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Embracing Your Enough-ness: A Journey of Self-Discovery
Elaine Welteroth's life story reads like a modern fairy tale with a powerful twist. Born blue from oxygen deprivation with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, her entrance into the world was dramatic from the start. Yet when the nurse placed her in her mother's arms, her gospel-singer mother's multi-octave "THANK YOU, JESUS!" echoed through the hospital halls. This moment of pure celebration would become symbolic of Welteroth's journey-one where she was constantly reminded that she was born enough, despite a world that would repeatedly challenge this truth. As a biracial woman navigating predominantly white spaces, from suburban California neighborhoods to the hallowed halls of Conde Nast, Welteroth's story resonates with anyone who has felt othered, overlooked, or underestimated. Her memoir has become required reading for a generation of young professionals seeking to maintain authenticity while climbing career ladders, with celebrities like Yara Shahidi and Lena Waithe citing it as inspiration. More than just a career guide, this book serves as a cultural touchstone that arrived just as conversations about representation in media reached a fever pitch, cementing Welteroth's status as a voice of her generation.
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Between Two Worlds: Growing Up Biracial in America
Growing up in Newark, California-a predominantly white, middle-class suburb-Elaine Welteroth existed in a constant state of in-between. Her parents came from diametrically opposing backgrounds: her mother, a gospel-singing Black woman from the South who had worked her way up from grocery bagger to aerospace corporation employee, and her father, a blue-eyed carpenter of German descent who loved B.B. King and Dionne Warwick. Their love story began after tragedy-when her mother brought food to her father's home following his brother's death. Despite their differences, they created a household where their children were encouraged to become exactly who they were born to be.
Though technically biracial, Elaine's parents raised her and her brother Eric with the understanding that society would see them as Black. Inside their home, they were given room to develop their identities, but outside was a different story. Eric rejected conformity from the start, becoming what Elaine describes as "an Afropunk before the festival existed," while she became more of a social chameleon. Both inherited their parents' rebellious spirit and sense of justice, just expressed differently-his through a green mohawk in a mosh pit, hers through cornrows in a corporate office.
The first time Elaine realized race was a "Thing" was during a preschool collage assignment to represent her family using magazine cutouts. Surrounded by white classmates, she flipped through pages filled with smiling white faces in pristine kitchens, finding nothing that resembled her own family. Unable to find images that represented her reality, she did what seemed expected-she cut out white people. When her teacher awkwardly pointed out Black girls in other magazines, Elaine felt singled out and ashamed. The message was clear-she was supposed to be cutting out brown people-but adding a Black family would mean acknowledging she was different when all she wanted was to belong.
When Elaine brought home her "white paper family," her mother launched a loving intervention. "Houston, we have a problem!" she declared, sitting Elaine and her annoyed brother at the dining room table with stacks of Ebony and Essence magazines. Under her guidance, they created a new collage with images that better represented their family. Her mother made her tape it beside her bed-the first images she'd see every morning and the last every night-determined to dismantle any notion that Elaine was or could ever be white.
At home, her mother counterbalanced their predominantly white school environment by instituting her own cultural literacy program-enrolling Elaine in West African dance classes, keeping her hair in braids, cooking elaborate soul food meals, and filling their home with Black magazines and culture. This dual existence created a complex relationship with identity that would follow Elaine throughout her life, ultimately becoming a source of strength rather than confusion.
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Finding Your Voice: The Journey to Self-Acceptance
From an early age, Elaine demonstrated an entrepreneurial spirit and creative drive that would later define her career. She and her childhood friend Claudia, whose skin was the same caramel shade as hers, built a full-service beauty salon in Claudia's backyard using old sheets for walls and scrap cardboard for their reception desk. They created an imaginary magazine, sketching high-fashion girls on construction paper wrapped in Saran wrap "for the glossy feel." Though perhaps a socially awkward tactic to lure in playmates, their salon attracted customers one by one from Claudia's very white cul-de-sac.
