User blog comment:JoePlay/Wizarding World Giveaway/@comment-4163220-20110718065449

What Harry Potter Means To Me: It’s no surprise to anyone in my life that Harry Potter is a big part of who I am. It isn’t just the fact that I’ve spent more than half of my life in love with this incredible world created by J.K. Rowling, or that I’ve watched Daniel, Emma, and Rupert grow up at the same time as I have; no, it’s much more than that— though that alone is enough reason to love the world of Harry Potter in itself. When the first book came out, my dad sat myself and my brother down every night to read to us before bed. This was before my dad got sick and before the abuse started; this was before my depression and before I was sexually assaulted. This was the most perfect part of my childhood. Every night my dad would read to us about Harry’s first year at Hogwarts and I would listen, utterly in love and mesmerized by it all. And then I got sick. One day I was perfectly healthy, and the next I was throwing up blood; hooked up to machines and dying. I don’t say dying lightly. I was dying. There was no source or reason to my massive internal bleeding and I was losing blood at an alarming rate. For a small child to be so ill without cause, there was no hope. My parents were told to make funeral arrangements and if family lived out of town, they should work their hardest to get to me before the end, which seemed close at hand. I was never alone. All the while hooked up to monitors and IVs and a drain to keep my throat clear of blood so I wouldn’t choke, I was never alone. My mother slept in a chair by my bed every night, and during visiting hours, my little brother would sit at the end of my bed while my grandmother or aunt brushed my bushy hair into submission. But before my family went home each night, my father would read to me and my brother. He would read about Harry Potter. And as Harry closed his first year at Hogwarts, the bleeding stopped. I stopped choking, I was able to get a blood transfusion and though for months afterwards, I was frail and sickly and beyond pale (I wasn’t allowed to play sports, which I had always done, I wasn’t even allowed to run down the hall way or horse around), but I had made it when no one thought I would. And just as I had beaten the impossible, so did Harry. I was afraid after that. And though I loved Harry and wanted to know everything about him as each book came out, it reminded me too much of being sick. And I had spent the first half of my childhood in hospitals without needing that reminder. So I let my brother read the books and he would tell me about them, or he would tease me for not reading them myself and then withhold information. And when the movies came out, my curiosity, though never quite sated, was managed. I lost Harry Potter in the hospital, but that’s where I found him again. Fast forward four movies and six books later at the deepest part my depression; the night my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer. I dropped out of my remaining classes and spent my time at the hospital each and every day, the same hospital I had almost died in and have since spent a considerable amount of my life in. I picked up the Order of the Phoenix and slipped right back into Harry’s chaotic world, because I could not maintain the devastating truth of my own in that moment in time. I read. And I didn’t stop. I read and confronted the death of Sirius as my own grandmother slipped into a coma and died holding my hand. I found solace in those pages and clung to them desperately, absorbing them and revering them as something more than tangible— but like a second home to me. I found myself in every page when I could no longer recognize myself in the mirror every morning. Harry and Ron became my best friends. While I could see myself reflected in both Luna and Hermione, and cementing them as my role models; hoping to never cease in finding magic in the most mundane or most painful places, and hoping to always keep my tenacity and heart wherever I go, no matter the difficulties. When Deathly Hallows had come out, I had caught myself up and found myself at the Midnight release with every other Potterhead in my area. With my brother right beside me, as he’d always been and with tears my eyes for the climax of something more special to me than almost anything had ever been. It took me 20 hours of non-stop reading to finish it. And when I did, I started right back at the beginning. I must have read all seven books three times between January 2007 and July 2007, even going as far as reading them aloud to my mother every night before bed. Harry Potter is more than the movies, more than the actors, and even in some ways, more than the books themselves. I can’t really explain to anyone what they mean to me, except there’s a place in my heart that aches for them— a place that I know as home and love, and is never too far away. They are morality and life and redeemable, even when the situations and characters seem otherwise. They were hope when I had none and remain a steadfast reminder that hope is alive and it is so well. This is more than the end of an era to me; it is more than the voice of a generation speaking its final word; it is my voice and my sadness and the little girl I once was, pushing my adult self forward. It is Harry, Ron, and Hermione growing up and past the heartache, just as I have done. It is my life with a few embellishments, but at the core, it is me: it is love and friendships and tragedy and always, always, overcoming that which would hold you back. Thank you, Jo. I mean, really, thank you. My life would be more than incomplete without this world.