Life isn’t happening to me, for the first time.” But even before HBO came calling and made her an overnight star, Schafer was already showing signs of a kind of preternatural sensitivity and creative purpose. Now I’m in this new phase where I’m kind of comfortable. But as soon as I started working and had a bare purpose, it’s easier to refer to parts of my life: when I was a contributor for Rookie”-Tavi Gevinson’s beloved online teen magazine-“when my first modeling agency took me out to New York, when Euphoria happened. “Mostly everything before I transitioned is a blur. The day I first started hormone therapy.” Her hands go on either side of the book, flattening the journal’s spine, to show her class photo from 2013, perhaps 2014, before all those firsts. I have all my thoughts about first transitioning. “I have tons of journals about falling in love for the first time. It’s also, she continues, a little mind-blowing to have accumulated an approximate autobiography. “It’s a little scary, just having it in a cardboard box,” she says. Schafer is in the process of digitally archiving this collection. Life isn’t happening to me, for the first time." “I’m in this new phase where I’m kind of comfortable. “Libra,” she says, with the relief of a big sister covering her bases.) She has put on the gray AndAfterThat hoodie she took from the floor of her costar Zendaya’s car (Schafer calls her “Z”) and wrapped her white-blond hair up in a high bun, and she is ready to show me the story of her life. (Schafer, the oldest of four, pauses when neither of us can remember what astrological season we’re in so that she can look it up. She just got off the phone with her second-youngest sibling to wish her a happy birthday. It’s the start of Schafer’s day off, and so far she has slept late to rest from shooting the show, which returns for a second season early this winter. She currently rents an apartment close to the set of Euphoria, the hit HBO teen drama in which she stars as Jules Vaughn, a new girl in town and the romantic heroine in the love story central to the ensemble cast. “Somehow, pen and paper end up in my vicinity,” the 22-year-old actress, artist, model, producer, and writer tells me as she sorts through the bound notebooks, their pages thick with collages from fashion- magazine cutouts. It is a sunny morning in October, and Hunter Schafer is sitting on the floor of her Hollywood apartment opening a cardboard storage box that contains a lifetime of journals.