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[0:00] Bobby Steggert: I'm Bobby Steggert, and this is The Quiet Part Out Loud.

[0:15] Bobby Steggert: Hello everyone. I'm going to take a little time off, just taking myself some breathing room. This has been so satisfying, but a lot of work, and so I'm going to regroup and come back with a bunch more episodes after Labor Day. But before I leave, I have decided to take a little bit of a risk, and that's to share part of my story. And in order to do so, I've asked my wonderful friend and guest on the show, Al Silber, to swap with me. And as you'll hear, she's amazing at that role, and she allowed me to tell a very personal and very complicated history, and one that has led me to my current work as a therapist, and that led me to this, to this podcast, where I'm now realizing the entire goal has been to encourage everyone to be able to say The Quiet Part Out Loud.

I think the reason is, is because I spent so many years, decades really, being so terrified to speak, to speak my truth, to admit to how much I was struggling and how alone I felt, and to then not know how to reach out for help, how to communicate what I needed, and therefore, I ended up stuck in a great deal of pain while, on the surface, everything looked great. I also want to share that in the following episode, I talk a lot about what was wrong, but I want to say what's right. And what is right now is that when I learned to really communicate, to risk opening up all of those dark corners and expose the complicated, terrifying truth to those I trusted, things started healing. When I was no longer isolated, I got more honest feedback and true, authentic support.

And when I was able to be more and more honest with what I was going through, I was able to then build upon that support to stand a little stronger in myself. And then in doing that, I was able to use that strength to start helping others. And then that becomes this reciprocal energy that everyone benefits from. Over the past three months, I have been so moved and impressed by the vulnerability that everyone who has appeared on the show has shared. And I think it's only fitting that I remind myself of that risk. And so, in telling some of my story, I am opening up something that feels really tender, but I really hope that resonates and that it reaches the right people. Thank you for listening to these episodes, and I'll be back in September.

[2:55] Alexandra Silber: Hello, welcome to The Quiet Part Out Loud, where Bobby Steggert and myself, Alexandra Silber, are going to switch roles. Today, Bobby has been brave enough, valiant enough to acknowledge that the role of the therapist and question asker is a role that is sacred, but also has the privilege of not always having to crawl out of our vulnerability. And he has volunteered to turn the tables and have questions asked of him and share his story, which is something therapists definitely traditionally do not do. But what I really admire that you're, as I said, valiantly attempting to do here.

[3:49] Bobby Steggert: Oh, God. And the thing is, there's a big part of me that thinks, is this the most self-indulgent thing in the fucking world? But I'm just acknowledging that, and I think I have something to share that is of value.

[4:07] Alexandra Silber: I agree. And I think to say self-indulgence is a very strong way to start the story, because I think my observation of you is that your story is soaked in shame. And that's a commentary of self-critique, which can turn into self-loathing, is a pattern. So what an interesting way to begin.

[4:36] Bobby Steggert: Yeah. And I should say, I've done so much work over the years, and especially in the last decade or so, in terms of really accepting my history of shame. And so as I talk about this, it's from a place of grace and acceptance. I want you to know, and whoever's listening to know, that this is not a place of real pain, while pain still exists within the story. But I'm able to talk about it in a way that feels healthy.

[5:02] Alexandra Silber: I think that's such an important thing to highlight, too, is that there's the kind of talking you do, what I call going into the cave and welcoming other people into the cave, which is very messy and truly exposed, and really should be kept in privacy. And then there is the sharing of processed pain and processed experience that keeps us human and, of course, is at the very core of sharing our humanity. But what I think you're talking about that's really important is, once we've processed our experiences, we're able to share them and reflect upon them with others in a way that doesn't mean that the pain is happening in real time. And I think that's really responsible.

[5:53] Bobby Steggert: Yeah. Thank you. I agree. And I guess where I want to start, my shame, really, ultimately, if I think about it, it was always orchestrated by this one part of me that extremely early, alarmingly early, decided that I had to be alone. It's this loner part. Not only that it was safe to be alone, but that I had to be. It was a sentence that was bestowed upon me by the universe from very early. And I think what is most indicative of that is this crazy recurring dream I used to have at three years old. And they say that human memory starts around three. So this was very early. And I remember it as if I had the dream last night. In the dream, I wake up and I'm in the bed that I am actually sleeping in.

