More Than Enough: Claiming Space for Who You Are (No Matter What They Say)

by Elaine Welteroth

Nothing bad ever happens to me. It’s all to learn and grow.

They hit my heart like a beam of light.

You know sometimes when you hear or read or see something that you need so deeply, but didn’t even know it?

I’d felt like I’d made choices that put me in a place of inner turmoil and lack, instead of nourishment and freedom. It was wearing on me. Every day. In every way. Many of us have been there. We allow the expectations of others to shape our own expectations. We don’t prioritize our time with ourselves. We rarely set aside moments to be still, to access our center. And the bottom line is, when we don’t focus on our inner light, it dims. We feel put upon, distracted, out of balance. We feel that life is happening around us and we can’t grasp it fully. It feels like bad things are happening to us. And it’s all out of our control.

There are times when everything is in perfect balance. And times when we just aren’t quite in sync.

vision? To not see the clumsiness as a bad thing, but to live in the space of “nothing bad ever happens to me.” To embrace an idea that my friend Oprah Winfrey told me some years ago: “This bad thing isn’t happening to you. It is happening for you.” That, my friends, is a game-changing notion. It is a powerful truth. And when I abide by it, I am whole.

I choose gratitude in that moment, instead of despair. And it saved me. Whenever I remember that Life is for me, not against me, I hear and see and feel it all. And I can find good in every shadow, in every cloud. It makes every day brighter.

How do we get there? It’s a spiritual practice. It takes time. And repetition. And as you can see, we all need to be reminded to stay on course

each day we have the chance to gain lessons from Life. We can observe how human nature unfolds before us. We can begin to read the world around us, the people we meet and the places we go, as if they are letters written by a divine pen. A person whose soul has awakened to this fact is so abundantly aware that every interaction, situation, even blade of grass reveals something worth knowing. And in that knowing, the truth is that nothing bad can ever happen to you. We can see it and process it as bad. Or we can see it and process it as something happening for us, not to us.

Every fall was actually a step. Every confusion was actually insight. Every risk was actually a reward waiting to happen.

Her journey is a testament to shaping what we experience for our own good. For crafting positivity as our path. For knowing that the bad is our choice and the good is our choice. And to work to choose the good. Every day. In every way.

What comes from the heart touches the heart. DEBRA WELTEROTH, MY MOM

Research tells us that, on average, a girl’s confidence peaks at just nine years old.

Luckily, I had strong examples of women of color in my real life who watered the seeds that helped me believe I could dream beyond what I saw around me.

At twenty-nine, I had become the second Black person and the youngest ever to helm a Condé Nast magazine. I was now the one holding the pen in one of the most divisive political climates in recent history. Shonda Rhimes coined the term: “First. Only. Different.” Being an “FOD” in your field comes with a unique responsibility and a powerful opportunity: to rewrite rules, to redefine norms, to represent for the communities that haven’t had a seat at the table before. But what good is a trailblazer who isn’t willing to leave signposts along the way that make it a little less confusing, less lonely, less disorienting for the next woman or person of color to follow? With my promotions,

I was able to help undo some of the damaging narratives I grew up with by recasting pages to make them more reflective of my world, and to create space for the most pressing issues of our time.

Because no one can share my truth but me. I have often found myself situated in the in-between, stretched like a bridge between worlds: Black and White, beauty and activism, the past and the future. But in this sliver of space, this intersection I now own, I have learned to create magic.

This book is not a career manual, because I believe only you can write your own blueprint for success, though I do share some of my hard-earned lessons that I am still learning to live by.

Instead, consider this book a love letter—to anyone who’s felt othered, overlooked, overwhelmed, underestimated, undervalued, and still chooses to overcome.

When you exist in spaces that weren’t built for you, remember sometimes that just being you is the revolution.

As you continue crafting the life you want, I hope you are reminded that it is the very things you underestimate about yourself that will help you create your own magic. Find it. Use it. Trust it.

We spend too much time hearing and telling ourselves we are not enough. Not smart enough. Not beautiful enough. Not successful enough. Not young enough. Not old enough. Not woke enough. I want this book to be the voice reminding you to say ENOUGH with all that. You are enough. You were BORN enough. The world is waiting on you. Let’s go.

I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams. BRANDAN ODUMS, AKA BMIKE

“We went through what we went through so that you could live, baby girl. So you gotta live. Run after it. And know that we are all with you. All of us—are all right there with you.”

But you know what they say about God and plans—we make ’em, God laughs.

But the more she cooed and pointed at Black people, the more singled out I felt. It’s like somehow my baby brain had already absorbed too much of the whitewashing in those pages to retreat now.

She was serious about dismantling any misguided notions that I was or could ever be White. But more than anything, she wanted me to see pride in my Blackness. And she did everything in her power to make sure I did.

making sure I learned a crucial lesson: when the world tells you to shrink, expand.

