Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Living 02: Trace

In this episode, I talk with Jenny Hobson about her experience with supporting a close family member through a severe mental health crisis, someone who, for years, didn't believe they needed help at all. We talk about watching psychosis slowly appear, navigating the Dutch legal system's mandatory mental health care process, and the cultural differences in how countries balance patient autonomy against medical intervention. Jenny also shares what she had to learn about love and responsibility — about when caring for someone means staying, and when it means stepping back to protect yourself too.

In this episode, I sit down with my teacher, Jaime Erickson. We talk about the quiet moment in a hospital room with her Grandpa that first taught her to question authority, why she came to distrust systems — from hospitals to organized religion — that fail to see the person behind the process, and how that instinct eventually led her to writing and to teaching as a way of cultivating critical thinking itself. It's a conversation about care, systems, and what it really means to ask "why".

In this episode, I read Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air — an autobiography written by a neurosurgeon in the final months of his life — and talk through why it hit me the way it did. I walk through the scenes that stayed with me, what the book taught me about medicine, patient experience, and the limits of what doctors can promise, and how reading it forced me to sit with questions I'd been avoiding since my grandfather's death. This one is as much a personal reflection as it is a book review.

In this episode, I retell a story a senior shared with me after two years volunteering at a hospice institute in Shanghai. Through her experience, I walk through what daily life looks like for patients nearing the end of life — the isolation, the small rituals of comfort, and a strange, telling fear of death that persists even among people facing it together. I also reflect on what it means to volunteer without expecting to fix or heal anything, and why simply showing up might be the most honest form of care.

In this episode, I speak with Jesper, a PhD researcher in palliative care in Maastricht, the Netherlands, about what it means to care for someone approaching the end of life. We discuss palliative care and dementia, patient autonomy, cultural attitudes towards death, and the difficult balance between prolonging life and preserving quality of life and dignity.

In this first episode, I talk through "Living" 01: Symbiosis, the solo exhibition I did last summer. I built it out of confocal microscope images from my own cancer biology research, tumor tissue layered over classical Western art, and a series of personal drawings. I trace how my passion for biology in general gradually shifts to a deeper reflection on medicine, ethics, and life and death. This episode tells the story of how the "Living" project began and where it's headed next.