At home, Elaine would stay up late working on elaborate photo album collages-her most prized possessions. She'd lie to her mother about going to bed, then use a flashlight to continue perfecting her work. Though she didn't always see herself in the YM and Seventeen pages, she used them to create something that reflected her world. During bath time, she pretended to be both interviewer and VIP interviewee, talking into the portable showerhead as Barbara Walters or Oprah.
These childhood passions weren't just play-they were early manifestations of Elaine's future career. Her father discovered her writing ability before anyone else. One morning in third grade, he found one of her short stories and exclaimed, "WOW-ee-zow-ee, Lainey! This is outta sight. You're a great writer, just like your grandma Pat and your ol' dad." His praise instantly changed her favorite subject from math to English.
However, Elaine's childhood wasn't without challenges. Her father's struggles with alcoholism and depression quietly plagued their family for years. After a work-related back injury ended his carpentry career, he turned to alcohol to numb his pain. Elaine would often find herself waiting hours after school for him to pick her up, only to detect the faint scent of beer on his breath when he finally arrived. One particularly painful memory involved him driving her to gymnastics visibly intoxicated, with her mother's check soaked in beer. Already feeling like an underdog as the only brown-skinned girl with braids on the team, she now carried her father's shame too.
This experience drove Elaine to work even harder for approval, developing an impulse to overcompensate and overachieve to distract from what she couldn't control. Looking back, she sees a little girl running, pushing, working creatively to compensate for things beyond her control. For years, she felt like an impostor with a hidden flaw. She worked harder to deny failure and shame a place in her life, positioning herself in the light and running full speed ahead. But like a shadow, shame follows wherever you go-until you make peace with it.
Over time, Elaine learned to accept and appreciate this part of her story. Her father was beautifully flawed like the rest of us, and his struggles played an important role in making her who she is. Sometimes the things that hurt the most propel you the farthest.
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The Beauty Paradox: Navigating Self-Image and Identity
In fifth grade, Elaine discovered she wasn't one of the "beautiful people" after finding a crumpled paper ranking the girls in her class from pretty to butt ugly, created by bored boys who thought this would be fun. Though she can't recall exactly where she ranked, it wasn't good. Her solution? "Let's make a list ranking the boys," she announced, thinking if girls could be treated as props to be assessed and discarded, perhaps the boys should feel how shitty that was too.
For so much of our lives, we're told what beauty is, who possesses it, and who doesn't. We pretend "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," but it often feels like a self-selecting world of haves and have-nots with restrictive, binary definitions. Those pushed to the margins rarely get to write their own definitions.
Elaine spent kindergarten through sixth grade feeling virtually invisible to boys. Though she was smart, funny, athletic, and reasonably popular, she didn't consider herself attractive compared to other girls at school. The petite blonde girls with straight teeth and bangs were the Thing then, while her frizzy hairline and jagged adult teeth that grew in strange sizes and shapes set her apart.
Her personal journey with her hair reflected her larger path to self-acceptance. She didn't even discover she had naturally curly hair until fifth grade, as her mom had kept it in intricate braids throughout childhood. Over the years, her hair became part of an ongoing experiment with her identity. Being biracial with curly hair and light brown skin meant she could blend in with various ethnicities depending on how she styled it-like built-in ethnic camouflage that allowed her to shape-shift with her surroundings.
By high school, with its more diverse student body, things got confusing. For the first time, Elaine was immersed in a world with eligible Black guys her age, and suddenly she was turning heads-an entirely new experience. After getting used to being overlooked by white guys, this sudden attention came with a male gaze that made her feel invisible in a brand-new way. She went from being the token Black girl to the "exotic," "light-skin-long-hair" chick.
College became an awkward but profound exploration of her Black experience, giving her space to develop her identity on her own terms. Being mixed race in America means existing in a constant state of in-between-having access to two worlds while never fully belonging to either. The feeling of otherness came from both sides-her younger white cousins would point at her legs underwater asking why she was "that color," while her older Black cousin explained her acne was because "when White and Black mix, weird things happen to your DNA."
