Research supports the idea that helping others can mitigate feelings of social anxiety. In one study302 of people with social anxiety, a group of participants who performed random acts of kindness, such as donating to charity or mowing someone’s lawn, had a greater reduction in their anxious feelings than control groups who simply interacted more socially or those who just wrote down what they did that day. The authors of that study suspected that the acts of kindness created kind of a virtuous circle: they made the outside world seem more positive to the participants, which in turn made the participants feel more inclined to interact with other people.

Finding a larger purpose is also what helped Allie Knight, a thin, red-haired thirty-two-year-old, when she was struggling as one of the less than 7 percent303 of truck drivers who are female.

The trucking life, for Allie, doubled as an escape from a failing marriage and dead-end job in customer service. She signed up for a trucking program in Fort Worth, Texas, passed her written test, and within a week, she was assigned to a driving trainer. For three weeks, she would share the 10-by-10-foot metal cab of an International Prostar truck with a perfect stranger. They would sleep inches from each other on bunk beds and subsist on the fast food they grabbed whenever they made a delivery.

Right away, Allie saw problems. The trainer was several decades her senior, and to her, some of his habits seemed plain wrong. He kept his empty soda cans in laundry bags, which he dangled from the ceiling of their tiny sleeping quarters. She told me that rather than take regular restroom breaks, he peed in a Welch’s White Grape Juice bottle he stowed in the bunk space. Among the man’s favorite conversation topics was Jesus—specifically, how Allie should find him. Whenever she made a mistake, which since she was just starting out was often, her trainer would laugh and mock her. “Oh, this little girl thinks she can drive,” she remembers him saying. (The trucking company did not return a request for comment.)

It irritated Allie that the worst clichés about male-dominated industries were coming true. Whenever her trainer launched into a rant that felt sexist, Allie would grow silent and numb. “I’m done with this conversation,” she’d say. She would climb onto her tiny mattress and wait for the eighteen wheels below to rock her to sleep.

Allie briefly considered switching to a smaller type of truck—one that didn’t require spending time with a trainer. But she had dreamed of driving the biggest thing possible ever since she got her driver’s license at sixteen and ran her finger up the DMV form to class A—“for vehicles over 26,001 pounds.” What do I have to do to drive that thing? she wondered. She decided to stick with it.