Homeless Teen Makes A Fateful Decision That Lands Her At Harvard
For teenagers all over the world, it’s incredibly stressful to navigate their school years, all the while dealing with raging hormones and trying to secure a place in college. Can you imagine how impossible these pressures would seem if you were homeless, though, with no stable family to lean on? This is exactly the situation Elizabeth “Liz” Murray found herself in at just 15 years old. Yet somehow the New York native managed to better her position in life to the extent where she even landed a spot at Harvard University. How did she manage it?
A difficult start in life
Liz was born on September 23, 1980, in New York City in one of the most deprived, crime-ridden areas of the Bronx. She had been just three years old when she discovered her parents Jean and Peter were addicted to cocaine, and that her mom was an alcoholic too.
She told The Guardian, “Both my parents were hippies. By the time the early 1980s came around and I’d been born, their disco dancing thing had become a drug habit.”
Her parents did drugs right in front of her
Every single day, Liz and her sister Lisa would see their parents enter another room, where they would spread their drug paraphernalia on a table and shoot up into oblivion. Eventually, they even stopped the pretence of going into another room.
The young girls’ lives became defined by living in squalor with two unemployed drug addicts. Liz told People magazine that her mom “would be banging on the walls in the tenement, screaming, wanting her money for drugs.”
Living conditions were abysmal
“Everything was filthy, and the drugs were everywhere,” Liz told New York Times Upfront. “I used to go into the kitchen and see my parents shooting up cocaine; they didn’t try to hide it. I would sit on the window sill and stare out into the alley.”
She added, “We had two cats and a dog that no one really walked or fed; you can imagine what the house was like. I had to step over piles of feces crawling with maggots to get to my room.”
Hunger was a constant companion
Naturally, Liz’s parents were too preoccupied with their addictions to spend much money on food, so the girls often went hungry. She told The Guardian, “We ate ice cubes because it felt like eating. We split a tube of toothpaste between us for dinner.”
When their cupboards were bare, and their stomachs groaned from the lack of food, the sisters “would knock on our neighbors’ doors. But everyone in the neighborhood was living off government checks.”
Welfare check day was a big deal
Speaking of those checks, Liz remembers the whole family waiting with bated breath for the mailman to show up every month. She told the BBC, “We would cash the cheque together.”
She revealed, “My sister Lisa and I, we would walk them down to the drug spot, and mom and dad would go. They'd disappear up this staircase, they would buy drugs, and come back down.” Only after securing their drugs would Liz’s parents get groceries: usually just $30-worth for the whole month.
Addiction made her parents desperate
Liz has a vivid memory of the sheer desperation her mom’s addiction wrought upon her. She resorted to stealing $5 of the birthday money her grandmother had sent the youngster and buying drugs with it.
When the young girl realized what had happened and questioned her parent about it, though, her mom broke down in tears and flushed the narcotics down the toilet. Liz revealed, “She began begging me to forgive her.”
School was no refuge
“This is a woman who is strung out and desperate to get high — and she just flushed her drugs down the toilet,” marveled Liz. “She looked at me and said, ‘Lizzy, I’m not a monster. I just can’t stop. Sweetheart, forgive me.’”
On another occasion, Jean sold Lisa’s winter coat, which meant the little girl couldn’t attend school the next day. Unfortunately, as Liz told NYT Upfront, “I got teased a lot at school; my clothes smelled bad, and I was dirty.”
Through all the strife, she loved her parents
Despite these difficulties, Liz insists she has always been grateful for her family life, and doesn’t blame her parents, who were suffering terribly from their addictions. She explained, “I’m not angry with my parents. They cared very much about me, and I loved them back.”
She added, “They were addicts since before both my sister and I were born, and probably should have never had kids. I’m grateful to them. They taught me things — they showed me which way not to go.”
She wasn’t going to be overcome by anger
“I remember a certain peace in knowing we all went to bed under the same roof at night,” Liz stressed to the BBC. “My mother used to sit at the foot of my bed, and she would share her dreams with me.”
