updated 6:45 p.m. ET Jan. 23, 2008

CICERO, Ill. - The final race of the season had just ended and Sylvia Harris was beaming.

She patted Lively Moment on the back and kept smiling, kept praising the thoroughbred after finishing 11th of 12.

Harris felt like a winner, though. She does whenever she's in the saddle.

A 40-year-old rookie who happens to be African American, Harris is a rarity in the world of horse racing, but there's more to her story.

It really is about redemption, about finding midlife salvation instead of a midlife crisis.

It's about someone who escaped the clutches of manic-depression, before it squeezed the life out of her.

It's about healing, strengthening familial bonds that nearly crumbled under the burden of turmoil. It's about a woman who was homeless finding salvation — and a place to call home — through her love of horses.

And it's a story that Sylvia Harris hopes educates and inspires.

The New York Times has featured her. "Good Morning America'' visited and plans to air her story. The "Today Show'' called. "Inside Edition,'' too.

She's attracting quite a bit of attention for someone who has won just three races on long shots this season at Hawthorne Race Course, the 116-year-old track in an industrial area near Midway Airport.

"Whether I win or lose, personally I feel like I've already won,'' Harris says Sunday night after the final race of the track's season.

There were times when she felt like anything but a winner.

Setbacks seemed to follow every step forward, sending her life back into chaos just when it seemed like she was finding stability.

On the surface, Harris seemed to have that growing up in Santa Rosa, Calif.

There were piano lessons, clarinet lessons, dance lessons. She starred in track and field through high school.

Her family had dogs and cats and birds, and even a boa constrictor, but no horse — no matter how hard Harris lobbied.

But beneath the happy exterior, trouble was lurking.

Her mom Evaliene had such severe Crohn's disease, an inflammation of the digestive tract lining, that she was discharged from the Army and several times nearly died. Her dad, Edward Sr., an Army staff sergeant who served in Korea and Vietnam, drank. Their marriage ended in a divorce that Sylvia believes triggered her manic-depression.

"Maybe there was something there before, but I didn't see it until after her dad and I divorced,'' Evaliene Harris says.

It caught her ex-husband off guard, too.

Brian Kersey / ASSOCIATED PRESS Harris rides Lively Moment during the 10th race at Hawthorne Race Course in Cicero, Ill.

"I had moved to Virginia and I wasn't aware of the problems,'' Edward Sr. says. "That stuff floored me.''

Sylvia was 19 and a student at Santa Rosa Junior College when she was first afflicted.

Suddenly, even though she rarely put a pen to paper, she stayed up writing poetry for two or three days in a row and experienced such severe delusions that she wound up in a hospital. It was the start of a vicious circle.

She would have a manic bout that would land her in the hospital for a few days, followed by periods of stability.

In the early 1990s, she was living in Northern California with her young daughter Atlanta and son Rory and their father. She wanted to marry, he didn't. One day, she left for Los Angeles thinking she would become an actress and eventually share custody of the children, who were with their father.

Instead, she had a fling with another man and "at the end of it, he's back in Spain and I'm pregnant'' with son Toshi.

Harris went back up north in 1993, moved in with her three children and the next two years seemed "perfect.'' Except she got sick from her medication, leading to a custody battle with her older children's father and a major breakdown.

Edward Sr. helped her move to Virginia with Toshi, and she wound up spending three months at Western State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Staunton, Va.

Another stable period followed. And then, another setback.

She had enrolled at Full Sail Academy, a media arts college in Orlando, Fla., in 1999, hoping for a career in the entertainment industry. Instead, she hit another low.

This time, she left the keys in her car while she went into a convenience store to get directions. When she returned, the Jeep Wrangler her father had financed was gone.

Without a car, she couldn't get to work. And without a job, she couldn't pay rent.

Toshi wound up in foster care and Harris wound up homeless, sleeping on the streets and in abandoned cars.

Her life changed when a minister at a soup kitchen asked what she would like to do. Harris' response: work with horses. The minister left, came back and within about 20 minutes Harris was in a van headed to Ocala - the center of Florida's thoroughbred breeding industry - about an hour away.

From there, her life turned around. Slowly.

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