Finding Compassion for Yourself Through Writing

Or, more specifically, through an artist's rendition of your essay.

My essay published in TIME. April, 2025. Illustration by Hanna Barczyk-Camarotti.

My professional writing career began when I was still completing my bachelors in English as a single mom living in poverty. A local magazine called Mamalode published a few essays of mine, and then assigned me a couple of book reviews. The features were paid on a scale ranging from thirty to fifty dollars by how many clicks they received, and the reviews had a flat rate of fifty bucks. I scanned a copy of my first check and hung it over my desk where it stayed for several years.

Money was so tight in the beginning of my freelancing career that a check for twenty-five bucks meant ability to pay an electric bill. Eventually I established myself so my work load was enough to no longer qualify for food stamps. I got my first smartphone the day my food stamps ended because I was afraid of getting caught using a “fancy” phone and food stamps at the same time. Six months later I got a book deal based on a viral essay I’d written about cleaning houses, and I guess the rest of what happened is probably why you’re reading this.

There wasn’t a lot of time to pause and reflect. I had two kids on my own and worried about finding child care through my publisher sending me all over the country to promote my book. It was the beginning of what felt like a double life that would eventually lead to long periods of dissociation. Even now, it’s hard to make sense in my head that my job is flying across the country where organizations provide fancy cars to transport me to a hotel and then a venue where my job is, essentially, to talk about this one time I lived in poverty.

Promotion for MAID began almost a year before it was released. My publisher, Hachette Books, invited me to their annual sales meeting where I would have the opportunity to give a short talk about my book in between people like the guys who created Dear Evan Hansen, Rick Steves, and immediately before Sally Field.

Me and Sally Field, March 2018.

As surreal as all of that was, the part that affected me the most was when I first stood to face the entire sales team and read the words “Ten years ago, when I worked as a housecleaner.” Suddenly these images of my former life crowded my view. The hours of scrubbing, driving all over town with a toddler in the backseat and my cleaning supplies in the trunk, and the nights spent writing in a blog to remember it all.

You see, “Ten years” is how much time I gave myself to age in order to become a version that I sometimes prayed to. I called her my “Older Wiser Self,” and began the act of speaking to her in moments of agony after I read a similar scene in Liz Gilbert’s book Eat, Pray, Love. I don’t know why I thought of her as ten years older. I guess that’s when I figured I’d have my shit together. But she was this presence, and I could sometimes feel her compassionate hand on my shoulder as she stood behind me while I cried.

In that moment in front of the sales team, I realized I had become my older wiser self. I was the woman who’d comforted me when I felt desperately alone.

This has happened one other time since then, and it was equally disorienting because it, too, was in front of an audience. A recent, more quiet version of it occurred last April. I published a piece about my choice to hire housecleaners in TIME magazine. I was really nervous about this essay because I talked about the stuff I purchased for my house with money I’d received from the Netflix series. Specifically, the line “rainbow-colored Fiestaware dishes and Le Creuset cookware.”

I’ve struggled a lot with survivor’s guilt since I got the book deal for MAID. When I cleaned homes, I constantly did math in my head. I didn’t have a lot of money, but I also did it in a kind of masochistic way to remind myself how little I got paid for the work I did. At one point I figured out that my take-home pay was somewhere around six bucks. A four-hour house became “$24.00.” A disgusting bathroom: $5.00. That one toilet that was always full of piss and I had to scrub by hand with a rag, a pumice stone, and some Comet: $2.00. On the flip side of this, items in their homes with price tags still on them were compared to how much they’d cover my rent. I once saw a receipt left out on a kitchen counter for a rug that was $1,000.00, the same amount I’d spent on my car, or could pay my rent for two months at the time. Though I love my fuckin’ rainbow dishes, they bring a twinge of shame when I look at them. A salad plate costs more than what someone in my state makes working for an hour at minimum wage.

