Motivational Monday: Liz Murray

jessi988
Sep 29, 2014
2 min read

Today’s Motivational Monday is about Liz Murray, Inspirational Speaker and Author of the bestselling book, Breaking Night. Liz grew up in the heart of New York City where she witnessed her parents shoot heroin and become addicted to cocaine over her childhood. Her earliest memories are sitting in the kitchen and watching her parents do drugs and remain high all day, to her, a normal every-day occurrence. By the time Liz Murray turned 15, her Mom was diagnosed HIV-positive and passed away and her Dad had become homeless on the streets of NYC. In that same year, Liz found herself homeless as well, continuing the pattern of her parents chaotic

on-and-off-the streets lifestyle.

As she wrote in her journal during these years of homelessness, she began to realize that she had been given a gift of a blank slate, which she could use to build any life she chose upon. Once Liz started thinking up who she wanted to be and what she wanted to do, she decided that she would like to go to Harvard. An unlikely choice for a homeless teenager, Liz knew she had to do something radical to break the pattern of poverty in her family. She managed to find her father who was at a homeless shelter in the city and used a friends address as her own while ‘training’ her Dad what to say to the Harvard counselors. She cleaned herself up and went in for her daunting interviews, trying to do everything in her power to make sure they did not suspect that she was homeless. Liz says that at that time in her life, every time she made a choice to do something new, a little voice inside her head would repeat “it’s unlikely, but it’s a possibility”…soon, this simply became “it’s a possibility”. When she got through the Harvard application process, she became shocked and over-joyed that her manifestation had worked and she was accepted into Harvard.

Liz Murray graduated from Harvard in 2009 and has since been working on her doctorate from Harvard in Clinical Psychology. She has also written a best-selling memoir called “Breaking Night” and has had a film made about her called Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story. Liz is now an Inspirational Speaker and founded the organization Manifest Living which helps those who are in the situation she was in and creates a place where homeless youth can come and find guidance to get out of poverty. Liz Murray also opened a high school with the help of others in New York City for homeless teens in 2011.