And I'm aware of this ravenous, violent, hungry wolf under the bed. And I know that my only shot at escaping being eaten by the wolf is leaping off the bed and scampering downstairs to the safety of my parents. And I jump off the bed and the door flies open and I run down the stairs and I turn the corner into the living room. And all of a sudden, the danger of the wolf is gone in the dream. He just disappears. But what I encounter in the living room is my parents slow dancing, headless. And I can't get their attention. And they're completely unaware of the danger that I was in as they continue just rocking back and forth in this embrace. Without heads.

[7:38] Alexandra Silber: Wow.

[7:39] Bobby Steggert: Every therapist I've ever had has been like, what the fuck, right? But it's just so clear, too. As a little three-year-old boy, I understood something about the world, which I probably should have understood yet, which was that there was something that they couldn't protect me from. The story in most fairy tales, I suppose. But I knew as a three-year-old that it was my being gay. I don't know how, but I did.

[8:01] Alexandra Silber: Really?

[8:02] Bobby Steggert: And that awareness at that early age felt like an extremely terrifying thing to hold. It's a terrifying thing to describe even in adulthood. I can't even imagine where those images came from. And I think something that might be really helpful for listeners to maybe set the stage of what the environment and family dynamic was when this dream emerged for you. And what was the dynamic in your household of parents that definitely had heads?

[8:32] Bobby Steggert: What's bewildering to me is that I was the oldest kid. I was in rural Maryland at the time. At this point, I guess my brother would have been one. And both of my parents were extremely present, extremely loving, extremely affectionate, mirroring of my experience. There was absolutely no neglect. And yet, at that time, little Bobby, who was just so observant and aware, was seeing on the news these images of these men dying of this disease that I understood was my fate.

[9:20] Alexandra Silber: Really?

[9:21] Bobby Steggert: I'm not sure if it was ever talked about in the house. I'm not sure if it was ever mentioned by anyone in my life. But I could just see in the eyes of the young men in that news footage that there was something in their eyes that I understood. And again, that three, four-year-old little boy felt that if he ever shared this knowledge in any way with anyone, that would be his fate. So I grew up very aware of my own mortality and mortality as connected to something that was wrong with me before I had any context to why.

[9:59] Alexandra Silber: This is a really fascinating observation. Have you read Far From the Tree?

[10:04] Bobby Steggert: I have. It's a long but very worthy-of-the-read book.

[10:09] Alexandra Silber: Yeah, it's a beautiful book about very hard subject matter written by Andrew Solomon, who's a social psychologist, but who also identifies as a depressed person and as a gay man. And he really delves into, in multiple categories, when parents have children that, as he calls them, have horizontal identities from their parents. He describes vertical identities as, we are white. Our children will be white. We are Catholic. Our children will be Catholic. We are straight. Our children will be straight. These sort of presumed expectations and that people don't really examine why they want children in the modern age. They assume they're going to take a little piece of you and a little piece of me, and it'll be this combination of the two of us.

But ultimately, what he says is that you are giving birth to a permanent relationship to a stranger, and that when our children are born and they develop into horizontal identities like, one of us is white and one of us is Asian, and our child is neither of those things, that is a horizontal identity. When a child is trans or deaf, et cetera, and what are the implications of that and how parents don't always realize that they are not necessarily designed, and there's nothing wrong with them if they can't perfectly meet the needs of that child. I can't imagine you coming into the world and entering this loving, attentive family, but clearly having the depth and insight and emotional intensity of a person clearly centuries old, and how to help you and guide you and discuss these things that you didn't even really have language for.

[12:00] Bobby Steggert: I have this other instinct to really try to protect my parents because they were wonderful parents. And there was just no context at the time to what being gay was outside of these people who were dying and different and who my parents or anyone in that community never met. So I guess I just want to say that they didn't have even the context through which to understand me, I think. And then you're speaking about something else that may or may not be connected, this emotional awareness that you and I shared as kids and as adults too. I connected to my queerness. I'm not sure what you might connect it to outside of what it is as it stands alone. But it did contribute to or reinforce a sense of aloneness because I was just so led by emotion. I felt emotion with such depth. And I often felt that it was confusing and far too much, and that it was just difficult to understand. And therefore, I felt left alone to sift through it myself.

