares that tore me from sleep. The panic attacks that left me gulping for air on scraped knees. The resistance I felt to forging real intimacy.

the possibility of what psychologists describe as “post-traumatic growth.” My illness has humbled and humiliated and schooled me, offering knowledge that might otherwise have taken decades for my pre-diagnosis, self-absorbed twenty-two-year-old self to accrue. But that old Hemingway saw—“the world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places”—is only true if you live the possibilities of your newly acquired knowledge.