A Love Letter to Harry Potter

A Love Letter to Harry Potter (Week 13)

This semester I will be posting my thoughts every week on some media I've consumed. This is a semester-long project for my SFL 358 class: Media and Family Development. 

Never could I convey all of the feelings of my heart about the wizarding world. So I will relate just one experience. This weekend, a friend asked my to tell her how I got through a tough time several years ago, and I reflected on it. I'd just broken up with my high school boyfriend, and I felt very little hope, meaning, or anything that wasn't horrible. To her everlasting credit, my Mom forced me to leave my bed a couple of days after it happened because I was super pathetic and hadn't like...eaten for a while lol. I was miserable, but she took me to my very favorite restaurant an hour away and got me to eat an entire 4 bites of delicious pizza (hindsight-what a waste!!!). I could not think of a thing that I wanted to do or a place I wanted to go, so she decided. She took me to Barnes and Noble, gave me her credit card, and forced me to go inside and buy the Harry Potter series. I went in- in my pajamas, face swollen up- but I did it.  Then I went home, got back in bed, and read straight through them. Then I did it again. And again. I don't know how or why, but reading those books put me back together. I had read them before, but this time I lived in them. I became part of them because I couldn't feel my own pain there. I felt my burden get lighter every day while I read them. I'll always remember feeling that miracle, and always recognize it as such. What a special gift J. K. Rowling has to be able to bring so much joy into the lives of millions of people. I don't think I could end in any other way, except for the words of the venerable Professor Albus Dumbledore:

"Words are, in my not so humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic, capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it."