[13:11] Alexandra Silber: When was the first time that you were able to fully comprehend the not just the necessarily implications of your queerness, but the day-to-day reality of it, the understanding of it on a more adult level? When did that develop for you?

[13:31] Bobby Steggert: It's incredible how the mind can split and exist in totally different realities. And so in parts of my reality, it was never an acknowledgement. And then I remember having my first like really meaningful, intimate relationship with this boy named Adam and we met in the sixth grade. And I think looking back, we were in love. We were inseparable. I was obsessed with him. We shared all these little secrets, and we would write notes back and forth to each other between every period of class every day, shoeboxes full of notes. They were love letters with all these beautiful sentiments about how much we cared about each other. And he was further developed than I. And he was more ready to accept and explore what sexuality meant to him. For example, this is metaphoric, like one day we decided to dye our hair together. We went to the CVS and I dyed my hair chestnut brown. And he dyed his hair magenta.

[14:34] Bobby Steggert: What a metaphor. Adam with the magenta hair, he was really ready to go. And so he taught me about masturbation. And he introduced me to all of these physical experiences of sexuality. And it was an incredible relationship and connection. And then at a certain point, he was too ready, and I was too distant from that readiness, and I had to reject him. And so my shame forced me into aloneness by ending the relationship, by releasing him into an experience of further queerness and exploration, whereas I shut it down and went through the whole rest of middle and high school, hiding from that part of me.

[15:17] Alexandra Silber: Such a powerful story. They say that the human mind's first experience of falling in love is often our first best friend, and that it's somewhat separated from the burdens of sexuality, and that it's that obsession, right? It's like your brain just flooding with chemicals of love for this person before you can even fully understand that. And that, of course, sexuality eventually will complicate things, which, of course, it did with you and Adam. How did the rejection take shape? And how did he respond?

[15:53] Bobby Steggert: It's hard to remember. The emotional memory is that his femininity started to scare me. His willingness to live in that femininity, his expanding beyond what was expected of him, the way he started to dress, the way he started to talk. And I think practically he ended up going to another school, and I let that be the cleaving that I needed it to be. And it's funny, we've never talked about it. We've been in touch over the years, lightly in touch, and sent good wishes, but we've never really talked about how that ended. But yeah, he was my introduction to first love and first loss.

[16:43] Alexandra Silber: We'll be right back. I guess I was wondering if there was an element to, which is often very close to love, was there an element of envy or jealousy about the way he was so capable of embracing himself and living his life so fully?

[17:04] Bobby Steggert: I'm sure that underneath the disdain was envy. The primary emotion was fear and disgust. And of course, that was only a fear and disgust of myself. But upon losing that incredibly important relationship, something happened to me physically, which I think you'll relate to, which is that what had started to be shared with someone and in communion with someone had to be sort of reabsorbed internally and had to become private again, and the experience of one again.

[17:43] Alexandra Silber: And your energy in terms of grief went to your gut, right?

[17:47] Bobby Steggert: In my experience, it went literally into my head. And two things happened, and this is something I've never talked about publicly. One, I started developing debilitating migraines every week, like clockwork. I would get them on Mondays at around 1 PM, I would have to leave school every week. And I would have to walk home hazy and go right to bed. And I would get in bed at two and sleep until the next morning. And then the next morning, I'd be fine. And this happened weekly. And on top of that, at that point, no one thought that it might be a psychological issue. So I started going into all of these neurological appointments where they discovered that, of course, nothing was wrong. But to me now, it's just now that I'm a therapist, I refer to that in my memory as such a prime example of the psychosomatic expression of an emotional experience.

[18:47] Alexandra Silber: Completely. The way your body sometimes has to scream to get your attention. And that migraines are so much more than a bad headache. They force you to stop. And the clockwork-like nature of that is so articulate in hindsight. And there was also this real movement in the 90s and early 2000s when we were young adults that there was a Western medicine answer for everything. That looking at the whole organism wasn't really something we had returned to yet, I think, in our culture.

[19:32] Bobby Steggert: And I can imagine that was just further, perhaps, further communicating that multiple things were wrong with you and needed fixing.