Clinging to this small semblance of a normal family life was important to Liz, and she never dwelt on negativity. In fact, she told People magazine, “People are so wrapped up in their bitterness. People are shocked to hear that I am not angry.”
Her mom gets a terrible diagnosis
Liz was effectively caring for herself and her sister by the time she was six years old, and when she was ten the family found out Jean had been diagnosed HIV positive. You see, she and Peter had been sharing needles with other addicts.
As Liz put it, “You can only live this way for so long before something happens.” This meant Jean was constantly in and out of treatment centers for the next several years, while Peter’s addictions continued unabated.
School fell by the wayside
During this period, Liz would do whatever she could to bring some cash into the home, as her father was always unemployed. Pumping gas and bagging people’s groceries didn’t leave a lot of time for school, though, and Liz found herself missing the majority of each semester.
Due to her natural intellect, though, she was still able to pass the end-of-year tests. Then in 1994 her parents broke up and her mom contracted tuberculosis, on top of the AIDS from which she was already suffering.
A tumultuous period
Liz stayed with Peter at that time, while her mom and sister went to live with her godfather. Child-welfare soon discovered that she hadn’t been attending school, though, so her dad lost their dilapidated apartment.
She told NYT Upfront, “I was about 13, and I was put into a city youth facility. I got out when I promised to live with my mother and godfather.” By the time she was 15, though, Liz felt uncomfortable in that home situation.
Heading out on her own
“I took just about everything I could squeeze into a backpack,” revealed Liz. “All the money I had on me at the time, which wasn't much, and, at age 15, headed out on my own. I slept at friends’ houses for a while, on couches or floors.”
She then revealed, “I would clean house to earn the right to be there, but I would hear whispered conversations about me. I felt like I was constantly inconveniencing everybody.”
Homeless at just 15
Around this time, Liz’s father went to live in a homeless shelter. Lisa was able to secure a spot on a pal’s couch, but her luck eventually ran out on that front. She wound up sleeping on park benches or on New York’s 24-hour subway cars.
The young girl was homeless, her family scattered all over the city, and she sometimes couldn’t help seeing herself as a rebellious victim of society. Fair enough: given how she’d had to grow up, who wouldn’t be angry at the world?
“Never a moment to rest”
“There would be days, sometimes a week or two, without showering,” confessed Liz about the harsh reality of homelessness. “There was endless, endless walking. Never a moment to rest. You learn to sleep anywhere. Sometimes I cleaned up in the bathroom at a doughnut shop.”
She revealed, “One of the hardest things, when I was panhandling, was when the middle-class kids would stare at me and snicker under their breath or count their mall money in front of me.”
Her mom had been a homeless teen as well
In a 2016 TEDTalk — entitled “For the Love of Possibility” — Liz spoke about that tough time in her life. She said, “I found myself, at 15 years old, sleeping in New York City streets, in parks, and subway stations. Many nights I would fall asleep with my backpack in my lap.”
She continued, “I would have my journal; my clothing; I had a picture of my mother when she was my age, and she was homeless in New York City when her family had fallen apart.”
No different from anyone else
Liz continued, “Now living this way, I know I sound pretty different from other people because it’s such an intense situation. But I actually think I was really just like everyone else. No matter what was in front of me, I had dreams that I wanted to accomplish. I mean, don’t we all?”
She has always been bemused by how people view her homelessness. She revealed, “People would often ask me very strange questions about being homeless. People would ask me, ‘Did you eat from the trash?’”
She began to let her dreams die
“The things that people are interested in fascinate me,” mused Liz. “When instead, what really was in my heart was… this internal experience. I had these dreams, but living in that kind of despair, I let them begin to fade away.”
She asked the audience, “Have you ever felt hopeless in your life? Where you had something that you wanted to do, but it felt so much out of your reach? I had this voice in the back of my head that I believe we all have.”
Her mom passes away
Sadly, things were about to get worse before they got better. Liz’s mom died in December 1996 at only 42 years old and, as she told the BBC, “She was alone when she passed away.”
It was a sad, lonely end to a life society didn’t seem to care much about — and the funeral was even sadder. Liz told NYT Upfront, “My mother was buried on the day after Christmas, 1996. I was 16 and I had been homeless for a few months.”
