“Breaking Night” by Liz Murray, how she went from Homeless to Harvard, shows that you can change the legacy you were born into.
Her endurance to survive was what she needed to change direction when she could see her course aligning with her parents.
She is seventeen when she decides to return to high school, a friend suggests an Alternative high school, “It’s a place like a private school, but for anyone who is really motivated to go, even if they don’t have the money. The teachers really care about you.”
Here is where she sees her past and future collide.
“I was scheduled to begin high school in September, it was May now. I would use the months ahead to prepare; I had four years to make up. The next thing I had to do, in order to complete my registration to Prep, was return to JFK, my old high school, and get my official transcript.
Having seen Prep, JFK looked absolutely massive in comparison. I passed through metal detectors to enter the building. No one looked at me. Students were everywhere, thousands of them. It felt like a bus station. Taking the number 1 train back to Prep later that day, I sat down and ripped open the manila envelope. Columns of failing grades- 45, 60, 50- were everywhere. It was unnerving, reading row after row of flunking marks. I felt like a mess, a big walking train wreck. The experience of talking about my grades (having been lectured by adults so many times) versus actually seeing my transcripts was night and day. Transcripts were a real thing, a tangible expression of what I had and had not done with my life, and a road map of what still had to be done. Looking at my academic disaster, I could see that I had a mountain ahead of me to climb.
Then, very suddenly, sitting on the train gazing at the JFK stationary, it dawned on me – my Prep transcripts were still completely blank. I literally had nothing, no grades, zip on my Prep transcripts yet. I could start fresh.
The thought of the clean slat was thrilling, especially after looking at the mess I had created. With all the things that had been difficult, it was one blessing to count on, the knowledge that what I did from this moment on didn’t have to depend on what I had done before. Back on Nineteenth street, I asked April to give me a copy of my blank Prep transcripts, which was a simple printout of my name on Prep stationary and rows of blank columns waiting to be filled in by my future grades. The JFK ones I handed to April and never looked at again. The blank ones I kept with me at all times. They were a reminder that I was, day by day, writing my future. Sleeping in a hallway around Bedford Park later that week, I took out my blank transcripts and I filled in the grades I wanted, making neat little columns of A’s. If I could picture it – if I could take out these transcripts and look at them – then it was almost as if the A’s had already happened. Day by day, it was just catching up with what was already real. My future A’s, in my heart, had already occurred. Now I just had to get to them.
A memory of Ma helped me decide this. The only papers I’d ever seen that were as ‘official’ looking as transcripts were Ma’s short stack of documents to verify qualification for welfare. Ma’s caseworker were always so difficult, so technical with us. And the walls of those depressing welfare offices, for some reason, were always painted puke green, a color made uglier by the harsh fluorescent lights and the iron bars on the large windows. There were so many people waiting in those offices – dozens, hundreds. When the hard little seats filled up, people sat on windowsills or on the floor; they stood or they paced.
Ma, Lisa and I would wait for hours too, one of the dozen of other families all nervously checking and rechecking their own short stack of vital documents. When it was finally our turn, what I can remember most about being hoisted onto Ma’s lap is the bizarre interaction between Ma and the caseworker. It did not matter what Ma was saying. All that the caseworker focused on were Ma’s documents. Birth certificates, notarized letters, doctor’s notes to verify mental illness, our lease. Ma’s actual words and particularly Ma herself, were invisible to this woman, a woman who had the power to give or take away food, rent and safety. All that boiled down to was this; either we had the exact documents required for approval, or we did not. There was no in between. And even if we were missing only something small, like a second set of copies or one of Ma’s doctors’ notes, a single error could make all our effort- the document gathering, the travel, and the hours of waiting –irrelevant. One missing or invalid document and our file was shut, tossed. They called “next,” and we had to come back another day to start from scratch. All because the documents were either correct or they weren’t, period.
How was this different from my high school transcripts? It wasn’t. I thought, if one day, maybe just maybe I wanted to go to college, some person in a suit in a very different kind of office would open my file, read my documents, and either I would have the qualifications, or I wouldn’t. Yes or no, nothing in between. And if I didn’t, my file would be shut and they would call “next.” I would be out of luck. Some things in life, I’d learned, were nonnegotiable. Documents as official as these transcripts were big, they were my yes or no, they were my options. They were my ticket. Now I was going to think of everything I did at Prep inside the framework of my transcripts – and that turned out to mean everything.”
Later, there would be times when I did not want to go to school. I wanted to sleep on Fief’s floor and not get up. Bobby and Jamie were hanging out, walking around the Village. People were cutting school, and I was missing all the fun. There would be times I did not want to sit in a chair all day long while fresh air was outside and I was missing out. But all I had to do was think of my transcripts, and I would go to school, on time, every day, for the first time in my life. Either I would have the qualifications or I wouldn’t, and besides my friends weren’t going to pay my rent.”
Liz Murray
Each moment she has to make a choice to either act differently and get a different outcome or fall back on the way of life she was used to.
Her focus on having a different document to hand out in life, gave her the tool she needed to stay the course.
Change is not easy, you have to go against all you have ever known, extract stamina in each moment to not waffle and capitulate, you have to be willing to let go of who you are to become who you wan to be…as Wayne Dyer says.
A great book of how she turned her life around…imagine she did this at seventeen homeless and with a father addicted to drugs who lived in a halfway house.
Literally, Homeless to Harvard!