[19:43] Alexandra Silber: Absolutely. And also, it would have been a very convenient fix, right? There was part of me that was hoping it was medical. My God, if you can just give me a pill. But you're right. It was my body screaming at me at the cost of suppression. But then something else happened, and this is also something I've never talked about. This I was so ashamed of that I never even told my first therapist. Which was that because the system had to become closed again, I couldn't share any of this with anyone. I ended up having this ruminative relationship with an obsessive-compulsive part of myself that believed if it could just think the same thoughts over and over again, I could cure myself, or if I could just do the same rituals over and over again mentally, I'd be able to protect myself from gayness, from HIV, from any sort of negative consequence of being gay. And I would spend hours internally, daily, ritualizing these mottos. You're not gay. You're not gay. You're not gay. You're not gay. You're not gay. You're not gay. You're not gay.

[21:46] Bobby Steggert: And then when I started to be sexually active in my college years, it turned into a compulsive checking on the internet about the symptoms of HIV. And so I would have a sexual experience, which is normal and healthy, and there was never any danger in anything I was doing, right? This was the late 90s when a lot of guys weren't even having anal sex at all because they were so afraid. And I would spend hours the next day or weeks looking online for any possible symptom that I should watch out for. I would waste hours googling, hours. And then what was so painful about that time is that when you would get tested for HIV, you didn't get a 20-minute turnaround. You got a two-week turnaround. And so if you were brave enough to get tested, you'd then have to sit in the fear of what might result for two weeks.

And then you'd have to go into this hospital. I would go to St. Vincent's Hospital, where it was terrifying and chaotic, and the nurses there were overworked and exhausted, and the whole thing just felt so unsafe. And so my relationship to sex was also a relationship that was moderated through obsessive, compulsive behaviors that I felt so ashamed of that I didn't tell anyone about.

[22:04] Alexandra Silber: Oh, Bobby. Was there ever any—was there an element of comfort in it at all? Did the ritualizing feel soothing?

[22:15] Bobby Steggert: What's so awful is that only very temporarily, I would look up the symptoms, and I would check in with my body, and do I have any of these symptoms? Nope. Nope. Good. And that soothing would last for 20 minutes. The thing that's, I think, often misunderstood about obsessive-compulsive disorder is we do have this entered our modern lexicon as this throwaway phrase in the same way that trauma has been used very glibly and does a huge disservice to people that deeply suffer from these medical diagnoses. And I think the thing that we think of with OCD is the flicking of lights, which is the compulsive handwashing. But the—correct me if I'm wrong, because, of course, you are the therapist—but the thing that really torpedoes people is the ruminating thoughts. And long before it ever gets to a behavior, is there a way for you to express in language what that felt like?

[23:22] Bobby Steggert: I've gone through a lot of therapy in which I've located these parts of myself as more energetic beings in my body. And so what I'll describe as more of a feeling, that part of me felt—still sometimes does, when it comes up, it's different now—like a little Mexican jumping bean in my skull that had just done a big line of cocaine, just hopping around and bouncing off the walls of my skull, almost as if the movement was like the propulsion that it needed to keep moving. It was a very strong, ceaseless energy that felt more powerful than me. I can only imagine, too.

[24:02] Bobby Steggert: Actually, I can imagine. I think one of the things that connects us is the blessing and the curse of huge imaginative capacity and language to name that are happening within us. It can be a huge gift because sometimes language is this like rock to stand on, images are rocks to stand on, and they can really release and set you free, but they can also keep you very stuck. Sometimes I'll say to myself, wow, I'm a really good storyteller, which will be a kind way of giving myself grace about I have made something up that is really advanced and sophisticated, but may or may not be truly happening. It sounds like that's something that exists inside you as well. Lots of storytelling. Yeah, and there's a big difference.

I take your point. You can tell a story to other people to try to convince them of a reality, but when you're telling a story that you don't feel you can tell anyone, when your only relationship to the story is your own, it can fester and there can be such a lack of reality testing around the story that it can become a mythology by which you live. That's such a beautiful distinction. Just combining this theme we've been talking about, about psychological and medical things in relationship, sometimes stories can grow septic and really make us sick. The other story that is layered on top of this, of course, is the layer of achievement and success. I was going to ask, how did your relationship to achievement and success, how was it in relationship to this experience and how did they play?

My isolating part, my loner part was so powerful that it was able to make all of that internal stuff happen under the surface. I could be managing all that stuff and make it seem like I was completely relaxed in front of anyone, almost to what feels like the sociopathic degree. I could be like an internal volcano and be totally fine to the eyes of someone else. Because of that ability, I'll call it, that ability to multitask, I was also able to be very effective in terms of all kinds of achievement, academic and professional and creative. The story that also created was, you are so privileged, you are so lucky, you're getting everything you want, look at all the feedback you're getting, you are one of the lucky ones.

