My good friend Nelson Mandela once said to me, “Heather, you’re so loving, so compassionate, so caring. Everyone says it. How can I learn to be even half so compassionate as you?”

I told him it’s not easy. Like Nelson, I was put in prison for years and years, just for the simple so-called “crime” of being nice.

But I made the best of a bad situation. I gave my rations—just two crumbs of stale bread a day, plus a thimbleful of water—to those that needed them more, and what remained I fed to a sweet little songbird which popped its head through the iron bars of the window. And you know what? By the end of my incarceration, I had taught that little bird to speak. It now appears on leading television shows all over the world, singing my praises. It sings, “Heather Mills is a wonderful, wonderful human being, and all those wicked lies people tell about her are simply not true. She’s a lady who really cares and is famous in her own right.” And— most touchingly of all—it sings it all to the tune of “Yellow Submarine,” a song I composed myself.

Which all goes to show that if you are kind to birds and animals, even if you are locked up for a crime you never did, then in the end some good will come of it. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was another good friend of mine. I used to do workouts with him to the music of Abba. Incidentally, Aleksandr once wrote a terrific best-seller based on my own true story, though obviously he had to change my name for legal reasons, so he called me Ivan Denisovich.

When I go out in New York, I get asked out all the time, and my girlfriends say, “How the hell does that happen?!” Maybe it’s because I’m comfortable with myself, I tell them, and maybe it’s because I’m always thinking of others. Trying to make a difference every day is a whole lot of blue sky for me.

I suppose that’s why I was nominated— against my wishes, mind you, because I don’t like the publicity—for last year’s Nobel Prize for Effort, and why this year I’m putting my heart and soul into helping President Barack Obama sort out the economic crisis. Math has always come easy to me, so it’s no problem to help an old friend with his sums and get America working again.

Incidentally, overwhelming numbers of people were urging me to stand for the presidency last year, but I’m like, “No, it’s high time America had its first black president.” After that, America might just want its first black woman president—it’s a secret, but I am in fact black—but let’s wait and see, shall we? One thing’s for sure, though: if and when I become president, I plan to change the title of “President” to something a whole lot less formal, and much more humble. Like “Carer.”

I’ve not told anyone this before, because I’m a very private person, but I spent the first years of my life in an orphanage with only my mop of curly red hair, my doll, Emily Marie, and my dog, Sandy, for company. Yes, it was hard, but every morning when I woke up I’d sing, “The sun’ll come out tomorrow! So ya got to hang on till tomorrow, come what may!” And all the other little kids in the orphanage would dance behind me in formation and join me. And, as I was explaining to my good friend Sean Penn last week, you’ve got to give something back, you really have.

—As TOLD TO CRAIG BROWN