Everything Happens with Kate Bowler · Everything Happens Studios

Living the Questions (Without Fixing Yourself) with Suleika Jaouad

March 24, 2026·35 min·2 clips

Kate says her journal of rejections and failures helps her see what gave useful information or made space.

1. Everything Happens with Kate Bowler centers this episode on living the questions instead of trying to fix uncertainty. 2. Kate Bowler, the host and author, speaks with writer and speaker Suleika Jaouad, whose memoir Between Two Kingdoms and book The Book of Alchemy make her a fit for a conversation about illness and creativity. 3. The episode asks what it means to stay inside a question, rather than rushing toward answers that promise certainty or efficiency. 4. Suleika describes living with an ache that still feels raw and asks whether it will always hurt this much. 5. She says rereading journals from her teenage years and college years shows her that the same questions have followed her for years. 6. Kate and Suleika discuss Joan Didion’s line about staying “on nodding terms with the people we used to be,” and Nora Ephron’s idea that after a certain age it is “just patch, patch, patch.” 7. Suleika names a question from her own life: “Where am I confusing momentum with meaning and what happens if I slow the story down?” 8. She says she often generates activities and to-dos because motion feels like progress, even when it only distracts her from discomfort. 9. Kate connects that pattern to her own tendency to make work when she feels scared and to whip herself into motion. 10. Suleika recounts spending a year trying to improve chronic pain with supplements, three massages a week, physical therapy, and “perfect postural whatnot.” 11. She says the effort produced “an enormous amount of effort” and “not a lot of change,” which pushed her toward accepting the room she is in. 12. Kate shares that she learned before book tour that there might be a third transplant, which left her suspended in a waiting room. 13. She says that experience made her realize she was “kind of done being suspended in a waiting room” and tired of living between scans, biopsies, and the next thing that might help. 14. Suleika says she would rather make plans and then adapt them than make no plans at all. 15. She describes a New Year’s party where guests wore prom tuxedos, wetsuits, a kilt over fleece overalls, and a yellow fur Cossack hat, and she says she felt “more like myself” than she did that night. 16. Kate says she likes Halloween costumes and Monty Python references, and she connects that to the idea that the more random something is, the closer it can feel to the marrow of your bones. 17. The interview has a conversational, intimate rhythm, with both women interrupting, laughing, and finishing each other’s thoughts. 18. The tone shifts between practical reflection and personal confession, especially when they talk about ambition, illness, and fear. 19. People dealing with chronic illness, burnout, or perfectionism will find themselves here. 20. Listeners wanting a fast self-help script or a tidy resolution may skip it.

As heard by us

A tender conversation about making plans for joy without pretending certainty.

Kate holds the conversation in a way that feels attentive and unforced, tracing how hope and dread can sit side by side without resolving neatly. The discussion keeps returning to plans, postponement, and the stubborn urge to imagine something beautiful anyway.

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Why you'd press play

When you need permission to make plans without pretending certainty will show up.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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