I must admit, I haven’t been on top of writing lately. Not just because I’ve been busy with work, but also because I’ve been in an un-funny funk of late. Then I realized, it doesn’t really matter what tone my posts are. One of the many freedoms of not having a wide readership. What I write is what I write and it is never wrong or ill-fitting because it’s all who I am.

I think what brought all this on is watching that Lifetime movie about JK Rowling’s life made back in 2011. I watched it knowing what played out on screen most likely bared little resemblance to what JK Rowling actually lived through, but I still managed to watch it three times and still couldn’t get enough of it. Then after I told myself I couldn’t watch it another time I went and watched all the Harry Potter movies for the first time in a very, very long while. When the final one rolled the credits and I was a sobbing mess, I finally had to admit to myself that I was procrastinating with the past in the same way that people do with photo albums or old home movies. Like Dumbledore says in the one that started it all, “It does not do… to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”

Watching that JK Rowling movie made me feel a resurgence of how I feel about writing and what I am on this earth to do, I always know in the back of my mind that writing is what I will contribute to the world, but sometimes I get so far away from what that actually means that I need a reminder like Rowling to put my head to my hands and let the realization sink in again. Watching her “life” made me reflect on the (admittedly quite short) one I’ve lived so far, and I realized how much she was responsible for shaping my adolescence, the person I am now, and the person I aspire to be.

Harry Potter, like Mac and Cheese and the $40 I get in my birthday card from my grandparents every year, is something from my childhood I will never outgrow. Most of my memories (the good ones, anyway) sprang forth from those books. One of my only clear memories of the time I lived up in the north woods of Minnesota, was laying on my brother’s Nascar comforter-clad bed as he sat at his desk by the window, immersed in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. This was over fifteen years ago, right before the movies started. It’s the first memory I have of somebody reading. And from that memory all the details of that life push to the surface, there all along but too weak before now to grow. The antique airplanes adorning the pale blue walls. The birch trees huddled together on the other side of his window that I could never see from mine. That it was a very rare opportunity that he’d even allowed me in his room.

That is the first time I remember Harry Potter being a part of my life. I can’t remember when I picked up the books for myself, only that I had by the time I was 9 or 10. And from then on, it became my identity. Days with my brother were spent with knife sharpener wands and fake wizard school books. I filled my young days with all the information I could about Harry’s world, and to this day I think I’m still trying to figure out why.

I read the last words of the last book almost 10 years ago at 3 a.m., with a flashlight under the blankets of a bed in a rental cabin in Wyoming. The cabin reeked perpetually of horse pee, but I knew that wasn’t why my eyes were stinging. For the first time I felt smaller than my emotions. There was something the book had released into the air that I suddenly knew I had to capture and put to paper. It was the first time the realization came. I fished around for any type of paper, and scrawled out a poem under the sheets. A horrible poem that started my portfolio that I still have to this day, barely legible with all the tear stains (which is good because it all rhymed and was 100% Harry Potter related and I really wouldn’t want anyone to be able to read it anyway. That would be horrifying. So I’m probably going to find it and share it with you).

I felt like the pieces of my world had been fit back together after writing that poem, and from then on I learned (and forgot and relearned) that writing would always be the thing that fit the world together again.

Which is why, no matter how I felt, I had still had to write this today. Even though it’s nerdy nonsense.

Thank you JK Rowling and all the other writers that have moved me (especially the ones that have moved me off my butt and into my writing chair), for helping shape who I am today, as well as who I will strive to be tomorrow.

P.S. I don’t have the poem to show you, but I gift to you this incredibly awkward picture of me in front of a drawing by Mary GrandPre that hangs on one of the library walls. She is a relative of one of the library’s former workers and drew it especially for the library during a visit there. Unfortunately before my time as an employee, but I still geeked out in a major way when I found out. I should explain that I look so stupid in this picture because someone called me over right as I was taking it and I didn’t get another shot at a selfie. But I’d be lying to you if I didn’t admit that’s actually just what my face looks like most of the time.