It’s not often you feel like you’re getting schooled in life lessons by someone who’s barely entered adolescence, but Rowan Blanchard is no ordinary teenager. Star of the Disney series Girl Meets World since 2014, these days Blanchard is also a writer, political activist and role model to some 3.5 million Instagram followers. At 14 — an age most of us were drinking cheap booze out the bottle in a park — Blanchard is busy reading the work of feminists like Gloria Steinem and Roxanne Gay, and articulately speaking out about gender equality everywhere from Twitter to the UN. The rest of the time, she assures me, she can be found dancing to Beyoncé in her bedroom. Song choices: ‘‘Flawless” for when she “needs to get in an egocentric mind set”, “Haunted” when she’s feeling “dramatic and intense”.

It’s easy to see how the LA-raised teenager has built such a huge legion of young, adoring fans; she’s honest, she’s personable, and she bravely engages with issues that matter. Following in the footsteps of other former Disney Channel stars Demi Lovato and Miley Cyrus, she has become a much-needed advocate for LGBTQ rights, and has recently tweeted that she identifies as queer herself. Back in December, she wrote a feminist essay on Rookie.com, run by her friend Tavi Gevinson, who Blanchard describes as “really delightful person and completely non-judgemental”. Titled “Sorry Not Sorry”, the essay charts Blanchard’s tendency to be over-apologetic — a bad habit that she sees as symptomatic of being female. “Adolescence, specifically girl adolescence, is confusing,” she writes. “I have treated, specifically, male feelings and ego as superior to and more fragile than my own.”

Over the phone from London to west LA, I ask Rowan why she decided to write about being Sorry Not Sorry.“I think I felt a need to write that piece because I was sick of apologising for things that I really shouldn’t be sorry for,” she says, with all the exasperation of someone in their 30s. “I see it now with my young sister and it scares me because I know at that age, when I was 12, I would literally spend 45 minutes putting on a whole face of make-up, when I really didn’t want to, but because I genuinely felt that if somebody saw me with my dark eye circles or a blackhead, that I’d risk offending them. You are supposed to say ‘I’m sorry’ for things that you’re not sorry for, especially to men. When I wrote the piece for Rookie it was kind of me trying to get other girls to start accepting themselves, but it was about me trying to get myself to stop apologising, too.”

Needless to say, the essay went viral. Whether it was Blanchard’s admission that, “What seems like the total end of the world, while valid, is not (usually) the end of the world in a week” – or her “know that you are enough for yourself” mantra – something in her words resonated with girls everywhere. Blanchard uses social media to put out similarly empowering messages; see Instagram for pics of her notepad, scrawled with things like “go and make things you’ve dreamed about” and “who cares what middle-aged men think”, bookended by cute selfies, naturally. In October, she even teamed up with Instagram for #MyStory: a campaign that encouraged young girls to discuss their personal experiences. Also involved were photographer Petra Collins, who shot Blanchard for Wonderland and artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, whose work tackles street harassment.

“I think social media is such a tool for people in my age group and such a tool for girls particularly. My mum started using Instagram and Twitter for me when I was like nine and, like, I had followers but I didn’t really know anything. I only started using Instagram and Twitter myself when I turned 12. I feel like that’s where I started finding things that affected me, particularly politics. I learned through social media that we often talk about America like it’s a totally equal place, but that’s not always the case. You think certain things happen in third-world countries or places that are really far away from where you live, but through social media I realised that things are happening right in front of me.”

White applique organza tank dress by COACH and pink cotton t-shirt by MSGM