“When the world tells you to shrink, expand.”

Keep in mind always the present you are constructing. It should be the future you want. ALICE WALKER, THE TEMPLE OF MY FAMILIAR

Little did we know, we were in the final days of Life Before the Internet, when imaginations still roamed freely in backyards across America and Giga Pets were the only tiny mobile machines kids had developed compulsive, codependent relationships with. These were simpler times, when dopamine levels spiked at the sound of the ice cream man, Nintendo Super Mario Bros., and cassette tapes with parental advisory labels. In not much more than a decade’s time, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter would come along and change all of that forever. But we were just eight years old then, and focused on one thing and one thing only: handling our business.

Long before I knew exactly what career path to pursue, I knew that I wanted to be great. Not mediocre. Not average. Anything but ordinary. I wanted to design my own extraordinary life—a big, colorful existence. There was no obvious path to success, though. I would have to make it up along the way.

You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world. LUCILLE BALL

“Baby girl, a woman should never compete for space in the mirror with her man.”

when fear is familiar it keeps you holding on—and its grip works both ways.

Your boyfriend should never scare you. Ever.

bifurcated.

The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it. JAMES BALDWIN

To be mixed race in America is to exist in a constant state of in-between. You have access to two worlds and are expected to be fluent in both, yet you never belong fully to either one. And as mixed kids know all too well, even in the in-between there is a spectrum.

It is the area where the Black kids congregate on campus. Where minorities go to become part of the majority. Where outsiders become insiders. No code switching. No “inside voices.” No one to remind you of the White Man’s rules. At my school, you could go to play dominoes with reckless abandon like they do on the corners of Black neighborhoods across America. You might experience an impromptu freestyle battle. You could participate in an educated debate on the merits of Tupac versus Biggie’s lyrical superiority. You could even get your hair braided at lunchtime—with beads! The Black Table is where you get to be among your people, to feel safe in your skin and inside your own self-made cultural cocoon. It is where you go to feel less alienated.

A place where Black kids learn to work twice as hard for equal treatment, or to behave as tropes, performing for entertainment value, or perhaps worse, to escape into invisibility. A majority White classroom rarely fosters a true sense of belonging for Black kids in America. Which is why the Black Table is sacred. For those who are welcomed in, it might offer the only moments of reprieve in one’s day.

It can also feel like an icy pit for anyone who is on the outside.

I had been looking at Blackness like it was a party I didn’t get the invite to. Like it was a dance someone forgot to teach me. But that night I learned that as much as it is our shared history and a pride in our culture that connects us, being part of the Black experience is being bonded by the painful and sometimes violent experience of exclusion.”

As a black woman, the decision to love yourself just as you are is a radical act. BETHANEE EPIFANI J. BRYANT

M. Foss seemed deeply interested in studying Black identity—and owning her own: Who Is Black? by F. James Davis, Watching Race by Herman Gray, Enlightened Racism by Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis, Caucasia by Danzy Senna. I wondered if she ever had the Race Conversation with her mom at the dinner table like I had or if her natural hair journey looked anything like mine.

Meeting M. Foss was like discovering a compass at a time in my life when I felt like I was wandering in the wilderness.

them uncomfortable. I had always loathed the superiority complex some mixed girls toted around like crowns. I could not stand it when Black girls pontificated about their trace percentages of Native American blood as a means of separating themselves from their own African lineage. Rather than heeding the urge to conform or shrink as a response to being “othered”—like I did at that sleepover with my White friends, and again at that college party—I saw the power in embracing all of what it means to be Black in America. This was precisely what my mom had been instilling in me since preschool. But it hadn’t clicked until now.

From that empowered place, I began experimenting with new ways to use my voice in my world.

I was mad because I was waking up to the ways in which society sets up Black people to hate ourselves. I was mad because so many of us are complicit in perpetuating this self-hating cycle of oppression, one designed to make us cling to Whiteness for validation. I was mad because of how insidiously racism works to keep us from claiming our beauty, our worthiness, our power. I was mad to see so many of us operating out of brokenness and shame. —

I HAD ALREADY BEGUN a deeper process of questioning everything, including my place in the world, beyond the suffocating confines of my college life in Sacramento. It was as if the winds of excitement just sort of blew right over it like a wasteland. Nothing magical, nothing exciting ever seemed to happen there—at least not to me. Especially after my breakup. I needed an escape from the sleepy college town where my social life had become a bit like walking a tightrope between Black and White worlds. In some ways, I felt stuck in a place I didn’t belong. I knew there was more—more to see, more to explore, more to experience. When your dreams are bigger than the places you find yourself in, sometimes you need to seek out your own reminders that there is more. And there is always more waiting for you on the other side of fear.