A girl finishes high school in this country and walks into one of the most consequential moments of her life with almost nothing in her hands. No real guidance. No knowledge of the funding that exists specifically for her. No mentor who looks like her, started like her, and made it through.
What she has instead is a social media feed that spent five years showing her a performance — carefully constructed, algorithmically optimised, emotionally engineered to make her feel like she is already behind in a race she never agreed to enter.
She believes it. Of course she believes it. She has been watching it every day since she was twelve.
So she drifts. Or she panics. Or she picks the safe option because nobody helped her see any other. She takes on debt for a degree she chose under pressure. She works jobs that have nothing to do with who she is. She quietly puts down the thing she was actually good at because everyone around her called it a hobby.
Meanwhile — and this is the part that should make you angry — there are billions of dollars in Canadian grants, subsidies, and micro-loans sitting unclaimed in government accounts. Allocated for her. For her age, her city, her situation. Unspent. Not because the money isn't there. Because nobody translated the eligibility requirements into language a 17-year-old working a retail shift could actually read and act on.
Meanwhile there are women in every Canadian city who started with nothing, found the funding, found the path, and built something that made them proud. Who would talk to any girl who asked. Whose number nobody ever gave her.
She is not behind. She was never behind. She was simply never told what was actually available to her.