That story convinced the part of me that was isolating that I didn't deserve help, that I didn't need help. Then that was also reinforced. I was in therapy and this well-meaning but not qualified therapist, when I finally opened up to him about the OCD stuff, his response was probably, you're fine. I think he meant it as an encouragement because I was starring on Broadway at the time, for example, but I wasn't fine. I was in so much distress. I colluded to perhaps make it look as not as bad as it was and other people saw an external shape of my life that looked so wonderful. That combination just made it really hard to face the music. My first question is, what was the play you were doing when this happened, when this advice was given to you?

This was Big Fish. This was actually later in my career. I had been going through this OCD stuff around sex for over a decade. It wasn't like, you've just found success. It's, oh, you've been maintaining success for many years. That story is halcified around the pain and the suffering. That is so fascinating. I often feel, speaking of the universe and its proclamations, if you will, I do sometimes think that these experiences and the roles and the stories and the themes and, of course, the people around us present themselves to us at certain very prescient times. The beauty of your character in Big Fish was about acceptance and a release on rigidity. That was roughly around the time that you and I started becoming friends and very close.

What I observed in you was something I deeply saw in myself, too, which was the simultaneous gift and damnation of a cultivated self-image. There was also, interestingly, the real beginning of social media, particularly Instagram, which I think has become the ultimate metaphor of this, the cultivated self-image. I often used it as a shield of, look, everybody that isn't in my inner circle, I am fine. I'm doing great. No need to pry or ask questions. For me, too, it was certainly a shield of warding off questions when my health crisis started to really develop, but I sometimes believed my own hype and did not seek the support I clearly needed. I wonder if there was an element of that in the achievement.

I hesitate to use this word, but addictive in some way, that there was something it was feeding. Absolutely. It was also just merciful evidence that I was okay. Why wouldn't you want to commit to that narrative? Why wouldn't you want that to be your whole and absolute truth? At times, it worked, but it would be temporary and based on moments of an upswing where things were exciting enough to forget about the grief and the pain and the lack of true self-acceptance. It sounds like anguish, Bobby. It was anguish, and it's hard to even own that because there's still the part of me that goes, but you're so privileged. You've had all of these really fortunate things and fortunate people and relationships in your lives.

I have had such wonderful relationships. Yes, the part of me that needed to do it alone forced me into anguish. How did this affect your dating, intimate life, this story, and this fear? That's really the thing I'm still really struggling with, the legacy that has left for me in terms of my intimate relationships. I guess what I can say, and what I feel comfortable saying, is that sex was so terrifying to me for so many years that, in different ways, intimacy felt like the thing I needed the most and the thing I was the most afraid of. I really just experienced what you said in my body. Thank you for that. I'll say in a very different way. For me, a lot of this is cultural, and a lot of this is in the timeline of our growing up.

There was something that really happened to women in the early 2000s that was deeply toxic in a way that I think we've mercifully attempted to outgrow. But the shaming of my contemporaries in the media, like Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, and Burberry shaming culture, made a huge impact on me. I think my grief that went to my gut couldn't help but include the meridian of my sexuality. There was this protectiveness and this shut-off-edness about that. I was able to, like centuries of women before me, experience it as just this very dutiful thing that was really disconnected from my own experience. You didn't say this, but you used the word legacy. I felt it in my body and heart in you, and I tend to be very connected.

I just want to hold that past Al and release her from the prison sentence and give her permission to forgive herself. It's beautiful. It's comforting to me. Comforting to me is comforting the word. I'm not sure if it's comforting, but to know that this kind of shame that lives in the body and that is about sex, it's not isolated to the queer experience. It's so common in all of us, women, men in very different ways. It's universal, and sometimes I forget that. Yeah, I think it's so beautiful to hear you say that, because we all experience our privileges, to go back to your word, and our oppressions collectively and individually. I think by obviously bonding with and creating bridges in our shared identities, it's very important to bond with people like us.

