LIZ MURRAY

Shortly after I turned 13, Child Welfare took me into care. I was sent to a residential centre where girls with behavioural problems were 'evaluated'. My time there comes back to me now only in flashes of smells, images and sounds.

If I want to be a loving, generous, giving person, I'm not going to test the waters. I'm simply going to be a loving, generous, giving person.

As well as being blind, Ma turned out to have the same mental illness that her mother had had. Between 1986 and 1990, she suffered six schizophrenic bouts, each requiring her to be institutionalised for up to three months.

I feel like my life has been a series of miracles. I was in every sense a lost cause.

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.

I've learned in my life that you really don't know what's possible until you're already doing it.

If I had a magic wand, I would live in a building in New York, big enough so my friends, my family could all have apartments in it. We'd raise our kids in the same space and have backyard barbecues and get old and fat together.

I had a calling inside of me. I had a sense that when I was going through experiences like living on the streets, losing my parents to AIDS, just having my whole world turned upside-down, there was this feeling inside of me like I was meant for something greater.

I'd been living on the streets of New York, and I was sleeping at my friends' houses, sometimes in the subway.

I have just one black and white photograph left of my mother when she was younger. She was 17 when it was taken and beautiful with wispy curls and eyes that shone like dark marbles.

When I grew up in the Bronx, we always had everyone telling us, 'Watch out for the system, watch out for child welfare, watch out, they'll get you,' and I grew up with this feeling of, 'Society is over there and they're dangerous and not safe.'

Ma was legally blind due to a degenerative eye disease she'd had since birth. This meant she was entitled to welfare, and our lives revolved around the first day of every month when her payment was due.

My mother used to sit at the foot of my bed, and she would share her dreams with me.

The lesson that people can't give me what they don't have, and if there's anything I took from it, it was: okay, I don't really expect anyone to hand me anything. There's going to be me and the world.

I was 17 and living on the streets. I had the education of technically an eighth-grader, but in reality, I had never had a formal education.

I realized eventually that when I ran out of places to stay and found myself on the D train and in Central Park, I was actually homeless.

I think there is something to be said for what you can do when you don't know what you aren't supposed to be able to do.

If I could have a family and a home one night, and all of it's 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.'

I realized that I had the ability to carve out a life for myself, that it was in no way limited by what had already occurred in my past. And that inspired me to go to school.

People are surprised by the poverty and think that I wasn't cared for. But that wasn't the case - I was deeply loved.

There was just so much attention that got focused on my story, and what that created was an opportunity for me to share what were the tools, what were the strategies, what was the thinking that had me break though those boundaries.

When you take charge of your own narrative, it gives you a handle on it.

I guess if there is a big spiritual experience in my life, it is me becoming a mother.

I guess more than anything, I just realized, okay, one day I had a home to live in and my family around me. The next day, I did not.

I thought, 'Let's make it a check list. What if I got my education even though I lost my mother, even though my dad is in a shelter?' and looking at these things as hurdles to go over. I could inspire myself.