Multimedia Project

I’ve lived in Danville for thirteen years. My mother homeschooled me for most of my life and I began attending Danville public schools in fifth grade; all of my friends lived in Danville with me. For the first couple years here at Uni I felt right at home but recently I have begun to feel split between my school and my hometown. The socio-economic and cultural gap between the two communities is an increasing problem and because of it I don’t quite fit into either community anymore.

I find a stark contrast between my reality and the life of your average Uni student. My parents are divorced and I don’t have much communication with my father. My mom is a single mother and our family operates mainly off of the child support my father is required to pay. We fit in as upper-lower-class, and my mom has a very hands-off and trusting approach to parenting; thus I like to think I am rather independent. The majority of my life has been spent in Danville among people who are completely used to situations like mine, if not in a similar one themselves. It’s difficult to switch to a totally opposite community where not many understand what it’s like for money to be tight enough that our lives revolve around when my mom gets her paycheck, or what it’s like to have an overloaded single mother in a chaotic house full of kids. No matter how hard my friends in the Uni community try, they sometimes simply can’t fathom life without the privilege they’re accustomed to.

On one hand there’s Uni, a close-knit, friendly community of well-educated families who have worked very hard to achieve success. Then there’s Danville, a large and gritty community of mainly lower- to middle-class children of people who never quite managed to make it out of the quicksand that is a small hometown. The two worlds are already so different, and to make matters worse each world looks down on the other. My Uni friends see Danville people as ghetto, trashy, and painfully mediocre while my Danville friends see Uni people as pretentious, rich, and socially inept. The negative views each world has of the other upsets and affects me, but the people in each world are so different that their superiority complexes were inevitable. For example, the average Uni student would describe school and grades as incredibly important and essential and spend a lot of time outside of school studying or in extracurriculars that will beef up their college applications. My friends back home put a lot of focus on school, but school’s definitely not the most important thing in their life. I appreciate how much realer and grittier my Danville people are. Although neither world can completely understand me and my situation, Danville comes closest. They value relationships and enjoying life and spend their time hanging out with people, partying, going out, and being active. Because of their more reckless lifestyle, they end up getting involved in a lot of drama and issues such as pregnancy scares and police busts. It’s crazy when you think about how drastically different each world is.

Ultimately I’m not at all ashamed of my socio-economic status. If anything I’m proud of it- my economic class has given me experiences that my Uni friends don’t even know exist. I am an exponentially more independent, aware, and fully-developed person than most of the students I know at Uni because of my lifestyle and the struggles I have faced. I consider myself much more of a “whole” person because of the different perspectives I’ve experienced. Because of the independence, understanding of the world, awareness, and emotional maturity I have that most Uni students don’t, I wouldn’t give my lower-class background up for the world.

For this project I have decided to highlight the poverty that goes on in Danville, because I think that a lot of Uni students could benefit from hearing about lower-class lives that sound awful and crazy to us but are completely normal and expected among poor communities in Danville. I ended up interviewing my mom, who works at a local elementary school, about her experiences with children in poverty and how it affects them so that I could give you just a taste of what life is actually like outside of the upper-middle class world, just forty-five minutes away.
Here is the link to my audio interview: 
WikiUpload Free File Hosting

Update: Work, Work, and More Work

In my last blog post, I wrote about how I suddenly came into three jobs within the span of a couple weeks and how I expected them to affect me. It’s been two weeks since then and I’ve decided to write an update, as I’ve begun to grow accustomed to working and the jobs have proved to have a large effect on my life. In hindsight, I can’t think of a much worse time to have started working. I’ve had to add 25-30 hours of work to my already busy schedule just as teachers started piling on assignment after assignment because the end of the semester is marching closer. Once I get through the next couple of weeks and begin the second semester I should be a lot better off because the workload will be lighter and I will have found a better way to manage my schedule, but the remaining two weeks before finals are incredibly daunting to me.

When my working hours are added to the fact that I live in Danville and it takes an hour or two (depending on mode of transportation) to get to/from Champaign, I have very little time for sleep, friends/family, me time, schoolwork, etc. The sudden lack of time has already taken a toll on me. I’ve been turning in so much mediocre (and even just plain bad) work and I hate letting subpar work represent me as a student, but I simply haven’t had time to work on schoolwork to the extent that I’d like. For example, the other day I actually forgot that an essay was due and showed up to class without even an outline. I then had to write this entire paper on a night when I didn’t get home until 11:30pm. I ended up only getting three hours of sleep and my sleep deprivation skyrocketed. My fatigue then led to my schoolwork suffering more, which led to more stress and less sleep, and the cycle began.

It’s been really interesting to see how my work affects me mentally. As someone with depression and anxiety who needs a lot of time for myself to maintain a stable mental state, you’d figure that spending so much of my time working or at school would have taken a huge toll on me mentally. And when my busyness is paired with sleep deprivation, my mental state does plummet. But otherwise I’ve honestly been so busy that I simply haven’t had any time to feel much of anything at all. Which is awful because I love how I thrive on emotions. Still, it’s been a really nice break from the negative emotions that I’m so used to, and I just hope that it can last me through the end of the semester.

However while this adjustment has sucked so far, I think I’m over the worst of it. I’m a lot more caught up in my classes than I was even just a week ago. I’ve been getting about twice as much sleep over the past few days and today and yesterday I ended up having hours on end with nothing to do but catch up on time for myself. The adjustment was incredibly difficult for two or three weeks, but I’m certain that the hardest adjustment period is over and now I’m ready to face the rest of the school year head-on (and so ready for the paychecks to start rolling in).