User blog comment:JoePlay/Wizarding World Giveaway/@comment-3058048-20110709090825

Harry Potter is so much more than a name, a brand, or a book.

No classroom ever taught me more and no lesson ever resided as deeply with me as what I learned from immersing myself in this story. It's near impossible for me to sum up in words what Harry Potter means to me. I was a girl of eight years old with no particular interest in reading when I first picked up "Sorcerer's Stone". It had sat on my mother's bookshelf for three months until she damn near forced me to sit through it. I consider those three months that that book collected dust as the biggest waste of time I've ever been responsible for. If I hadn't waited so long I would have fallen in love much sooner than I did, because that is exactly what happened. I fell in love.

I fell in love with magic, and words, and reading, and bravery, and all the lessons and characters that Jo Rowling weaved into the tapestry that she has shared with us.

Joy, angst, worry, fear, glee, love, happiness, despair. Harry Potter makes me feel all these things in their purest form. I never laugh as honestly as I do as a result of Fred and George's shenanigans. Worry doesn't strike me like it does as thoroughly as it did as I followed Harry into that graveyard. Pain never seemed as real as it did when I lost Sirius in the Department of Mysteries. And joy never was as abundant as it was when Hermione finally kissed Ron.

I feel all that they feel. Their trials are my trials, as their triumphs are as well. I love these characters and this world more than anyone or anything that has followed in my life. They have been the happiness I have found in the darkest of times, and have helped me remember to turn on the light. Aside from the love a daughter, a sister, and a friend may have for her family, this is what I love most. It's Harry, or rather Jo, who taught me how to love so thoroughly. Because of them I do not let fear get the better of me. I try to be as brave and loyal as I can because in my heart I am a Gryffindor. In my heart this is my world, and it matters. What I have learned and taken with me I will keep forever. I will cherish it forever. Though in time all this will reside only in my mind and heart as it will with others, "why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"