Growing up I was embarrassed by where I lived. And even today, some of my closest friends don’t know the details of my childhood. When my parents divorced my mother went back to work after being a stay-at-home mom for years. She tried to maintain our lifestyle, but eventually we had to move into government-subsidized housing, a cluster of apartments thirty minutes south of our old home.

I still had the opportunity to go to an excellent school because of my grandparents, but my life was obviously different than my schoolmates’. When asked, I told friends that I lived in my grandparents’ neighborhood, and I rarely invited anyone over for sleepovers. It seems silly now, but I was terrified of what people were going to think. So I pretended to be someone else.

It was an embarrassment then because I was a selfish child, unaware of the world and how bad things could be. Sure, I lived in a dangerous part of town and never once played outside, but I had advantages. I beat all the odds that said I would never amount to anything because I grew up in a poor single-parent home. To this day my mother still says, “You should be a statistic, but you’re not.”

I attribute most of my success to my family’s faith in God, but I understand if this means nothing to you. I also had a loving mother and grandparents who did everything they could to make sure I got a good education. And I did. I had the privilege of going to an excellent school, the other kids in my neighborhood did not.

As an adult, my childhood experiences have shaped my life in a number of ways. I’m not as selfish as a used to be, I have a soft heart for the downtrodden, but most importantly, my outlook on life is extremely different. Not a day goes by that I’m not thankful for my life. Pardon the cliche, but no matter how difficult things get, I’m quickly reminded that they could always be worse.

I’ve been thinking about my past a lot over the past few weeks and I think it has a lot to do with Chicago Now’s One Story Up, a blog about Chicago housing. This blog not only reminds me of my childhood, only a lot worse, it reminds me of the beat reporting I did in graduate school last year. I, too, reported on Chicago housing and development. Every day my heart broke listening to stories about gentrification, public housing and education. Every day I went home with a heart full of thanks that my hardships had only lasted 10 years and were not nearly as bad. Some people’s hardships last an entire lifetime.

If you’ve gotten this far down into my blog, thank you, but I’m sure you’re wondering where this story is going. So am I. I guess my point is this: we all come from somewhere. And sometimes that somewhere is a bad and awful place, but that doesn’t mean the rest of your life has to be that way. Look around you. Chances are, if you’re able to access the Internet and read this blog you’re better off than most. Start living that way.

Cabrini Green by TheeErin, Creative Commons License