Paris: A Memoir for Young Women in the Age of Influencers

Know your worth, girls. You’re not lucky to be at the party; the party is lucky to have you. Apply as needed to relationships, jobs, and family.

There are so many young women who need to hear this story. I don't want them to learn from my mistakes; I want them to stop hating themselves for mistakes of their own. I want them to laugh and see that they do have a voice and their own brand of intelligence and, girl, fuck fitting in.

It's humbling to be reminded that no matter how big your life is, you are still a speck of dust that can be swept off this earth in half a second.

Don’t waste energy living a life someone else designed for you. Life is one per customer. Let them do theirs. You do yours.

Here’s what I believe: Your reality is totally up for grabs; if you don’t create your own life, someone else will create something based on their own agenda and project that on you. Don’t let them do it, my loves. Don’t let them tell you that their something is bigger than your everything.

Some friendships just have their seasons, and that's ok.

The people who hurt you don’t get the last word. You get to tell the story of you, and “your story has more power than you can imagine.

I know we’re supposed to spin terrible things to make it sound like they were actually good, but that’s bullshit. That heart attack did not save your life. Cancer is not a gift. Your abuser did not give you strength. Terrible things are terrible. Let’s just acknowledge it. If you found strength, wisdom, or a new way of thinking, that’s awesome, but notice that the strength, wisdom, and new worldview came out of you, which means it was all there inside you to begin with.

True sophistication is the ability to fit in anywhere, because you have a broad understanding of and respect for all kinds of people.

Every eighth-grade girl is rare and precious. Every eighth-grade girl is a treasure, like a priceless work of art, so you’d like to think that every eighth-grade teacher will be like a security guard in an art gallery. He’s not there to enjoy the beauty; he’s there to protect it. He’s there to enforce the rules, and Rule Number One is: DO. NOT. TOUCH. Keep your fingers, lips, and man bits off the masterpieces. It should be obvious that the Girl with a Pearl Earring deserves a chance to smile her wistful smile without some creepy guy feeling her up. Because damage to that precious work of art can be hidden, but it can never be undone.

I’m just saying, grace is available to all of us if we make it available to each other.

The rise of selfie culture isn’t about vanity; it’s about women taking back control of our images—and our self-images. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Discuss amongst yourselves.

When you endure horror day after day, month after month, it becomes normalized. I built high stone walls around my heart—walls that no one could break through or climb over for more than twenty years. My MO was to not think about it, not talk about it. Don’t feed the beast. Don’t give it any oxygen. It’ll go away. For a long time, I made that work, but every now and then, some random thing would trigger a flood of memory and anxiety and crush my soul all over again.

Girl-shaming as a sport and industry needs to be over.

One priceless bit of advice my great-grandfather fave my grandfather, and my grandfather gave me: "Success is never final. Failure is never fatal.

There is a hierarchy, and these are the rules in my family: If you don’t talk about a thing, it’s not a problem. If you hide how deeply something hurt you, it didn’t happen. If you pretend not to notice how deeply you hurt someone else, you don’t have to feel bad about it.

I don’t choose to revisit that which is divisive. I’m only interested in that which is healing.

Secrets are corrosive. Secrets destroy anything you try to layer over them. It’s like using concealer to cover a black eye. You can hide it, but that’s not the same as healing.

Trauma often robs a person of the surrounding memories—which is inconvenient, but merciful

If the rest of the world says you're obnoxious or stupid or just not braining right, loving yourself is an act of rebellion, which is beautiful but exhausting, especially if you're a little kid.

Doing advocacy work in the troubled-teen space has taught me the toxic nature of silence and shame, and looking back, I see myself trying so hard to reestablish ownership of my body, to reclaim what was natural and good in me, and that made a lot of people so uncomfortable, they didn’t look beyond it or wonder, “What’s really going on with this kid?

The primary disadvantage of ADHD is that people around you are often inconvenienced, weirded out, or hurt by your behavior, so you're constantly getting judged and punished, which makes you feel like shit. Suicidal ideation is higher in people with ADHD. Self-loathing and self-medication are endemic. If the rest of the world says you're obnoxious or stupid or just not braining right, loving yourself is an act of rebellion, which is beautiful but exhausting, especially if you're a little kid. With that needy little kid always inside you, your life becomes an epic quest for love--or whatever feels like love in the moment.

Girls like me assumed we’d be judged and belittled, we expected girls to be sexualised and then condemned for their sexuality, punished for both silence and speaking out, told we should accept responsibility for our choices and then called crazy or stupid or slutty if we didn’t live by the rules other people chose for us.

True sophistication is the ability to fit in anywhere because you have a broad understanding of and respect for all kinds of people.

Know your worth, girls. You're not lucky to be at the party, the party is lucky to have you. Apply as needed to relationships, jobs, and family.

It should be obvious that the Girl with a Pearl Earring deserves a chance to smile her wistful smile without some creepy guy feeling her up. Because damage to that precious work of art can be hidden, but it can never be undone. My

Casting him in the role of child molester meant casting myself in the role of victim, and I just couldn’t go there. I couldn’t accept that all his praises—all those affirmations an eighth-grade girl desperately needs to hear—came from a place of malevolence, and I was stupid and vain enough to buy it.

Maybe if one of them had told someone, it wouldn't have happened to me. And maybe if I had told someone, it wouldn't have happened to someone else.

I try not to think about how easily I slipped through a crack in the floor. It’s like, if you were walking down the street with your friends, and suddenly one of them slipped down an open manhole, you’d notice, wouldn’t you? I certainly would! I mean . . . I think I would. I hope I would. Or maybe we’re all so focused straight ahead, people slip away when we’re not looking.