If you are at peace, you are living in the present.” If you are anxious, you are living in the future. “If you are depressed, you are living in the past. These are all ritual experiences that help us bridge the distance between “no longer” and “not yet”-but re-entry after a traumatic experience has no such clear ceremony. We have all kinds of ceremonies and rites of passage that help us honor different phases of life and move from one to the next: birthdays, bar mitzvahs, weddings, baby showers, funerals.

We have to reassess our days and what they can contain. Trying to apply old ones in such circumstances is a recipe for frustration. When our lives are dramatically disrupted by illness or a global pandemic or some other sorrow, it’s important that we create new habits, goals, routines, and rituals. Instead, I’ve come to understand that while you can’t move on, you can find a way to move forward with it. It’s the delusion that you can build a barricade between yourself and your past, that you can bury your sorrows and that you’re among the lucky few who get to skip over the hard work of grieving and healing and rebuilding.

Through my own experience, and those of dozens of others I’ve interviewed who are navigating the aftermath of a major loss or trauma, I’ve learned that moving on is a myth. I was still wrestling with the wreckage, with the physical and psychological toll of illness, and with the grief of losing so much. I couldn’t go out dancing with friends, and if I did, I paid for it dearly with three days in bed. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t live like a normal 27-year-old. I wasn’t well enough to work a traditional job, seeing as I needed to take a break in the middle of the day for a four-hour nap. The outside world felt overwhelming and frightening, and I was struggling to find my place among the living. I was lost in a liminal space, where the survival skills I’d honed in the context of illness were no longer useful. It should have been a celebratory milestone, but in truth, I had never felt more lost.

When I finally emerged from nearly four years of treatment, I learned the brutal lesson that surviving is not the same thing as living. I was diagnosed with leukemia when I was 22. Download the Next Big Idea App to listen to the audio version-read by Suleika herself-and enjoy Ideas of the Day, ad-free podcast episodes, and more.

She survived the illness, but the story doesn’t end there.īelow, Suleika shares 5 key insights from her new book, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted (available now from Amazon). She won an Emmy award for her New York Times column, Life Interrupted, which she wrote during her four years fighting cancer. Suleika Jaouad is an author, journalist, and activist.

Between two kingdoms