This TED Talk features youth homeless advocate Malika Whitley, recorded live at TED Residency

2017.

Don't you love a good nap?

Just still in a way that small block of time to curl up on your couch for that sweet moment

of escape.

It's one of my favorite things,

but something I took for granted before I began experiencing homelessness as a teenager.

The ability to take a nap is only reserved for stability and sureness,

something you can't find when you're carrying everything you own in your book bag

and carefully kind of the amount of time you're allowed to sit in any given place

before being asked to leave.

I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia,

bouncing from house to house with a loving, close-knit family

as we struggled to find stability in our finances. But when my mom temporarily

lost herself to mania, and when that mania chose me as his primary scapegoat through both

emotional and physical abuse, I fled for my safety. I had come to the conclusion that homelessness was safer for me

than being at home. I was 16. During my homelessness, I joined Atlanta's 3,300 homeless youth,

and feeling uncared for, left out and invisible each night.

There wasn't, and still it's not any place for a homeless minor to walk off the street to access a bed.

I realized that most people thought of homelessness as some kind of lazy, drug-induced squalor and inconvenience,

but that didn't represent my book bag full of clothes and school books

on my A-plus grade point average.

...