Leading up to when MAID was coming out, things were going so well that it triggered my PTSD. I couldn’t trust the good stuff. Something, somewhere, had to be bad. I found it late at night in reviews of my book on Goodreads, Amazon, and eventually Reddit, where people claim to personally know things about me that are easily debunked by my (pretty accurate!) Wikipedia page. But, in their possible defense, a recent article about me said my net worth is upwards of five million, which is an unfathomable amount of money. I suppose it just shows you can never know what truth to base your opinions off of—what the person who lived it said, or what this random article written by AI containing almost no verifiable facts says.

A friend of mine who knows a thing or two about success and the hate it throws at you said to me once that some of us have dark places we sometimes need to feed, and that made a lot of sense to me at the time. I’ve worked really hard to starve that place since. But it’s almost funny that people claim I don’t hold myself accountable for making “bad choices” when I sat on my therapist’s couch in tears just this last week talking about the guilt I feel and the most recent bout of suicidal ideation that sprung up because of it.

When things were good, it was kind of terrifying, because I felt like I didn’t deserve it. I hated it when people told me I did. I hated it even more when they called me a success story of how to climb out of poverty. “I didn’t pull myself out of poverty,” I would say. “I got a book deal. That’s not going from welfare to work, that’s a lot of privilege and a lucky break.”

Writing is fucking hard. Promoting what you have written is harder. Sometimes, both in the writing process and talking about it, it’s enough to be raw in retelling your own story. Sometimes it’s all you can do because you’re writing from a place that’s been scraped raw and hasn’t had time to heal. Pausing to reflect is almost impossible when you’re writing about a life you’re technically still living.

For the last year and a half, I’ve been putting a lot of effort into trying to process the last decade. It’s loosely the purpose of this Substack, and the book I’m trying to write. And the only way I can even attempt to do that is because I have the privilege to feel. I am in a much different place than I was fifteen years ago. I have a therapist I’ve met with for almost seven years and a small group of friends who’ve known me for longer than that and a loving boyfriend who can all sit with me in those feelings. I have had the space and time to cultivate those relationships. I’m not in survival mode (though my mind tries to trick me into believing I am sometimes). I have access to resources like medication and medical care. For fuck’s sake, I’m not hungry! Even if I lose the house I live in, I still have housing security. I don’t live in constant fear of losing whatever meager “safety net” benefits the government provided to me (if I worked hard enough for it). I am not judged by people for using SNAP or Medicaid. I am no longer required to report my monthly income and expenses to continue living in my home or to receive a few hundred bucks a month for food. Most importantly, I have been able to form an invisible cushion underneath myself that will support me if the rug ever gets pulled out from under me again.

Even with all of that, knowing all the places like Goodreads and Amazon and Reddit exist does not make it easy to do my job, which I have written about here before. With the vulnerability comes the expectation for hate. It feels like the success gives me an armor people assume I have that protects me from their comments about my choices in mothering my children. But I guess if they truly believe I’m a millionaire, it would make me less reachable? I guess I don’t really care what their motivation is to hate me. I don’t feel like I deserve it anymore.

Art by Hanna Barczyk-Camarotti

When I submitted my recent essay about hiring a housecleaner, I hadn’t published anything through a national platform in a while. I felt like I’d been hiding in the chaos of my private life to my own detriment. I feared what the reaction would be to me writing about my life now that I’d had a good amount of success. My lovely, incredible editor sent me a few physical copies like she always does, and I held the package to my chest for a second or two before I opened it like I always do. When I found my essay—a full, two-page spread—I set the open magazine on the kitchen table and stared at it for a long time.

The illustration, by artist Hanna Barczyk-Camarotti, was indescribably perfect. It shows my present self, reaching through a bathroom mirror to comfort the version of me who used to clean houses. She’d captured a feeling I had formerly relied on and now embraced. To me, it’s an illustration of my older wiser self gracing me with the compassion I begged for from my life at the time. It’s an illustration of honoring the work I’d put into getting myself here. Staring at her artwork, I imagined my present self saying to the former one in the drawing “One day, you’re going to write about what you’re going through, and the whole world will listen.”

I hope you, right now, find a moment to tell yourself the same fucking thing.

Until next time.

xo,

-step.