All Must End Well

While everyone today is lining up in the cinema to watch Eclipse of the Twilight Series, here I am in my dorm room making another post. Hehe. This post may make me sound like a STAN (thank you ONTD for this term, remember the fanatic in eminem’s video from the same music Stan).

I’ve been a potter fan for almost 10 years. I know I’m too old for this shit but I’m thankful for the series for making me love reading again. It may not apply on my Medical books, but I’m a big fan of reading fictional, semiautobiographical, and non-fictional. From Mitch Albom to Neil Gaiman to Sidney Sheldon, I manage to read some in between my hectic schedule.

Reading has been my salvation. It takes you to places you never been, from Paris to Hogwarts. It stimulates your imagination (not that lustful ones, :P). It sometimes builds your character or finds similarities with those characters. I remember my mom scolding me and grounding me from reading books, weird right? Haha

Yesterday I was watching J.K. Rowling’s 2007 ITV Documentary: A Year in the Life. In here, she was filmed while releasing the last book of the series, the Deathly Hollows.

I only posted the last video. Part 6/6. Why? I especially love the part when James Runcie (the interviewer) brought her back to her old flat in Leith, Edinburgh, where she wrote and finished the first book, HP and the Philosopher’s Stone. She cried seeing where it all began.

Transcript from the interview:

After seeing her old apartment, “This is where I really turned my life around, completely, my life changes around this flat. I feel like I really became myself here, I'd made such a mess of things. But that was freeing, so I just thought, 'Well, I want to write', and I wrote the book and what is the worst than can happen? It gets turned down by every publisher in Britain, big deal."

When she entered her old room, the new tenants of her old flat has a bookshelf with complete potter series!

She is deeply moved visiting her old flat and what haunted her at the time, she used to turn her life around and if she lost everything, those are the places she would return to.

Choking back her emotions, she says: "It was my life and it was very hard and I didn't know there was going to be this fairy-tale resolution. This room is full of ghosts."

It’s very well known that prior to writing the Potter series; Rowling lost her mother who’s suffering Multiple Sclerosis. Fresh from her wrecked marriage, she’s taking care of her daughter with almost 0 funds.

I also love the commentary, “for most writers, the act of writing is a form of therapy, a way of making sense of the world and their place within it”

Lastly, she was asked.

What do you still want to achieve? I want to get better

What keeps you going? I’m a born “tryer”

Why do you still write? Because I love it, and I need it

How do you liked to be remembered? Someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.

“Jo Rowling came from very humble beginnings, had extreme hardships and depression but never lost hope in herself or abilities as a writer. Her goal was to be published and to live off her writing; never did she ever fathom the success and wealth she would have created for herself nor the happiness she now enjoys thanks to the Harry Potter series. She didn’t write to become rich and famous, it happened because she believed enough in herself to write something that others would enjoy.”

My favorite quote from this woman:

“So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because, failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

“You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. 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 fail by default.”