You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession

by Piper Weiss

All that keeps you from disappearing is another person who sees you. What happens when they look away?

I hate being left out of conversations about me. Somewhere inside them lies the truth about who I am, but I’m not allowed to hear it.

The bond between two girls surrounded by boys is so fragile, always threatened by embarrassment, especially if that embarrassment isn’t shared.

What’s most insufferable about privilege—whether white, wealthy, physically able, or free from the trauma of abuse—is the denial of its existence. The assumption that we are all the same. That some small emotional bruise you once had is comparable to the jagged head wound another endured, the memory of its stages—watery, crusted and matted, clean and indented but never entirely gone.

The notion of self-improvement is particular to girls and women. That perfection myth that begins with our bodies in adolescence continues to rear its head through adulthood, even when reframed as empowerment.