Winona Dimeo-Ediger

5. No one person can meet all your needs. Expecting your partner to meet all your needs is a recipe for disaster. There is no one person on earth who can single handedly meet all your social, intellectual, sexual, physical, and emotional needs.

When you’re helping people zip up dresses and watching their reactions to certain items of clothing, you start noticing patterns. Here are four of the phrases I hear most often in the dressing room, and how I wish — oh, how I wish! — I could respond.

1. If you want vulnerability and honesty from the other person, YOU have to be honest and vulnerable. This is probably the singular reason WTF has been so wildly successful: the interviews/conversations are beautifully real and raw and honest. Guests reveal secrets, fears, and sadness. They open up about tough topics, often prefacing with, “I’ve never talked about this publicly before.” Marc draws out that raw honesty because he’s willing to be raw and honest himself.

Welcome to the Proud Coven of Secondhand Shoppers, my dear! I’m sorry your entry into our well-dressed, eco-friendly, budget-abiding coven wasn’t a happy or voluntary one, but now that you’re here, let me assure you that thrifting is not scary or gross, and in fact can be super-fun.

Dear Winona,

You might think that being on a budget means you can’t afford to dress like a super rich, fashion-forward celebrity, but girlfriend, you are wrong about that!

I’d been so busy patting myself on the back for conquering my big fears, I failed to acknowledge that the types of things that scare me had shifted. A lot of the obvious stuff didn’t bother me anymore — but what about all the smaller, more personal things that still scared the living shit out of me?

The thing is, we soak in these body-judging lessons from a very young age, before we even know how damaging they are. Some of the messages are implicit, like when we see a fat girl getting made fun of on the playground (or, for many of us, when we are the fat girl getting made fun of on the playground) and learn that being fat is not just wrong, it’s a punishable offense.

A New York Times editorial about women’s proclivity for apologizing for things that aren’t their fault has been making the rounds on social media this week. For many of us, the article hit home in a pretty profound way, especially the scene where the author, Sloane Crosley, described saying “sorry” multiple times for a restaurant messing up her order, something over which she had absolutely no control and in fact should have been receiving apologies for.

12. Was someone just like, “I have a great idea: let’s shave part of a goat and then kind of ball up the hair and glue a pin on the back and call it a goat hair brooch”?