Tales from the Trailer Park

For twenty-two years of my life I grew up in a trailer park, a nice home was the double wide trailer my best friend lived in. When I graduated from high school at seventeen years old I went away to college, I lived in a dorm and went home once every few months to see my family. While I was at school, I never mentioned much about my personal life, nobody knew that I grew up in a trailer park. Whenever someone would make a joke or say something that had the word "trailer trash" in it, I would wince, but say nothing. The last thing I ever wanted to become was the social outcast. I won that title in high school, I did not want to experience that humiliation again. Today, I wonder what made me so ashamed, what is the social taboo that we put on individuals who grew up in a trailer, why do we automatically mark them as less that everybody else?

We picture individuals who live in trailer parks to be toothless, brainless, tobacco spitting, never graduated from high school, can't even get a GED, losers. However, those stereotypes could not be any further from the truth. I learned more about family and friendship growing up in the trailer park, then I ever could from living in Suburbia. My friends came from all walks of life, we could all teach one another life's hard learned lessons before the age of sixteen. Drug abuse, alcoholism, domestic violence and poverty were among the lessons some of my friends were able to teach me. Not to say these problems do not exist anywhere but a trailer park, but we never label the children who live in homes as individuals going no where with loser parents.