Who am I? Well my name
is Stephanie, I’m a transfer student from City College and I am a junior. I am
Dominican, born and raised in NYC. I also happen to be the only one of my mother’s
children to one, be a girl, and two, graduate from high school and attend
college. I have 3 brothers, 2 of which were born in the Dominican Republic and
a younger one who was born here and has cerebral palsy. Having 3 brothers had
its own challenges growing up and having one with special needs even more. Add to
that the pressures one faces in school and ones’ peers, and pressure from your
family to do well in life. Since I was a
little girl, I felt that it was essential that I make something of myself so
that I could not only provide a better life for my mom and family, but to also
make them proud. This also so a way for me to prove to myself I didn’t need to
have a father to be successful. However, growing up in a male dominated
household I found myself fighting for my mother’s attention. My mom was a
single mother which is one of the hardest jobs on the planet, added to the fact
that my younger brother is a special needs child, her mind was always in a
constant state of stress. I was young, it was hard for me to understand that at
times, she just simply preoccupied with other things or the needs of my brother
outweighed mine, which is why me and my mother used to bump heads all the time
and I basically learned how to do things on my own.
I hated my reality was
desperate to escape it somehow and that is I guess, where my media consumption
began. I read a lot, immersing myself in someone else’s struggles or escaping
to a far away land. For me, it helped me to not feel so alone and also gave me something
to do when I was home.I also began to watch a lot of TV, when I was around 11
we got cable for the first time and I was obsessed with Disney Channel. I would
watch these shows with these “perfect” families and wondered why my family couldn’t
be like the ones I saw on TV or why me and my mother couldn’t get a long or communicate
like the ones I saw My ideas on how my life should have been where all coming
from the things I saw. I started to write a lot, carried around my journal like
it was the bible. Writing was a good way to deal with a lot of the feelings
that I had bottled up inside me (anyone that knows me knows that I am super shy
and introverted) so those things that I had difficulties expressing to other
people, I would simply write down. Since I was so shy I didn’t have many
friends as a child, so these little things like reading a book, watching TV and
writing were the things that in a way helped me to cope. I didn’t really understand
though how much the shows I used to watch as a kid had effected me until later
in life.
After that I entered high school, and made a
couple of friends and then with the invention of Facebook, I spent a lot of my
time on the internet. Checking in on my friends, on what my favorite celebrities
were doing, and I didn’t realize it at the time but this turned out to be a bad
thing. The first thing I would do in the morning was rush to check my phone and
go online, check my messages, check to see the latest news. I think the worst
for me during that time, was that in some ways my self worth began to be tied
into how many people liked my status or my picture and trivial things like
that. Everyone during that time I feel was desperate to simply appear to be
living the best lives, high school is the ultimate popularity contest and
social media just made it easier to be bullied or to make yourself look cool. I
also saw the “Cool” things that other people were doing and longed to be living
an exciting lifestyle instead of being where I was. Then after when I started
college I was having a hard time deciding what I wanted to do for the rest of
my life and after my fourth semester, I took a two year break from school. I
was trying to find my place in the world, but admittedly I spent a majority of
my time outside of work either watching tv or on the internet. In a way I felt
like everyone was moving on with their lives and I was still stuck doing
nothing. The interesting thing about social media like Facebook or Instagram for
example though, is that people only post what they want you to see, meaning
that they could be in a really crappy relationship for example and you would
never think they were because all the do is post happy couple pictures all the
time.
Now a day I do still use
Facebook and Instagram but more so just to keep up with distant relatives or
old friends. Facebook is also a good place to network but besides that I try
try to stay off as much as possible. It took me a while to get to this place
though. It got so bad I had to eventually unplug myself from social media for a
while, and I took the time to actually go out into the world, and interacting
with people face to face, which is taken for granted now I feel like. I was
thinking about ways that I could use my creativity to make a living, I never really
wanted to become a writer because I didn’t think I was good enough to do that.
Then interestingly enough one day I ended up going to a live taping of one of
my favorite shows the Tonight show and as corny as it may sound something
clicked. I watched a lot of TV yes, but I never really thought about all the
behind the scenes work that went into producing a show. I started to research
potential careers in the TV industry and got really excited about the idea of
maybe one day producing some of my own shows. I look back on all the times
where I rushed home to watch my favorite shows on Disney Channel, and thought
there was nothing better than this. As in adult now I realize that a lot of
these shows that I grew up watching, and many kids will grow up watching, set
up false expectations for us as to what our lives should be like. Not every
family has a mom and a dad, not every family is perfect not every family is
just one race, some families face more difficulties than others. I feel these
things weren’t really represented in these shows (and still aren’t) and they
are targeted at young impressionable people. Some mothers and daughters take
time to develop a healthy relationship like I now have with mine. I now hope to
someday make some type of in impact and maybe one day make some meaningful television
that will help kids like me to feel
better about themselves, and know that there aren’t alone.Hopefully with this
class I can learn some things about how women are represented in the media, and
how I can take that information to make even a small change in that.
http://www1.cbn.com/700club/candice-kelsey-raising-myspace-generation
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