In her second year of college, Elaine enrolled in Introduction to Rhetorical Criticism, where she encountered Dr. Michele Foss-Snowden (whom she nicknamed "M. Foss")-a professor who defied all her expectations. Young, distractingly pretty, and racially ambiguous with long curly hair like Elaine's, she commanded the room with intelligence and style. M. Foss became the first professional woman Elaine could see herself in-someone who transcended the binaries society forces on women: pretty or smart, Black or white, young or old, smart or stylish.
Through her deep dive into India.Arie's "I Am Not My Hair" for a class assignment, Elaine developed critical tools to analyze cultural messages about race and gender. India.Arie's dark skin, dreadlocks, and headwraps challenged Eurocentric beauty standards with her empowering message: "I am not my hair. I am not my skin. I am not your expectations." This work resonated deeply with Elaine's lifelong struggles with identity and helped her examine her own light-skin privilege as a biracial Black woman.
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The Ride-or-Die Syndrome: Love Lessons and Self-Worth
At fourteen, Elaine was ready for love and everything that came with it. She wanted to walk around campus holding hands, someone to call her after school, to understand what love songs and rom-coms were all about. Most of all, she was ready to "get chose."
Enter First Love, the most beautiful boy she'd ever seen. She first spotted him in seventh grade crossing a grassy hill at Newark Junior High-an eighth grader who looked like the literal FaceFusion of Lil' Bow Wow and Trey Songz. Every time she saw him, time slowed down, her heart pounded, and her hands trembled. Yet she didn't muster the courage to speak to him for another two years.
Their romance brewed on the track after school, officially beginning in spring of her freshman year. Those first three months were dreamy-talking on the phone past bedtime despite her parents' warning pounds on the wall, paging sweet nothings to each other, and him making her a cassette tape filled with R&B and neo-soul slow jams that expressed how he felt about her.
But what Elaine once perceived as passion became mercurial after the honeymoon phase. Between grand gestures, he'd pick fights, then ghost her. His inconsistency taught her to cultivate her own full life through schoolwork, sports, student council, and friendships. Yet no matter how well she impersonated a "chill girlfriend," his aloof behavior eroded her self-worth.
Despite Oprah and Maya Angelou's wisdom to "believe people when they show you who they are the first time," Elaine ignored the evidence that First Love was a jerk. Instead, she embraced the ride-or-die anthems of the era that taught women to bend themselves to make romance work.
When he went to college at Sacramento State, his bad-boy act escalated. Rather than applying to Stanford as she'd always dreamed, Elaine followed her high school sweetheart to college-a decision that gave her hot, chest-tightening pangs of regret for years. At seventeen, she convinced herself and her parents she wasn't choosing Sac State for First Love, that he was "just a bonus."
During freshman year Christmas break, Elaine received a collect call from county jail-First Love had been arrested on several felony counts. For the next five and a half months, she lived a double life: cheerful A student by day, ride-or-die girlfriend by night. She'd take ninety-minute drives on weekends to visit him in jail, getting patted down just to see the boy she'd loved since fourteen.
Just days after their surprisingly uneventful breakup after five and a half years, Elaine got into a car crash driving home from work. Though her "jelly bean" car was totaled, she survived without a scratch-grateful for another chance and the lesson that life is too short to lose sight of where you're headed.
Years later, at twenty-four, Elaine found herself in another relationship that challenged her self-worth. She met a man she was certain would be her Future Husband at a fancy Midtown West house party. He was handsome, well-dressed, a Harvard Business School graduate and investment banker-the literal translation of a Disney prince to a magazine editor making twenty dollars an hour.
They fell fast, spending the snowy week between Christmas and New Year's holed up in his skyline apartment, sharing life stories and dancing to Fela Kuti. By Valentine's Day, he'd given her diamond earrings. But when she didn't react exactly as he expected to this gift, he became distant and hostile, criticizing her response-the first bad feeling she should have trusted.
