Emmy Award-Winning Journalist, Suleika Jaouad Redefines What It Means to Live After Illness

Who is a woman who has inspired or mentored you, and what lessons from her influence have stayed with you?

The women I admire most are not those with Instagram-perfect lives. The women who inspire me are those who have struggled, who’ve had the ceiling cave in, and then figured out how to rebuild from the rubble—and the woman who epitomizes this the most for me is Frida Kahlo.

When I was 22, I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia. In the early months of treatment, my mom gifted me a copy of Frida’s diary. I knew the outlines of Frida’s story—how she suffered so many personal tragedies, beginning with polio as a child, and then a horrific bus accident at 18 that left countless physical and emotional scars. But in reading her diary, I understood more fully how, rather than being cowed by her grief and pain, she transmuted it into art. In addition to her famous self-portraits, she adorned the plaster corsets that she had to wear to support her spine and painted surrealistic hospital tableaus of her miscarriages. Toward the end of her life, she had to have her right foot amputated. She had a pair of elaborately embroidered red boots, and on the laces of the right one, she tied a bell. Frida not only highlighted what most people would want to hide, but she turned it into a kind of performance art—into a song.

I don’t want to put Frida on some pedestal, to describe her as some saintly icon—she was fully human with human foibles. But for the many ways she pushed back against cultural expectations of female beauty and disability, and for her example of alchemizing the brutal plot twists of life into something useful, even beautiful, I find her such an inspiration.

In honor of Gloria Steinem’s 90 years of advocacy, what do you believe is her most enduring contribution to women’s empowerment, and how has it inspired your own journey?

A lot of people respond to life’s challenges, be they personal or systemic, by looking away or shrinking—by not ruffling feathers, by taking the path of least resistance. Gloria Steinem has made it a habit of doing the opposite: she takes the path of most resistance. For the last 90 years, she has shown up as her fullest, most authentic self and has led the way for so many others to do the same.

I came to understand this most clearly when I read Gloria’s powerful memoir, My Life on the Road. I was twenty-six years old and emerging from a harrowing four years of cancer treatment, and without doctor’s orders or discharge protocol, I had no idea how to pull myself from the wreckage that illness leaves behind. So I embarked on a solo 15,000-mile cross-country road trip, where I visited readers of my New York Times column “Life, Interrupted” who had written to me with their stories of re-entry. I hoped to gain insight on how to rebuild my life.

Reading Gloria’s memoir while I was on the road myself was deeply empowering. In many narratives of women in transit, danger lurks at every turn or corner. But beholding the scope of Gloria’s roving life—her early days as a journalist; marching and giving speeches; refusing to be hemmed in by what was expected of a woman—gave me confidence. It made me believe I did not have to shrink myself to fit some outdated societal expectation. It gave me an alternate vision for my life, one in which I was strong and capable, where I could do things how I wanted, where I made it on my own.