A pauper’s funeral
“There was no money for a proper funeral,” admitted Liz. “There was no priest — just the cemetery workers sitting a few feet away, talking about sports and women, and waiting to put dirt on top of her.”
She continued, “My sister and a friend and I had managed to pull enough money together to take a taxi to the cemetery in upstate New York, an hour away. I remember it was freezing cold. I was wearing an army jacket and old boots with holes in them.”
The lowest point of her life
Liz continued, “We stood there for about ten or 15 minutes looking at her coffin, a donated pine box. I saw that her name had been mis-spelled in Magic Marker on the top. So, my friend took out his Magic Marker and wrote her name, ‘Jean,’ and spelled it right.”
Her pal then wrote, “Beloved Mother, 1954-1996,” and drew an angel in the black ink. This was a touching gesture but, as Liz admitted, it was still “the lowest point in my life. But I didn’t cry. I was thinking too much.”
An epiphany
Liz told the Above the Law website that, instead of being destroyed by her mom’s death, she began to look at it from a unique angle. She explained that it showed her, “Life was malleable.”
She explained, “If I could have a family and a home one night and all of it is gone the next, that must mean that life has the capacity to change. And then I thought, ‘Whoa! That means that just as change happens to me, I can cause change in my life.’”
Now or never
Her mom’s death opened Liz’s eyes to a way of thinking which would change her life forever. She told The Guardian, “Like my mother, I was always saying, ‘I’ll fix my life one day.’ It became clear when I saw her die without fulfilling her dreams that my time was now or maybe never.”
A fire had been lit inside her, and she made a fateful decision. She told People, “I felt all this potential bubbling up inside me that I wasn’t putting to use. I knew I wanted to go back to school.”
Time to go back to school
By this point, Liz was 17 and hadn’t been to school regularly for a number of years. She felt she could go back and thrive, though. In fact, she was convinced she could complete her high school education in only two years.
But how would she go about enrolling again? Well, in her TEDTalk, she revealed it was simple. She recounted, “I’d dust myself off after sleeping on the train [and] I’d knock on doors at high schools after years of being truant, and I would ask them to accept me.”
What if?
“I should have been applying to college,” explained Liz. “I was applying to high school — that’s how old I was… I went from school, to school, to school, and I experienced a lot of rejections.”
She continued, “But there was this feeling in my heart — a feeling that I want so badly to transfer to everyone that I meet now — which is, ‘What would happen if I just kept going? Even if there was every evidence in the world that it wouldn’t work out, What if?’”
Her persistence pays off
Showing tremendous determination, Liz simply chose to keep persevering in the face of constant rejection. She reasoned, “Even though it was unlikely after being told ‘no’ so many times, it was possible that the next school would accept me. And so, I continued to knock on doors.”
Her refusal to give up eventually paid off when she managed to land a place in Humanities Preparatory Academy — an “alternative” high school in the upscale Chelsea district of Manhattan.
A little white lie helps secure her place
In order to enrol at the school, though, Liz needed to have a fixed address — yet she was still homeless. Thankfully, a bit of quick thinking — and subterfuge — saw her come up with a unique solution.
She told NYT Upfront that she brought her dad to the school, “so I could convince them I had somewhere to live. I was sitting outside the interview room and repeating a friend’s address and phone number over and over to my father, so he would know it when they asked.”
A straight-A student in double-quick time
Despite starting school again at the age most of her peer group was graduating, Liz vowed to become a straight-A student. She managed to fit four years’ worth of curriculum into only two by taking night classes on top of her regular school days.
Heartwarmingly, the faculty was incredibly supportive. She told the BBC, “In a world of ‘no,’ these teachers were a ‘yes’ to me.” Throughout it all, she was still homeless, but none of her teachers or friends had any idea.
The next step
As Liz closed in on graduation, her class went on a school trip to Boston. It was the first time she had ever left New York, and she was incredibly excited. And by the end of the trip, her life had changed once again.
She told the BBC, “The last thing we did was go to Harvard Yard, simply because we were supposed to take a picture in front of the John Harvard statue.” She knew, right then and there, that she had to go to Harvard University.
