TED Talks Daily
(#10) Elise’s Top Ten: What almost dying taught me about living | Suleika Jaouad
20 Sep 2025
"The hardest part of my cancer experience began once the cancer was gone," says author Suleika Jaouad. In this fierce, funny, wisdom-packed talk, she challenges us to think beyond the divide between "sick" and "well," asking: How do you begin again and find meaning after life is interrupted?Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
Hey, everyone. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, the show where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Welcome back to my top 10 TED Talks, our first ever podcast playlist where we share a curated list of talks from the archive on the feed all at once. I hope that you have enjoyed some of these, if not all of them, on this list.
And to close out this playlist, we have the formidable writer, teacher, and activist Suleika Juwad. We started with talks that were about our present and future selves and how to think about it. We've also talked about stories that we tell ourselves, narratives for the wider world, and what it means to consider aesthetics, connection and relationships. Now we bring you to Suleika.
In her first TED Talk from 2019, she shares what almost dying taught her about living. And she asks us the profound yet simple question, how do you begin again and find meaning after life is interrupted? As we've learned from so many TED Talks, life can be a series of interruptions and restarts, frustrations. Suleika reminds us of life's beauty and our resilience.
It was the spring of 2011, and as they like to say in commencement speeches, I was getting ready to enter the real world. I had recently graduated from college and moved to Paris to start my first job. My dream was to become a war correspondent, but the real world that I found took me into a really different kind of conflict zone. At 22 years old, I was diagnosed with leukemia.
The doctors told me and my parents point-blank that I had about a 35 percent chance of long-term survival. I couldn't wrap my head around what that prognosis meant, but I understood that the reality and the life I'd imagined for myself had shattered. Overnight, I lost my job, my apartment, my independence, and I became patient number 5624.
Over the next four years of chemo, a clinical trial and a bone marrow transplant, the hospital became my home, my bed, the place I lived 24-7. Since it was unlikely that I'd ever get better, I had to accept my new reality. And I adapted.
I became fluent in medicalese, made friends with a group of other young cancer patients, built a vast collection of neon wigs and learned to use my rolling IV pole as a skateboard. I even achieved my dream of becoming a war correspondent, although not in the way I'd expected.
It started with a blog reporting from the front lines of my hospital bed, and it morphed into a column I wrote for The New York Times called Life Interrupted. Thank you. But above all else, my focus was on surviving. And, spoiler alert, I did survive. Yeah. Thanks to an army of supportive humans, I'm not just still here, I am cured of my cancer. Thank you.
So when you go through a traumatic experience like this, people treat you differently. They start telling you how much of an inspiration you are. They say you're a warrior. They call you a hero, someone who's lived the mythical hero's journey, who's endured impossible trials and, against the odds, lived to tell the tale, returning better and braver for what you've been through.
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