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The Secret Witness
Teenagers Are Telling Us That Something Is Wrong With America
We’ve long known that suicide can be contagious without quite understanding how or why…
B. also spoke to the contradictions of her parents, who seemed unhappy in their work, in their role as parents…. Yet…they were pushing their daughters toward the same kinds of achievements and the same lifestyle…Why, she proclaimed, would she want any of this, and why do they want her to pretend as if she wants it?…
…A. wants to be an artist and she has a special talent for it, but when her sense of self feels so precarious….we all have these questions about how precarious life has to be in this country…
…a fantasy of withdrawal…. B. wants to move to the countryside and raise dogs: “beautiful, innocent, fluffy dogs, just like mine!” She doesn’t want to work, or make money, or have children, or be with anyone really.
“I looked in the mirror and I couldn’t recognize myself,”…
…one can often find in the stories of adolescent, mostly white, male school shooters the same set of difficulties swimming around identity, a self that is falling apart…The 15-year-old who is accused of killing four students at his high school in Oxford, Mich., in 2021, wrote in his journal: “the first victim has to be a pretty girl with a future so she can suffer…