Applying to Harvard
One of Liz’s teachers noticed how enthused she had been by the Harvard campus and encouraged her to apply to the institution. The teacher had no clue she was still without a fixed abode, though, and had very little money to speak of.
Liz explained, “I knew I needed scholarships.” Eventually an appropriate opportunity presented itself — a scholarship from The New York Times for $12,000, paid every year of a college degree. This was her opportunity.
Getting the scholarship
To secure the funding, though, every applicant had to write an essay about the obstacles they’d faced in their academic journey. Liz naturally wrote about her troubled, irregular upbringing, and her current living situation — and out of the thousands of applications, she was chosen as one of six recipients.
The newspaper then published an article about the scholarship winners in its Metro section, and everything changed once again. The response from Liz’s peers, as well as total strangers, was truly astonishing.
The people of New York find out her secret — and want to help
Liz told a DePauw University audience, “I really didn’t understand the power of the media before that, but I found out… The readers of the newspaper came out of their houses… and brought me sweaters and clothing their kids weren’t using anymore. Some lady came just to give me a hug!”
She added, “Another came just with some cookies, then she said to me, ‘I don't have any money, Liz, but I have a station wagon and a house. Do you have any laundry?’”
A guest on Oprah
After that, Liz was never homeless again, and with the aid of the scholarship, she made her way to Harvard. While studying, though, the newspaper article snowballed into more media opportunities, including being featured on 20/20 and The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Heck, Oprah even bestowed Liz with her first ever Chutzpah Award. She was soon giving motivational speeches at events which also boasted the likes of the Dalai Lama and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair!
She uses her experiences to help others
Over time, though, Liz found the most rewarding thing was speaking to teenagers about avoiding the pitfalls of drugs and gang life. She would try and instil in them the mantra that they shouldn’t use their circumstances as an excuse for not trying to better themselves.
She mused, “My interests broadened, because I realize that I have certain insights based on what had happened to me, and I had this opportunity to share with people and go back-and-forth and maybe draw some meaning out of it.”
Escaping the trap
Something which may surprise people, though, is that Liz insists she didn’t want to attend Harvard because of the prestige that comes with it. Instead, she simply sees her educational journey as the story of someone constantly seeking the information that will help improve their circumstances.
She said, “It’s about learning, about educating yourself and gathering enough knowledge to find your way through any little crack or crevice you possibly can so you can move up and escape from that trap you were born into.”
Meeting her dad for the first time — metaphorically
As Liz closed in on finishing her studies, her father was struck down by AIDS, just like her mom had been. She went home to be with him in his dying days and found that he had fought his way to becoming clean and sober.
She told the BBC, “When someone gets sober, it's almost like meeting them for the first time.” She was able to reminisce fondly with him about how, even when their family life was dysfunctional, he had instilled a love of literature in her.
“Now we’re a family again”
Poignantly, before he passed away, Peter wrote his daughter a message which touched her deeply. She revealed, “He wrote in the card, ‘Lizzy, I left my dreams behind a long time ago. But I know now they’re safe with you.”
“Now we’re a family again.’” It was a testament to the family bonds that were formed through terrible adversity, and a positive way for Liz to remember her father — something which can’t be underestimated.
Starting her own family
These days, Liz is happily married to her high-school sweetheart James Scanlon, and they have two wonderful children named Maya Jean and Liam. She told the Post-Gazette, “I guess if there is a big spiritual experience in my life, it is me becoming a mother.”
She explained, “After you have a child, you realize it is sort of arbitrary who you are a parent to. You sort of look at other kids and feel responsible for them, too… I feel responsible to make the world better for all our children.”
She refused to be a statistic
Ultimately, Liz believes her life hinged on the fateful decision she made in the wake of her mom’s death. She told Doer Life, “I realized that my self-image as an independent woman of the streets was a delusion. I was 16, with an eighth-grade education, and I was homeless.”
She continued, “I had learned to get by and had done well under the circumstances. Who would blame me, right? I had every excuse in the book to give up and become another statistic. But I also knew I was capable of something more.”