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.”