The show was about to start. My heart was pounding with the music as I tried not to topple over in my heels while looking for my seat. The fake fur draped over my shoulders was threatening to fall off. I found my seat: front row, midway down the catwalk. Attendees were dressed to the nines, and I was prepared. I religiously followed Fashion Week street-style blogs, and I knew the drill—the more outrageous, the better. (A neon-green one-shoulder top, striped pants, and heels so tall I can barely walk? Sure, why not!) There was a party around me. Compliments: Kiss kiss. OMG, you look incredible. And side-eyes: Who is that again?

I had just turned forty and was six months into my job as executive editor of Teen Vogue. I’d been a feminist writer and critic for almost fifteen years, and even though I’d always been interested in fashion, I’d also been vocally critical of its untenable standards. Still, here I was— a fat, brown feminist writer turned fashion magazine editor, sitting in the front row of Fashion Week. I posted endless selfies on Instagram (“Baby’s first #NYFW”), tagging the brands of my group-text-approved outfits, welcoming the “yasss queens” in my comments. I felt hot, uncomfortable, and a little ridiculous, but it was worth it. I was participating in something I had secretly fantasized about—the upper echelon of New York City life and culture. After years of criticizing the elitism and exclusiveness of these very spaces, I was sitting in the belly of the beast.

This, I told myself, is what making it feels like.

Teen Vogue had recently started covering feminism and social justice in earnest, and I’d gotten hired to polish the coverage. Fashion Week wasn’t exactly an essential part of my job, but I felt pressure to not only be part of this new group but also be seen in it. Attending felt like another way to stretch myself in my career, meet new people, and belong to another community. And let’s be honest: It was fun. I was ascendant. I was becoming someone more momentous and more exciting than just an editor.

I can now see that this fabulous story I had been telling the world wasn’t particularly true. I felt out of place at that fashion show, like I was watching myself in a movie about someone else’s life. The veneer of social media often glosses over what’s really happening in people’s lives, and I was no exception. Posting those pictures allowed me to deflect what was actually going on.

The real story was that the previous year I had been let go from a job, which had led to months of depression and uncertainty about my career and financial future. My dad’s health was in bad shape, as were my parents’ finances. I regularly took time out of my “glamorous” New York City life to head upstate on Metro-North and visit my dad in depressing hospital rooms or in our cluttered house in the exurbs. I resented how anxious, exhausted, and worried it made me. I hadn’t dated in months, and I was often too tired to catch up with friends. Instead I stayed at the office until well past dinner. And my feet always hurt. I was at the apex of my career, but I was dissociated from the realty of my actual life. As I sat in the front row that day, I was 80 percent faking it with a 100-percent-real Gucci bag.

When I think of that era, the very real highs—there was a lot I loved about the job, and I felt fiercely loyal to my team—are coupled with the unavoidable lows of limping home at night, struggling to keep my eyes open after back-to-back days full of meetings and managing difficult personalities with few breaks. I told myself, though, that this was what making it meant. It meant you were tired. Frazzled. That you sacrificed friendships and resented your family for needing you. That you stress-ate and paid too much for lattes and ignored it when your doctor was alarmed by your latest bloodwork. It meant you worked twelve hours a day and came home with painful feet.

This was simply what it cost to flourish. To be a “success story.”

I never would have called myself a girlboss—I am too old for that, and the pink “she-conomy,” Type-A, organized, SoulCycle devotee was never my style. I would have never claimed to be “leaning in”—it is too neoliberal for my leftist tastes. But what’s inescapable to me now is how thoroughly I had bought into certain myths about what it means to be a woman who is “getting ahead at work.” I told myself I was loving it. I was like a coach who couldn’t stop giving pep talks: “This is awesome” or “I’m so happy to be here.” And sometimes it was even true. If work meant sacrificing everything, then I’d sacrifice.

Then, one day, it all came crashing down.

I’m not alone. Millions of women and nonbinary people in the past decade—and especially during and after the pandemic—have looked at their lives and said, “What the fuck?”