As their relationship progressed, Elaine found herself becoming a duller version of herself. Future Husband tested her with questions about hosting his leadership team and probed her intellectual capacity. "Do you consider yourself an intellectual?" "Who are your smartest friends?" He even emailed her an article stating a man's success indicator was the wife he chose. She felt evaluated for a supporting role in his bigger life.
Despite red flags, Elaine stayed in the relationship until she received an email with the subject line "Your Loving Boyfriend" from a suspicious Hotmail account. The message detailed Future Husband's affair with another woman, including a secret pregnancy and abortion. When confronted, he denied everything, swearing on family members "dead or alive." Weeks later, her roommate Offy confirmed her worst fears-Future Husband was indeed cheating.
After the breakup, instead of fighting to fix the relationship, Elaine focused on reclaiming parts of her identity she'd surrendered-her voice, her confidence, the baggy boyfriend jeans and red lipstick she'd traded for khakis and pearls. This breakup was different; she wasn't just brokenhearted but felt her heart breaking open, letting light shine through again. Letting go meant getting herself back so she could become the woman she always wanted to be.
Глава 6
Climbing the Ladder: Breaking Barriers in Media
After graduating college with an accidental early graduation, Elaine faced the daunting task of finding her place in the world. Though she'd begun dreaming about magazine journalism, she had no idea where to begin looking for a job. She set a clear goal: land a paid magazine gig in New York City by June 1st.
Her persistence paid off when she secured an internship at Ebony magazine under the mentorship of Harriette Cole, a Black woman who had built an impressive career across multiple media platforms. Though friends questioned her choice of the "dustier" Ebony over the sexier Essence, Elaine trusted the divine guidance that had led her to this moment.
On her first day at Ebony, Elaine's fantasies quickly collided with reality: no fancy marquee sign, dingy carpets and walls, and a "fashion closet" that was merely a storage room with beauty products spilling from torn shopping bags. This was nothing like the glamorous media offices she'd seen on TV. Working there was a metaphor for being Black in America-underresourced and marginalized.
Despite these challenges, Elaine thrived at Ebony. She quickly became part of the family, from Carolyn the Afropunk-rocker executive assistant to Sharon the office manager from Trinidad. When her summer internship term officially ended, she simply kept showing up and somehow kept getting paid. She boldly changed her email signature from Editorial Intern to Production Assistant-her first self-appointed promotion.
During the 2008 recession when publishing jobs were disappearing, Elaine negotiated for a raise from $10 to $12 per hour, even taking a bold risk by skipping work for a day to apply pressure. When she nervously returned, Harriette surprised her with approval for $20 an hour-doubling her income overnight for a job she didn't technically have.
With her newly secured role, Elaine seized every opportunity: creating a beauty department single-handedly, chasing Fashion Week invites, writing feature stories, and building their digital presence despite budget constraints. Within a year, she was formally promoted to beauty and style editor.
After two years at Ebony, Elaine made the leap to Glamour magazine-a step down in responsibility but up in pay and prestige, meaningful to legions of Black women in media who rarely saw one of them make that leap. Moving from Ebony's all-Black office to Glamour's mainstream beauty department was transformative for her career. At Glamour, she had to learn to interpret beauty across cultures-from self-tanning to volumizing limp hair. Yet she noticed white beauty editors could succeed without ever learning about chemical relaxers or foundation matching for women of color.
Despite her success, Elaine sometimes felt like a token Black hire-Rajni Jacques and she, the only Black editors, were mistaken for each other despite looking nothing alike. Though she appeared to be assimilating well, internally she struggled with impostor syndrome due to her race, age, and working-class background.
Her big break came when Eva Chen, the beauty and health director at Teen Vogue, asked if she'd be interested in her position as she was leaving. After immersing herself in teen culture and developing a vision for bringing diversity to beauty coverage, Elaine got the job-becoming the first Black beauty director in Conde Nast's 107-year history. This milestone made her realize she needed to embrace her differences as strengths rather than trying to assimilate.
