Amortentia – my love for Harry Potter

People with a love for books will often speak of a specific book from their youth that has affected them in a profound way. For Njabulo S Ndebele it was No Longer At Ease by Chinua Achebe and for J.K. Rowling it was Emma by Jane Austen. For me, the book that shaped me in my teenage years was Harry Potter.

It sounds like exactly what you would expect from a teen of my generation, but that’s what I like best about it. I’m part of the only generation that had the opportunity to read the Harry Potter series as they were written and released. There will never again be lines of hundreds of fans all around the world waiting all night outside their local bookstores for the clocks to hit twelve and the doors to swing open. The next generations will not experience the exhilarating torment of waiting an entire year to find out what happens to the characters that they love in the same way that they love their best friend.

They will experience the instant gratification of being able to immediately read one after the other, but they will miss out on the feeling that has you close to tears, shaking with excitement as you wait to buy your copy. And then staying up all night because there is no way you are going to wait until morning to jump back in and immerse yourself in your favourite fictional world. However, the worst thing that the generations after me will not experience is the feeling that I felt when I was reading the last book. That bittersweet notion of wanting to race towards the end and find out what will happen to Harry, Ron and Hermione, but also being constantly aware of the fact that it is the last time you will ever be reading a Harry Potter book for the first time.

Why am I so afraid of failure?

*Discliamer – this is another writing assignment, but please go ahead and read it anyway – you might find it interesting*

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.” – J.K. Rowling

Failure. This is something I think about every single day. As a young, goal-driven woman, failure is prevalent to my life. If I didn’t think about, and fear, failure, then I wouldn’t work as hard as I do to succeed.

Maths was the bane of my existence in high school. By my final year, I was working at it for over eight hours every week and I still could not pass. I felt like a failure when I was incapable of learning these equations that everyone around me seemed to understand. By the end of Matric, I had grown accustomed to the fact that I was not going to pass Maths and I even celebrated when I managed to achieve a mark that was technically a fail, but that would still allow me to be admitted to Rhodes University for a Bachelor of Journalism. I had learned by this time to comfort myself with the idea that Maths was not my thing. Reading and writing are my things, and I learned to accept that it is not possible to be good at everything.

As I moved out of high school and into university, my understanding of failure changed again. I realised quickly that when you fail something at university, the odds of a second chance are slim to none (unless your parents are happy to pay for a repeated year of study – which mine were not). This realisation put a lot more pressure on my shoulders. I knew how much money my parents were putting into my course fees and my res fees and the multiple flights between Port Elizabeth and Johannesburg and I really didn’t want to let them down.