SELF Magazine Is Closing, and I'm Not Over It

When I was maybe ten or eleven, before I knew I could write, I was convinced I was going to be a fashion designer. Or a makeup artist. The plan changed weekly. What didn't change was the ritual: cutting up magazine covers, doing my own makeup on the models with whatever drugstore eyeshadow I could get my hands on, and plastering them across my bedroom walls like I was curating something. SELF was always in that pile.

I found out last week that it's closing after 47 years, and I am genuinely sad.

Here's what I'm not sure anyone is saying: SELF wasn't just a health magazine. Growing up, surrounded by Allure and Glamour and Cosmo and Teen Vogue (RIP to another legend) — all those glossy, aspirational universes telling us to be smaller and prettier and more palatable — SELF was always just there. Telling us to get stronger, to understand what was happening in our own bodies, to actually show up for our own care. It was a different message. And for a lot of us, it helped quietly undo what we'd been absorbing for years, which was, mostly, that our bodies were problems to manage.

As someone who once dreamed of working within the walls of Condé Nast, this stings. As a founder who has spent years trying to do something similar — make women's health feel less confusing, less clinical, more like something that actually belongs to you — it feels like a small defeat.

Every outlet that takes women's health seriously makes that work a little more possible. Every one that closes makes it a little lonelier, and a little more urgent.