I had to deal with bullying a lot, people saying Lizzie, put a gun to your head and kill yourself. I was born with this very, very rare syndrome that only two other people in the world, including myself, know of. I'm going to be 25 in March, and I've never weighed over about 64 pounds my entire life. And when I was born, the doctors told my mom, your daughter has no amniotic fluid around her. The doctors told my parents, we just want to warn you, expect your daughter to never be able to talk, walk, crawl, think, or do anything by herself. But the first thing they told the doctor was, we want to see her, and we are going to take her home and love her and raise her to the best of our abilities.

I had to deal with bullying a lot, so I had to go home and ask my parents, what's wrong with me? Why don't they like me? And they sat me down and they said, Lizzie, the only thing that's different about you is that you're smaller than the other kids. You have this syndrome, but it's not going to define who you are. They said, go to school, pick your head up, smile, continue to be yourself, and people will see that you're just like them. And so that's what I did. When I was in high school, I found a video, unfortunately, that somebody posted of me, labeling me the world's ugliest woman. There were 4 million views to this video, 8 seconds long, no sound, thousands of comments, people saying, Lizzie, please, please just do a world of favor, put a gun to your head and kill yourself.

I cried my eyes out, of course, and I was ready to kind of fight back, and something kind of clicked in my head and I thought, I'm just going to leave it alone. I want you to think and ask yourself this in your head right now, what defines you? Who are you? Is it where you come from? Is it your background? Is it your friends? What is it? What defines who you are as a person? My life was put into my hands, just like your lives are put into yours. You are the person in the front seat of your car. You are the one that decides what defines you. I kind of started realizing that my life is in my hands and open my eyes and realize the things that I do have and make those the things that define me. I can't see out of one eye, but I can see out of the other. I might get sick a lot, but I have really nice hair.

Am I going to let the people who called me a monster define me? Am I going to let the people who said, kill it with fire, define me? No. I'm going to let my goals and my success and my accomplishments be the things that define me. Tell me those negative things, I'm going to turn them around, and I'm going to use them as a ladder to climb up to my goals. Eight years later, I'm standing in front of you, still doing motivational speaking. First thing, I accomplished it. I wanted to write a book. In a couple weeks, I will be submitting the manuscript for my third book. I wanted to graduate college, and I just finished college. I'm getting a degree in communication studies from Texas State University in San Marcos, and I have a minor in English. I really, really tried to use real life experience. I worked my butt off. I used the people who were telling me that I couldn't do this to motivate me. I used their negativity to light my fire to keep going. Use that. Use that. Use that negativity that you have in your life to make yourself better because I guarantee you, you will win. But remember, brave starts here.