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Disrupting the Status Quo: Creating Space for Authentic Voices
As the first Black beauty director at Conde Nast, Elaine inherited two jobs: beauty director and sole representative for people of color in a blindingly white slice of media. She was expected to speak as an authority on diversity, walking a precarious line between representing an underrepresented perspective without making sweeping generalizations that might threaten the white power structure.
Her mission was to help young people see their differences as strengths, and she needed to live that mission herself. This period brought bold personal changes: dating an older man, purchasing her first "boss lady bag" by Tom Ford, moving into her own West Village studio, ending a relationship with someone unwilling to commit, and experimenting dramatically with her hair-dyeing it green, bleaching it blonde, and finally chopping it all off to challenge societal beauty standards.
Her first Teen Vogue story detailed her natural hair journey, exploring how reclaiming her curls symbolized reclaiming parts of herself she'd spent years suppressing. The February 2013 story resonated deeply with readers, particularly Black and brown girls struggling with self-acceptance. Though the natural hair movement was underway, mainstream beauty magazines rarely covered Black hair, revealing a clear need for more cross-cultural content that our young, vocal readership craved.
After spending Christmas in Rwanda-her first trip to Africa-Elaine returned to the office wearing Senegalese twists down to her waist. Despite being a beauty director, she felt apprehensive about wearing braids to work. Her fears were confirmed when a high-ranking white beauty director touched her hair and asked, "How did your hair grow so fast? Is this all yours?"
Inspired by these experiences and Zendaya's powerful response to criticism about her dreadlocks at the Oscars, Elaine wrote a story for Teen Vogue exploring how Afrocentric hairstyles in white spaces can be a form of activism. This Black hair story pushed Teen Vogue into culturally sensitive territory at a time when the magazine was primarily known for light fashion pieces.
When the piece was published, it ignited controversy when someone on Twitter mistakenly identified their biracial model as white, accusing them of cultural appropriation. The criticism evolved to focus on their failure to include dark-skinned Black women in the imagery-a valid point Elaine completely owned. This painful lesson became a turning point in her career, pushing her to become a more diligent storyteller and conscious advocate.
Just two weeks after the braids controversy, their August Teen Vogue cover featuring three Black models-Imaan Hammam, Aya Jones, and Lineisy Montero-hit newsstands to extraordinary praise. The industry had taught that three things wouldn't sell on a cover: models, people without household recognition, and Black people. They'd done all three on what was typically a slow-selling summer issue, yet it became their highest-selling cover that year, even outperforming Kylie Jenner's issue.
For their February 2016 issue featuring Amandla Stenberg, Elaine insisted on hiring Black creatives, particularly advocating for a Black hair stylist given their Angela Davis-inspired aesthetic. Despite pushback, they eventually booked talented Lacy Redway. Seeing all the beautiful Afros on their Harlem set created a magical moment of Black excellence Elaine would never forget.
The Amandla issue marked a turning point for Teen Vogue editorially. When Solange's powerful introduction arrived-"There's a secret language shared among black girls who are destined to climb mountains and cross rivers in a world that tells us to belong to the valleys that surround us"-Elaine broke down in tears at her desk. Her words and Amandla's reflections on Black girlhood were exactly the affirming messages she needed as a child.
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The Power of Vision: Transforming Teen Vogue and Beyond
When Anna Wintour summoned Elaine to her office on the 42nd floor-known for hires and fires-Elaine quickly changed from her casual shoot outfit into something more suitable. In Anna's stunning office overlooking Manhattan, she informed Elaine that her boss was moving on and she would become Teen Vogue's new editor.
Elaine felt ready rather than shocked, grounded in gratitude for a role she felt called to do. Anna explained she'd be charged with both building on their editorial success and turning the business around, working closely with sales on revenue-generating ideas. For this expanded responsibility, she was offered a mere ten-thousand-dollar increase-far below market rate for an editor-in-chief.
