I never did get the second part to this, anon, but I figured it was worth posting anyway.
That’s the thing, isn’t it, that it does happen. And it says nothing bad about you as a person if it does. It’s something understandable, and not on anybody else to judge. It happens to a lot of people. Many of us have the luxury to not go through this experience, it doesn’t mean that’s universal.
In the case of Juls, she’s far more vulnerable than people think. Your environment affected you and hers is not exactly much better. She’s lost the only people she has and she’s NOT as superhuman and invincible as people think. It’s not OOC for her to be wildly insecure at times and make impulsive, bad decisions and to lash out. The way she yelled at Val over the scholarship, the way she yelled at Lupe at suggesting their worlds were different, things do get to her. Just because she puts on a show of bravado doesn’t mean she’s going through life without a care. She didn’t let Sergio drop off at her house, just because she hides her emotions, often behind anger, doesn’t mean she’s not feeling them.
And it is important, I think, to remember the audience and the creators here. These aren’t people who have seen this trope or written this trope a million times. This is to reflect new experiences in a very melodramatic way. We were lucky and we marveled at how they seemed to sidestep so many tropes we hate, but if you take our history with those tropes away from this, if you look at this as a story within its own environment, I think the main thing becomes how they frame it, as long as they don’t show it as any kind of good or necessary thing.