Even better would be not losing her face to begin with.
This was preventable.
Am I the only one to notice the events that led up to this?
1. Young girl moves multiple times due to her parent’s jobs, causing for stress and anxiety.
2. Girl finds stability and passion when she is granted an encouraging educational experience/environment at a private school where her parents both found contract jobs.
3. Parents both lost their contract jobs on the same day.
4. As a result of her parents losing their jobs, she could no longer go the school, because her parents could not afford it.
5. Her boyfriend who went to that school cheated on her.
6. She shot herself in the face.
Getting cheated on in high school happens. It’s a painful experience but it’s generally a pretty good time for it to happen, because (ideally) you’re in a secure place where you can experience pain without existential loss.
Moving is rough, but not nearly as rough as having your family morph between social classes. This sort of thing is just evil for a child. Either up or down is just awful. Neither you or your peers have any context for what is happening. You’re entirely misunderstood and feel out of place. I will not have kids unless I can be reasonably certain they won’t have to experience this. In her case, her family was never even in the social class she acclimated to. This is one seriously dirty trick, especially for a child. Obviously her family was doing everything they could for her. This was just out of their control.
To face those complex realities that define your entire world and have it thrown in your face by your boyfriend cheating on you with someone else, both of whom presumably had the security of surplus income supporting their education and social life, is really bad. But we forget how much worse this is for a child.
Children in high school are smart. They understand a lot of stuff, even the difference between rich and poor. But they should only be expected to be able to make sense of so much at a time. The whole idea of this stage is to develop a stable self-identity in an environment encouraging of education and confidence. She lost both in the blink of an eye.
And she had to face the reality that going to another school like the one where she had found passion and nourishment was all just short of not happening.
This is just one of the reasons these games we play with education funding and classism are sick. This girl did not have to be in her situation.
We love to talk about how competition motivates innovation, but it also motivates economic rollercoasters. Maybe adults can handle that, but children simply can’t. This is one disgusting way to live and kids all over America are riding this rollercoaster while their parents do everything in their mighty will to give them a stable healthy existence.
But we’ve created an America where an honest living means a shitty school and an existence no more stable than a contract job. Nobody thinks about what this does to the kids. All they see is innovation.