Sonya Sukalski

The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out. It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget. You may decide you want to spend your time working as a neurosurgeon, but two months

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In our society, the spaces for adults to play are mostly constrained, for example, to sports, or going to the pub. And opportunities to live a life of imagination are reserved for exceptionally privileged people, like designers, actors, artists and film directors. This lack of imagination in our lives is an existential risk for society and... See more

Belonging gives us the confidence to take care of ourselves, others, our planet, and all the members of our ecosystem. Knowing this, it becomes clear that building a community is one of the most important, generous, and creative acts a human can aspire to.

Lost in a featureless wasteland of my own mortality, and finding no traction in the reams of scientific studies, intracellular molecular pathways, and endless curves of survival statistics, I began reading literature again: Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka,

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People underestimate compounding and long games. When people think “that’s not possible”, “you can’t do that”, “that won’t work”, it’s often because they’re imagining something like 5 years, 10 years. Things get very different when you have 50 year plans