It's how we feel community, but it's equally important to build bridges across the things that we don't necessarily understand and share, because it's how we experience expansiveness, and your capacity to do that has always taken my breath away. I'd love to circle back to two things that are niggling in my brain. The first is about your parents and your defensiveness of them, which is also something I deeply relate to. I think something we both share is I had these great parents and I had this great life, but I held these super deep and intense and specific roarings of my heart that I couldn't utter, express, and could never expect perfectly loving and capable adults to anticipate. I really relate to that.

I often will talk about my story and then get very protective of my family unit. I think one of the things I want to say that I wonder if you agree with is that phrase people, but parents in particular, often use, and I think it is often used when having a queer child. I just want my child to be happy. I just want them to be happy, and that's all I wish for my children. I think it's really important to explode that slightly and go, what does that really mean? At least in my observation, and I wonder if you relate to this, if you agree with this, I think with queerness, for you, it's going, I acknowledge that there is an element of being queer in the world that is a harder human experience. I don't wish for my children to experience a hard life.

Even in the most loving, most expansive, accepting conditions, that ache in the heart can be present for parents. I wonder if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah, I think the simplest way I can sum up what it was like and then what it's like now, in terms of the evolution of my parents, is that yes, I think at first it was real fear that I would have a tough life. Thinking back on what my parents really needed in that moment was reassurance from my straight best friend that I was going to be okay. It meant so much to my mom that my friend Gabe told her, Bobby is still the same Bobby, which then was really.

[36:02] Bobby Steggert: To me, now I look back and go, wow, they didn't see any chance for me to expand into something even more wonderful and evolved and accepting and layered and interesting. They just wanted me to be safe. And from that context, I understand it. Now, after years of them being educated by my life and my friends and who I am and the work I do, it's a really different story. And my mom just said to me a couple days ago, in terms of hearing your episode and Gavin's episode, those two especially, in terms of how deep we went. She said, I'm realizing that you love in such expansive ways. And she said, having you as a son is helping me to understand that. And so my being queer is part of what has made really honest, really frank, really deep conversations possible.

And so now we are at the place where we're in a much more expansive conversation about life and all its possibilities. And I attribute that to my being queer more than anything. Beautiful story. It's also a beautiful testament to cultivated adult relationships with our parents. And that at a certain point in our adulthood, relationships with our nuclear family really become largely active choices. And to re-meet our parents as adults is a really fascinating journey and can be a wealth of gifts. And I think a parent who's willing to learn from their kid is doing such a service to themselves.

[37:44] Alexandra Silber: Absolutely. I do. And I agree, by the way. I certainly know that I have been in romantic relationships with people that don't even come close to the level of closeness and intimacy you and I share. And the sexual intimacy that is not a part of our relationship feels neither here nor there in terms of what it means to love as a verb and what love as a noun feels like between us. And I say whatever gives an individual the aperture into experiencing that should be embraced. And does require labor, though. Does require labor.

[38:37] Bobby Steggert: We'll be right back. I think something that a lot of, and again, I have all this privileged information so I don't want to take it for granted for our listeners. What did the professional acting universe offer you? What did it serve? How was it lush and wondrous? And what ultimately moved you to step away from it? I think it's a really relatable question that's deeply related to your mythology.

[39:04] Bobby Steggert: It gave me so much. It gave me power and ability to stand on my own two feet and in my body with pride, with ownership. But it's interesting. I think more than anything, it gave me, and this sounds paradoxical, it gave me privacy. And what I mean by that is that it gave me a structure on stage to be the full range of my own identity. And I think that's on stage to be the full range of my emotional self in what felt like privacy, even though there were people watching. There's the duality there. Maybe safety is another word. And I got to, over many years, portray, experience, and share extremely complicated emotional experiences that I didn't feel I had the space to in my life. And for that, I'm extremely grateful.

And then, as we touched on earlier, the story of success and how much I needed that story, I knew was ultimately the thing that would keep me from healing. And so while I have such incredible admiration for you to be able to heal while being an artist, I had to go completely inward. And that's why this loner part of me is also kind of genius. I knew I'd be fine. I knew that if I stepped away from that whole world, I would still be me. I'd have all of me contained and available to myself in order to learn something new and different. And when I said goodbye to that whole world that gave me so much, I almost never looked back because I finally had space to fall apart. I finally had space to mourn something that I was only mourning through my work, really, and not in my actual life. And then I had a space to then build upon that to start helping others, which gave me such a sense of purpose that I didn't need the purpose that performance gave me.