Why are we working all the time to make less than our male counterparts?

Why are we doing most of the childcare even when our partnerships are “equal”?

Why have we sacrificed so much of our personal happiness to be driven by these undefined measures of success?

Why are we spending more time with our coworkers than with anyone else in our lives?

Why are we tired all the time?

For a while there, many of us faithfully followed a certain vision of what it meant to be killing it at work. Want to earn more? Want to get ahead? It was nothing a little girlbossing, leaning in, and hustling couldn’t help you achieve. If you worked hard enough, you could over- come any obstacle in your way. It was just a matter of putting in the time, working your network, and being smart and hyperorganized about it.

But recently we’ve seen the cracks start to show. What this ethos leaves out is the many, many roadblocks women face that can’t be hus- tled through, no matter how hard they work. Things like unequal pay, cost-prohibitive child- and medical care, lack of affordable housing, and student debt. If you’re a person of color, poor, disabled, queer, and/or gender nonconforming, the walls you may hit at work are likely to be even more complex. During the past few years, many of us woke up to the reality that we were trying to find individual solutions for systemic issues. So, we sit now at a career crossroads, wondering what our next move is.

The truth is we still have to navigate these imperfect systems. We have to find ways to earn money while maintaining some sense of morality but also while being able to pay our rent or our parents’ rent or to have a child and put them through college or, I don’t know, finally go on that vacation.

But despite knowing that we can’t push ourselves and our bodies any harder and knowing that if we lean in any further we’ll break our faces on our desks, we are still ambitious, we still dream, and we still want to do great things. Even while intimately knowing about all those structural barriers, we still want to build full, free, satisfying lives for ourselves.

The question is, How do we do that?

Perhaps the first step to answering this is figuring out, as the philosopher Brian Massumi calls it, our “margin of maneuverability.” The Canadian philosopher suggests that, rather than giving in to pessimism and inaction when the events of the world feel dreadful, a person ought to turn their attention to what is possible. He suggests that uncertainty is, in fact, an opportunity to give a person space for optimism, for possibility, for hope, and for making empowering decisions.

This is the same uncertainty in which many of us stand today. Every day, we are faced with the horrors of everything from skyrocketing inequality to unregulated guns to racial injustice to never-ending wars to climate catastrophes to ongoing threats to our bodily autonomy. And, in the middle of all that, the way we work has become untenable, both personally and globally. We are craving something more and something better.

What is the space between what we can actually do in our lives and what is insurmountable or unattainable without collective effort? We have an opportunity to rethink what ambition means, and, contrary to the hustle mantras on which we were raised, we can’t do it alone.

This book is not a how-to manual. What I explore instead are the bigger questions that undergird our desire to get ahead: What fuels our aspirations, and what keeps us yearning for more? I start by considering how corporate feminism set us up to fail. I then examine the roots of the myths we buy into about work and revisit what hasn’t worked and what we can learn from that. The second half of the book is about my own experiences as a manager and as a woman of color navigating environments that are often inherently unequal. About when diversity and inclusion is important but also when it is not enough. I reckon with our relationship to burnout and the corresponding pressure for self-care. Finally, I consider what ambition ultimately means and where it is leading us.

But I also consider where we have had small wins and how they can add up to a bigger one—making it possible for all of us, despite our different places in the economy, to fight for global worker solidarity— and how we can become radicalized workers or leaders, while also prioritizing happiness in our own humble lives. What, ultimately, does real success look like? What does it truly mean to make it? Think of this book as the friend and mentor you’ve needed, who’s trying to help you answer those questions.

I’m not coming to you as someone who has it figured out. Quite the opposite. I wrote this book because I’ve done this and that job, and I wanted to share what I’ve learned and talk to other people about what they see, too. I wanted to feel heard and seen in my experience, which is both unique to me and also very not unique at all. I was shocked to learn that those in my life who look like they have it all were either unhappy, stressed, anxious, or in constant fear of things falling apart. And all I could think was, This is not normal. There must be a better way.

My hope is, together, we can find it.

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