If you don't know here name, Welteroth is the person who made Teen Vogue into a critical and inclusive platform. She's a biracial Black woman who grew up lower middle class in California. She's open about the dumb things she did (mostly with men, but also with asserting herself) on the way to the top of a Condé Nast masthead at the age of 29. As a writer and journalist, her prose is as good as you'd expect--and well-sourced with depressing stats like

a girl's confidence peaks at just nine years old.

(come to think of it, that around when mine crashed!)

Oof--and this vicious tidbit of realness

If you ever wonder how a teenage girl feels about herself, where she is in life, who she's trying to be, just look at what is going on with her hair.

I love a fashion person who is also a psychology person and a political person.

This statement rocked me, too, because I think of all the shit girls and women put up with in the name of fighting for relationships

Growing up, girls are warned about the kind of abuse that leaves bruises and scars behind. But the cyclical mistreatment I was experiencing was invisible--it wasn't what people wrote magazine articles about or went on morning shows to discuss. And so I kept covering up how awful I was feeling inside, assuming this was what people meant when they said relationships were hard.

She wrote this in the section about a man she dated in her twenties, but it could also apply to the boy man she was with for five years of high school and college--the person she talked herself into believing Sacramento State was the place for her over Stanford because that's where he went. Sac worked out well because Welteroth met her first important mentor there, but it's wild to me that even such a superstar can be swayed like that over a lover.

She, necessarily, speaks of her FOD (first only different, per Shonda Rhimes) experience and just how fraught it is being alone, no matter how well you might be doing in terms of tangible success.

When you occupy space in systems that weren't built for you, your authenticity is your activism.

One's expectations can be so low that an expression of solidarity can be shocking, as when Welteroth's friend and colleague is outraged that a coworker cuts herself off in the middle of observing that Welteroth was "working like a sla..."

His angry reaction surprised me. It honestly hadn't occurred to me that I could share this with a White person and be met with this kind of empathy. I had encountered and swallowed so many uncomfortable moments like those, but seeing his rage, I realized I hadn't ever processed my own.

Later she writes

But we rarely discuss the marks and scars and bruises that come with breaking through glass ceilings.

My one quibble with Welteroth is when she refers to "the platform I was given." Um, GIVEN? I don't think so. Earned, at the very least.