33-year-old mother enrolled in high school as a 15-year-old

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The cheese slid off her cracker.

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Both oars not in the water.

Two cans short of a six pack.

One fry short of a Happy Meal.

Elevator not going to the top floor.

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“Yeah, maybe not!”

Jerri Blank lives.

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Maxine Houser? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N5kF_b6Ln0

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I went to the Atlantic article, and I’m sorry, but there’s no way that woman passes for a 15 year old. Hell she barely passes for 33.

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From the article:

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Come on, lady - 30-somethings only get to (unconvincingly) play teens in Hollywood productions.

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Won’t someone think like the children???

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But, high school sucked… why go back?

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That’s the funnest pull-qoute, but if one doesn’t read the article, definitely misleading as to the tone. This is an abused, neglected person in need of compassion and understanding. Her life, from her abusive mother, to struggles with bullying and a teenage pregnancy resulting form a lack of proper sex education spiraled and high school sports were her escape.

The article cited a handful of other cases of adults trying to go back to high school for athletic glory. I’m sure there are other cases of people wanting to start over. It seems like a natural impulse to me. Once you’re an adult and life has momentum in a shitty direction, there aren’t set milestones for re-invention like middle-school -> high school, high school -> college, or just each new fall.

I don’t know. I kinda get it.

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“And though the faces may have changed, the hassles are just the same!”

I think it’s a tragedy really. After reading the article, it’s clear that she’s gone through abusive hell in life, has ended up with some pretty severe mental health issues, and was trying to ‘go back in time’ to fix her life where she felt like it all went wrong.

Some of the comments here are a little cruel really. Yes, she does have mental health problems, but making fun of her for them, doesn’t exactly help to end the stigma. I know she’s not reading this, but other people with mental health issues are, so are their families and friends, so… maybe a little consideration. Or, maybe I’ve just had a sense of humour fail. Probably because her story, once I read it all, just seems so sad to me.

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If I could go back and relive it knowing what I know now high school would be awe…wait, I guess it would just suck in entirely new ways.
I came perilously close there to forgetting the lesson of Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment by Nathaniel Hawthorne which I first read in high school.

Edited to add: Thank you @slinkywitch for pointing out how sad this story really is. I shouldn’t have treated it lightly. This part is exceptionally disturbing.

When Brown’s mother found out about her vomiting, she asked her straight up: “Are you pregnant?” It was impossible, Brown thought. She was whippet-thin. And anyway, she thought the way she and her boyfriend did it was safe. “I didn’t know what made you pregnant,” she told me. “My mother never talked to me about things like that.”

Actually it’s just the beginning of a sad series of events. Something very similar happened to Lizz Winstead, creator of The Daily Show. It’s terrible so many young women go through this.

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Student 1: Does the new girl seem unusually, uh, mature to you?
Student 2: Shh! Let’s just be nice and see if we can get her to buy us booze.

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What she needs is anime

Huh, maybe there’s a reason why anime has this consistent HS setting in nearly every series.

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On the contrary. The article details a truly sad history of abuse at the hands of her mother, her husband and pretty everyone else in her life. She was trying to relive the childhood she wanted, not the one she had. She needs mental healthcare, not jail time.

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Fair enough. reads article Well, that’ll teach me to make pithy, off-the-cuff comments based on assumptions. Deleting my prior comment.

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On one level the sentence is acceptable - identity theft is a crime, after all. But is jail time really a useful solution? A treatment would have helped her much more, and I think it is possible for US judges to show creativity?

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