At 11 years old, I was a victim of a secret three-way call. My so-called friend at the time kept pressuring me to reveal what I really thought about our mutual friend. After a lengthy interrogation, frustrated and cornered, I finally blurted out an offhand comment about how her constant giggling and “sunshine” personality were annoying.

The response was immediate and brutal: laughter — not from one, but two sixth-grade girls — echoed down the landline. I was devastated. My private thoughts, which I never intended to share, were weaponized against me. They were exposed, ridiculed and used as ammunition. That betrayal cut deep.

It wouldn’t be the last time my unfiltered observations about the world or people would get me into trouble. Have you ever read the comment section of a woman’s writing on the internet? Or checked her inbox after sharing an honest, vulnerable thought? It’s often an unforgiving place. As an adult, online responses to my thoughts have pushed me away from online spaces for months at a time.

Around the same time as that tween hazing ritual, “Harriet the Spy” — a classic coming-of-age film starring Michelle Trachtenberg as the film’s namesake — was released. The film, based on the 1964 novel by Louise Fitzhugh, follows 11-year-old Harriet M. Welsch, an aspiring writer whose early craft is as an amateur spy. She spends her days observing the lives of the people around her, taking notes on their behaviors and secrets in a notebook. However, when her private thoughts and observations are accidentally revealed to her friends, they turn against her.

Trachtenberg, 39, was found dead in her New York City apartment on Wednesday; her co-stars Rosie O’Donnell, Blake Lively, Kenan Thompson and more have paid tribute online. Fans have flooded social media with appreciation for her work — especially other millennials like me who recognized themselves in her characters.

Harriet, like so many girls at that age, craved to understand the world around her. She wasn’t merely a nosy girl; she sought understanding — of strangers and of the people in her life. I was no different. I had my diaries, journals and secret binders, each one a place I tried to untangle the mess of adolescence. It was in those notebooks that I began to make sense of the chaos, interrogating the conversations I transcribed and the behaviors I described, searching for clues about my acceptance, my place in the world and the shifting tides of friendship and identity. In those pages, I began to piece together who I was — or at least who I hoped to become.

After bullying escalated in sixth grade, I transferred to a new school; my mom was a teacher there. As the new girl, my only power was my ability to observe and reflect, carefully walking a tightrope between cliques, watching for subtle signs of loyalty or discord, taking note of jean choices or jewelry or shoes. What would it take to fit in here? Who did I need to look out for? Who could I trust?

So, like Harriet, I began my own secret spy career. Like Harriet, I was an observer — insatiably curious, easily obsessed and stubborn to fault. For me, writing became a way to process the complexities of human behavior.

Over the years, I learned the importance of being discerning with my language. How much of a story should I tell? Which details should I leave out, and which should I highlight? These decisions shape the narrative, just as our interpretations of the people in our lives shape the characters in our stories. This was what felt so real about Harriet: She simply wrote what she saw, what she thought, and what she felt. She was the epitome of a first draft.

The summer before seventh grade, I typed up a dossier on every significant peer from the past two school years. Each section was filled with raw, unfiltered thoughts — good, bad, innocuous and boring. I printed it on dot matrix paper and folded it accordion-style into a storage bin where it has stayed ever since (currently in my basement in a larger storage container with other adolescent creations). It wasn’t intended for anyone else to read. It was my personal record, my way of processing how my friend groups had fallen apart and how the people around me had become unpredictable.

Occasionally, I remember it, I come back to it for nostalgia’s sake, and I’m always shocked at how accurate my memory is of the events I wrote down right as or after they happened. Or is this just part of the same story I’ve always been telling? My memory is clear and accurate because it’s what I want to remember. Because I made it part of my story when I was writing it. It’s true to me, but it’s not necessarily true to those I wrote about.

It is a harsh lesson Harriet has to learn: that just because something she wrote is true to her doesn’t make it the end of the story.

As Harriet navigated the fallout from her revelations, she began to reflect on whether she could have both friends and be a spy. “If I had to choose,” she wondered, “I’d pick spy. Maybe you’re not allowed to have both.”

I asked myself the same question countless times while rewatching that bright orange Nickelodeon VHS tape as a preteen. Being a spy meant I could write. I could look around the room and channel all my judgments — fair or not — into understanding the world around me. Like Harriet, there was no choice to make. To be a spy was to be a writer, and that’s the way I saw the world.

As an adult, I understand the deeper question Harriet was really grappling with: Are girls allowed to be their authentic selves and still be valued? To observe the world around us, to question, to write, and to express those thoughts — can we truly do that and avoid fallout?

Having recently moved into a new home, I came across the bin containing my old dot matrix paper dossier — my spy notebook, my manuscript, my collection of findings and observations. It felt like uncovering a lost relic from my past. As an aspiring memoirist, like Harriet, I will always have my notebooks.

But now, I’m more intentional with my words. I don’t lie, as Harriet’s former beloved nanny and confidant Golly (O’Donnell) suggested about “little lies” that spare others’ feelings, but I conceal, trim and squeeze through small cracks, hiding some parts while letting others surface. I consider what impact my carefully molded perspective of an event, a topic or time frame in my life will have. I consider who will read it and why. Harriet, too, eventually learned that the power of her voice came with the responsibility to be judicious. But she didn’t let others steal her voice or silence her for having something to say.

I take that lesson with me every time I receive an email from a man who’s angry about my opinion or that I had the audacity to publish it. It’s a reminder that examining the world around you, reflecting on it, and then using your voice to comment — especially as a woman — often comes with a cost. At 11 years old, I was lucky to have Harriet to show me the cost is worth it.