ANNOUNCING: My Third Book!!

THE PRIVILEGE TO FEEL: A Memoir in Essays

My 98^th speaking gig happened in a lecture hall at Endicott College in April of this year. Although it was my favorite type of audience, made up of college students and faculty, I nervously paced around the space they offered me as a greenroom before I would stand at the podium. This event had requested I speak for forty-five minutes specifically about my newest memoir, Class. Though I have spoken endlessly about my first book, Maid, this was a first. I licked my fingers to rub the corners of the pages I had printed before waking up at 4AM the day before to catch a plane to LaGuardia. I don’t sleep well in hotel rooms, so I was now dealing with a haze from two nights of very little sleep on top of everything else.

To calm my racing heart, I put my hands on my hips in the “Superman Pose,” pointed my face to the ceiling, and took a deep breath. When I returned to my pages, I felt a familiar wetness in my armpits. My thin cardigan was a dark orange color instead of my usual black, and I immediately checked to see if there was a visible dampness on the fabric. Upon seeing there was, I took the cardigan off and began shaking it in a fanning motion, trying to ignore the wall of windows to my left that allowed students in the hallway access to this scene, turning me into some sort of  “Anxiety” exhibit at a hall of mental illness.

At the National Community Action Partnership Conference on August 28, 2024.

I’ve been doing this job for five and a half years, and it still strikes me as odd that I am paid to talk about a roughly ten-year period of my life during which I lived well under the poverty line. In the beginning, I flew home from an event and immediately went to bed and often couldn’t get out for two days from exhaustion. When I told Hannah, my speaking agent, about this, she audibly gasped and asked me what I needed.

“I have anxiety,” I said out loud to someone in a professional setting for the first time, and began to describe how my path to becoming a public figure was paved with almost daily panic attacks. “Every one of them is different, but they all exhaust me completely. I just figured it was part of the job.”

Though Hannah had always told me she was available if I needed her, I had never made any requests or demands for fear I would sound like a diva. Every aspect of my life had quickly become unrecognizable. Due to the “resilience training” I’d gone through as a person living in poverty, I felt like I needed to be nothing but grateful while hiding the aspects of it that were difficult for me.

Over the last few years, I’ve tried countless things to help reduce the stress of my day job. All of this has been incredibly expensive, time consuming, and sometimes fills me with embarrassment, like when I have to admit that I bring my own food when I travel because if my anxiety level is high, I cannot muster up the energy to walk down to the lobby of my hotel to pick up food I had delivered. In a busy season, I am on a plane several times a week for a few months at a time. I sometimes joke that I know the best bathroom stalls in almost every major airport for a good cry.

Photo by Rebecca Stumpf for the New York Times

Spending so much time talking about things I have written does not always mean that I get to do the thing I love that got me to the stage. Though the last six years have been an incredible ride, I felt the light of passion for my writing start to fade. All my energy went to writing about things I had been told to write about, and that I hadn’t had a chance to fully process while living in a state of constant flight mode. At the beginning of 2024, I knew I needed to find a new way to connect with readers—a project that that would not just tell my readers a heartfelt and often traumatic story, but one they could recognize themselves in as well. That would communicate: I see you working to recover from your own losses, setbacks, and grief. Not only do I see you, but I can make sure that others see you as well. That your suffering and your hard work to do what you need to do for yourselves and your families, your hard work to survive, is also seen and recognized.

Trauma has become a catch-all phrase in recent years, as the pandemic forced the world into lockdown. In isolation, people discovered they had a shared trauma, and a seven-year-old book called The Body Keeps the Score started flying off the shelves once more. When I saw its resurgence in 2020, my first thought was that people were not merely looking to educate themselves about the long-term effects of trauma, they needed mental health care in the here and now and couldn’t access it or afford it; a book was the most affordable option. Despite its specific focus on Vietnam veterans, van der Kolk’s exploration into PTSD offers what many people with mental illness need: explanation, validation, and suggestions for ways to overcome debilitating symptoms. But what the book fails to say are the words “I know how it feels. I’ve been there, too.”

This new book is exciting for me, because it offers a chance to write from my present self. I couldn’t do that in Maid and Class for two reasons: I wanted to write a memoir “in character,” and I hadn’t had time to process a lot of the trauma I had experienced from living in poverty. Many criticisms of my first two books noted their lack of reflection, but it was almost impossible for me to fully comprehend how much my life had changed since that time. I had only been off food stamps for six months when I got my first book deal, and still lived in low-income housing. I was writing about a life that I was technically still living.

When I was in my darkest moments, I envisioned an “older wiser self” version of me that was ten years into the future. In my mind, she was always standing behind me—much like Liz Gilbert’s did in Eat, Pray, Love—with her hand on my shoulder to offer comfort. The year Maid was published, I realized that it had been ten years since I had begun working as a housecleaner. I had grown into my older wiser self who’d offered me empathy and compassion through my hardest years and told me not to give up when I desperately wanted to. She told me everything was going to be okay. She was the reason I had faith and the ability to continue on. I like to think of this entire book as written by that entity, showing readers that they, too, can look back on their most traumatic moments, or periods of their life where others see nothing but a string of “bad choices,” and have compassion for that version of themselves. Most of my “bad choices” were made because I didn’t have any “good choices” available.

When people criticize my decision making, I see a person who was struggling to survive with mental and physical abilities that were worn down to a nub from chronic pain and untreated mental illness. I want others to know that validation. I want them to know yes, they can do hard things—they’ve been doing hard things all along to survive—but the degree to which those things are difficult is a direct reflection of how little support they receive and how few resources are available to them.

My daughter, age 2 1/2, in the back of my car with all my cleaning supplies for work.

Encouragement is nice, but not an answer. Suggestions of “self-care” fall flat for those who work for low wages to care for other people. My book asks: Who will take care of the people who work to take care of us?

As my career began to take off, and I experienced success in ways I hadn’t even dreamed of, I got frustrated that my body continued to struggle with the effects of trauma. I was no longer food insecure, so why did I get triggered when my fridge was empty? I’d just bought a house, but lived in fear that some catastrophic thing could happen to burn it down. When I travel for work, I struggle with invasive thoughts about my youngest daughter being hit by a car and winding up in the hospital and I can’t be there. It wasn’t until I had the privilege of space and time to process these traumas that I could not only identify what they were, but seek help for them in appropriate and healthy ways. I went from fearing that I would disappoint people who wanted to see me living my best life to being vulnerable about my setbacks.

Recovering from trauma is a process, not a solution. I am not writing this book from a place of being healed, I am offering readers knowledge that even in the best circumstances, trauma will sneak up on you when you least expect it and bring you to your knees just like anyone else.

This book is for everyone who continues on—or doesn’t know if they can continue on—while carrying the weight of trauma, and it’s for everyone who has gone looking for help only to find that the cost of help is too great.

I can’t wait for you all to read it.

xo,

-step.