Zadie Smith writes in the New Yorker about being (and having) a teenager. I have one myself and they’re having a rough time right now. Some of this brought comfort:

Watching girls gather outside the multiplexes this past summer, choosing between “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” I thought, Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. Brittle, impossible perfection on the one hand; apocalypse on the other. 

It’s a funny story, filled with standout bits like this:

I had been banging essentially the same drum since I was eleven. I’m deep/you’re shallow. You’re rich/I’m poor. You’re beautiful/I’m clever. You’re popular/I’m interesting. And so on. Now I was seventeen. Yet I was still spending an astounding amount of time accusing other people of preoccupations that in reality filled my every waking hour.

and this:

Sometimes I ask myself: What would teen-age me do with her misery now? Where can a twenty-first-century girl go these days to retreat from reality? (If the answer “the Internet” comes to mind, I’m guessing you’re either over fifty or else somehow still able to imagine the Internet as separate from “reality.”)

It’s a piece I’m probably going to come back to. Give it a read.