[41:13] Alexandra Silber: I'm hearing this story, and I'm tearing up because I watched it, and I held it, and I'm so proud of you. I think something I'd love to try and name with you is the sense of privacy, which you say sounds paradoxical, but makes perfect sense to me. I deeply relate to it. I see my own journey as an actor pre- and post-healing, and one of the things I sometimes use to describe the strangeness of acting is use a dance metaphor because it's physical, so it's a little easier to grasp. If you think about the rehearsal room of a dance company, there are rules, unspoken and sometimes spoken, now more than ever, of ways in which we are to engage with one another that are special rules for this space, and these rules don't exist in the real world.

They only exist in this room, and in a dance world, it translates into, in this room, you may touch this other dancer on this part of their body, and touching the inner thigh, the lower back, sometimes the buttocks, the neck, these are places that if you touched human beings like that in a restaurant or a bank, you'd be arrested, but in the context of this space, it's not only welcome, it's literally necessary to execute the task at all, and the reason I use this touch metaphor is because it's very concrete, but what I then transition and say, this is exactly the ask of what's being asked of actors in a rehearsal space, but it's about emotional exposure, and then we leave that room, and those rules change, but there's no physical markers that indicate that something has shifted, and so it requires unbelievable navigation, sophistication.

We are not really taught how to navigate it, and so when you talk about this privacy, I completely understand. I see it as like a sandbox or a boxing ring. Both of those metaphors are telling, but anyway, you enter the space. I know that for myself, I would open my heart, and that's where I would grieve. That's where I would allow horrors inside me to emerge and have everybody else think that I was just really talented, and I'm wondering if you relate to that, what you think of that metaphor, if that in any way names this privacy thing you were describing.

[43:49] Bobby Steggert: Exactly. A container for something very real that was deemed not only acceptable, but impressive from the outside, so it had a kind of dual function. I think it's something people don't appreciate about the ask of actors, and also the maturity that is required to navigate it, to know the difference between the emotional intensity of a character. It's a hugely demanding task. If real work needs to be done, as it did with you, sometimes walking away is incredibly courageous because you walked away from a lot of trappings of validation.

[44:26] Alexandra Silber: I did, but I also knew I was strong enough to, frankly, validate myself at that point, and I'm not surprised then that I chose something that was very private in a different way. I'm in this closed system with another client all day, but what is starting to signal to me that this part doesn't need to work so hard anymore, this isolating part, is that I'm emerging. I'm emerging here, literally right now, but in terms of how I want to share, what I want to share, how I want to identify, not maybe perhaps just as a therapist anymore, perhaps as an artist again, and that flexibility that I'm feeling, the opposite of being trapped within myself, is telling me that I'm healing. How did you know that the therapeutic world, as a career, if you will, and of course as a role in the world, how did you know it was right? What were the indicators?

[45:27] Bobby Steggert: Because I can read people so quickly and so easily, which is also a legacy of hypervigilance to other people. So for better or worse, growing up on the outside, you get extremely good at anticipating the energies of other people. So while my awareness isn't necessarily born out of something that feels totally pure and totally positive, I think I've been able to shape it into a place where I can give back and help with it. I remember you saying in the first couple weeks of being licensed and really starting to run and then sprint, you said, it's amazing, Al, it's that feeling of creative flow that I remember, and time disappearing. It was such an honest response to what you were doing, and to me that was an indicator that you really found something.

I guess I have a couple of just curious questions based on these stories, some of which I've never heard, so it feels like such a privilege to be here in this space. I love what Gabe said, your best friend Gabe, he's still the same Bobby, and I'm sure you're in touch with Gabe, but what would Bobby tell that young Gabe, that Gabe that said that?

[46:40] Bobby Steggert: That the same Bobby was really stuck and scared, and not evolved into who he got to be later. That the goal wasn't the same Bobby.

[47:00] Alexandra Silber: Beautiful. And I think maybe in the same spirit, what would you tell middle school Adam?

[47:07] Bobby Steggert: Oh god, that makes me cry. How beautiful he was, and how brave he was, how inspiring he was in terms of not being so afraid of what other people might think. Do you think it might be powerful to say it in the present tense?

[47:25] Bobby Steggert: You taught me that you were okay, and eventually I was able to understand that I was okay. I'm really grateful to him. That's what I want to say to middle school Adam. Thank you for loving my best friend before I could get there.