Love and Empathy

One of the first books I have a distinct memory of reading is Harry Potter. I must’ve been around kindergarten when my mom started reading it to me at bedtime. Sure, looking back on it, maybe this was a bit young, but I ate it up. It’s now been several years since I last reread any of the books, but the memories are still prominent in my mind. If you’re unfamiliar with the plot of Harry Potter, it follows the story of an eleven year old boy, who finds out that he is a wizard, after living with his neglectful aunt and uncle for the past ten years of his life. The following books then proceed to follow his journey in an attempt to protect the wizarding world he comes to love from the villain who is responsible for his parents’ deaths.

As many of us did, I became enamored by his story. One memory that particularly stands out to me to this day is that I would wake up early before school in the mornings and sit on the floor in the living room to read ahead of what my parents and I had read at bedtime. To this day, I’m not completely sure what was so compelling about it. Regardless, I now notice a trend in the books I proceeded to read after finishing Harry Potter, notably that they were all hero’s journey novels. This was something that continued throughout my elementary school years until middle school. I think that regardless of the messages that I may have learned at the time, or the ones I can see in it now, one very influential thing that I picked up from reading it was my love of literature in my younger years.  

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (the final book in the series) would eventually become the first book that I ever cried over. Due to those experiences, the most important thing I think I learned from Harry Potter was about love and empathy. Somehow, within the span of a few months, I went from asking my mom why she was crying when a character died at the end of the fifth book because “mom, it’s just a book, it’s not real”, to crying myself over character deaths in the last. To anyone who knows me today, it might seem ridiculous that I didn’t understand why my mom was crying over a book (I am a notorious crier: movies, books, songs, you name it, I’ve probably cried over it), but I think this experience was very influential in my learning .

Because of the influential role it played in my childhood and early development, today I hold it up on a bit of a pedestal. I refuse to look at any spoofs or parodies or horrible jokes people make online off of it, because the nostalgic part of me wants to keep that part of my childhood pure and untainted. While I may not remember a lot about the specifics of the plot, or the many characters throughout the seven book series, the experience I had of falling in love with this book was something that I will carry for the rest of my life.