“If I just let them assume, they’ll assume I have the same kind of stuff as them.”

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Transcript for Please Don’t Come To My House

Uh, the early parts of my childhood, uh, my family moved around a lot. So we weren’t in one place until I was about four, uh, because my dad was getting his doctorates. So, um, a lot of my early childhood is of out east.

Uh, but then as I got older, we moved into Joliet-ish area. Um, kind of in the suburbs of Chicago. And I went to this school for gifted kids in the area that was really like culturally diverse. Um, and I really…I was happy there, but my parents were worried about the quality of the high schools there. So later they ended up moving us into more of a, um, uh…I don’t know, I’m not going to say like a higher class, but just not as urban kind of neighborhood and so…that was really hard for me because all of the sudden, instead of going to this school that was really diverse, where you know like white kids were in the minority, uh, all of a sudden there were like maybe two black kids in like the whole school.

I wouldn’t consider myself especially wealthy. Um, so I live in like a pretty small house and everything, and so growing up with all those kids with like these giant mansions, like you could visit their house and it was like, “Ahhh. Please don’t come to my house. We only have one story and I live in the basement.” And like….that was always really awkward too, because you’d have group projects and it’d always be like, “Please please please please please let someone else volunteer their house because I really don’t want anyone to come over.”

I was worried that if they saw my house and they saw like the kind of state it was in, they would feel sorry for me? Oh goodness, there was, uh, there was this school dance. A friend invited me and we all went in a group, and afterwards we went back to her house. And she has, like, she lives in this giant house, and there’s this long table with all these, like, uh, like fancy dishes and stuff set out. And we all sat down and her mom served us like mousse. Like chocolate mousse with like these, um dessert straws poking out of it.

And, like, I just looked around and there was like a grand piano in the corner and, um, this huge entertainment system. And I was like, “This is so different. This is completely different. Like, we’ve got a TV in my house that’s from like the 90’s and we hooked a digital cable box up to it and it still works and it’s awesome. And, it was just…yeah. That was really…that’s that level where you’re like, “I really hope they never want to come to my house because if I just let them assume, they’ll assume I have the same kind of stuff as them.” When we relate with other people, when we don’t know things about them, we kind of fill in the gaps for ourselves. And we usually fill those gaps in based on ourselves. You know, i think it’s one of the Freud defense mechanisms. And I, like you…I mean, it’s just kind of embarrassing.