Deepa Purushothaman On "Acting In" Stress, Anxiety, and Overwork

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (0:02)
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Deepa Purushothaman had a huge corporate career. She described herself as a productivity junkie, and she said her superpower was outworking everyone else around. For decades, Deepa ignored pain and signals from her body and just pushed through until she couldn't ignore it anymore. And then, Deepa started talking to other women of color who'd reached high positions in corporate America, and she discovered a shared sisterhood of women, women who seemed powerful, who were excellent and well paid and had big titles, but who felt powerless in the face of biased and patriarchal corporate systems. She found a sisterhood of people acting in, performing, excelling, but never feeling powerful, keeping feelings of rage and anger and shame and frustration and anxiety shoved into their bodies. Now, Deepa helps those women let these feelings out and experience their authentic power in a healthier way. Deepa Purushothaman is an author and speaker. She's co-founder of Information, a Community for High Achieving Women of Color, and she wrote the book, The First, the Few. My first question, Deepa, is when you started realizing that women, women of color face more toxicity and trauma and mental health struggles at work. Was it something you always knew or is something that came on?

**Deepa Purushothaman** (5:28)
I think it's something I've always known. I think that there wasn't as much conversation about it, growing up or even rising in my own career or places around me. So I think for a lot of us, there was denial that that is in fact true. So I think some of us felt like some of the experiences are different and there is a different layer that is happening. But because the conversation feels like it's much more in the public domain, it's more accepted, it's more widespread, it's more commonplace. I do think there's a different layer of that really settling both into the mind and the body. Some of the conversation really became clear to me as I interviewed women for my book. So I interviewed over 500 women of color in writing the book and obviously have met thousands since. I just started to see such patterns in the conversations. So that's when it was absolutely like this is a thing, this is what I have to talk about, this feels so clear. It's really interesting that we know, but there's so many things in our lives that we're told to put aside or maybe it's not that bad or it's not that true. And so I think for a lot of women of color, I found it's that dissonance between this is happening but it's really not that bad or we're not supposed to acknowledge it. Is it just me?