With only minutes before the press release went out, Elaine learned she'd be sharing leadership in a "triumvirate" with two colleagues-not the traditional editor-in-chief role she thought she was getting. She was told to accept the offer as presented or be removed from the announcement. Meanwhile, Black Twitter erupted in celebration as headlines declared her the youngest editor-in-chief in Conde Nast history, creating a painful disconnect between public perception and her private reality.
Despite these challenges, Elaine pushed forward with her vision for Teen Vogue. As the presidential run between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton heated up, Teen Vogue became a platform amplifying youth voices on political issues. Under Phill Picardi's digital strategy, they balanced hard-news reporting with analytical pieces that infused public discourse with intelligent youth perspectives.
Their newsroom grew more diverse, launching award-winning content like the "Not Your Fault" series for sexual assault survivors. They photographed Yara Shahidi and Rowan Blanchard for their December 2016 cover, young women who embodied their new direction as thought leaders for their generation. The issue fatefully hit newsstands on Election Day 2016, taking on new meaning after Trump's win.
Lauren Duca's piece "Trump Is Gaslighting America" went viral, proving young people weren't afraid to call out power abuses. Within weeks, their digital traffic jumped from 2 million to 12 million, print subscriptions increased by triple digits, and they found themselves on The Daily Show discussing the brand's transformation.
In under a year, Teen Vogue transformed from a cautionary tale into an exemplary case study of a youth-focused, mission-driven media company that doubled down on a new direction in a politicized climate. Eventually, Elaine went directly to Anna, honestly expressing her daily experience navigating dual realities: being held up as a token symbol of progress while not formally empowered. Within 24 hours, Anna gave her everything she'd hoped for: commensurate salary, official editor-in-chief title, and the corner office.
Despite Teen Vogue thriving-their first Summit nearly sold out, a Hillary Clinton guest-edited issue in the works, and numerous brand partnerships-Elaine was blindsided when executives informed her they were closing the magazine. The news leaked while she was at a doctor's appointment, leaving her devastated not just for herself but for her team.
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More Than Enough: Finding Your Purpose Beyond Titles
As the Teen Vogue Summit approached, Elaine found herself in a state of emotional conflict. Despite Anna Wintour offering her the chance to create her own role at Conde Nast, something didn't feel right. After nearly a decade in a shrinking corporate structure, she felt ready to explore beyond these walls.
The Summit became a powerful culmination of Elaine's vision for Teen Vogue. Greeting Hillary Clinton as their keynote speaker, watching Yara Shahidi prepare to interview Clinton, and introducing Ava DuVernay-someone she'd once said she'd "pay to intern for"-Elaine realized she was witnessing the fulfillment of all her dreams for the brand.
After the Summit, Ava DuVernay invited Elaine to her home for dinner. During their meeting, when Ava asked what was next for Elaine, she hesitantly mentioned the venture she was discussing with Conde Nast. Rather than being impressed, Ava challenged her: "But why would you do that?" She helped Elaine craft a better story: "Elaine leaves Conde Nast"-powerful and decisive.
Before Elaine left, Ava gave her a transformative hug and told her, "I think the universe is calling you to be a little bit braver right now." The next morning, the contract from Conde arrived in Elaine's inbox, but it was too late-she was ready to be braver. She resigned to Anna Wintour, who graciously supported her decision and even offered a hug. Walking out of the building where her first dream came true, Elaine felt lighter and freer, knowing she'd done enough and was ready for more.
Our lives are a series of dreams realized, not single destinations. We repeatedly ask children what they want to "be" when they grow up, as if one career path could define a lifetime. But job titles are temporary while purpose is infinite. There are no final destinations or pots of gold-only new beginnings and horizons waiting with fresh mountains to climb.
When you exist in the space between dreams realized, parts of you will feel too big for where you are and too small for where you're going. Go anyway. Don't wait, don't wonder if you can, don't ask permission. When lost, look within for answers that are always there. When the world tells you to shrink, expand.
Remember: You have done enough. You are enough. You were born enough. The world is waiting on you.
