A few days back, I watched the incredible live YouTube webcast of the Harry Potter world premiere celebration. All Trafalgar and a good part of Leicester Square (very brief clip) was packed with fans, cameras, and large outdoor movie screens paying tribute to the genius of JK Rowling's entertaining and superlatively money-making creations. It did me good to see the H.P. cast and especially JK herself give stirring little speeches, and take their final Potter bows before the entire world.
But to me one of Rowling's finest creations -- and certainly one more of us can relate to -- was her extraordinary speech before the Harvard Graduating Class of 2008. If you can believe it, the topic was one hardly associated with the (officially) Wealthiest Author Ever. The subject was: Failure.
Oh yes. Anyone the least bit familiar with her story knows one thing: this girl knows about life at the bottom. Rock bottom. And she knows how incredibly fortunate she is to have found her way out and achieve such astounding success. Seven years after graduating from university, Rowling saw herself as "the biggest failure I knew." Her marriage had failed, she was jobless with a dependent child, and so on. But she described her failure as liberating:
“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to 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 area where I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had 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 a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."
– J. K. Rowling, Harvard commencement address, 2008.
These are huge, important questions for all of us. What are you, really? What are you pretending to be instead? Have you ever hit rock bottom ... and once there, did you feel liberated, or just a failure?
Every time I listen to her speech, it moves me to tears. Anyone who has failed miserably by any standard, and more to the point considered themselves a failure, knows what she is talking about. The incredible challenge to use failure as a springboard to re-invent yourself. To look at who you truly are -- and are not -- and construct a life, an entire reality, around your newly revised self-image.
As detailed elsewhere in this journal, I not only hit rock bottom, but lived there for far too long. And I'll be honest with you, for most of my life I did not feel the least bit liberated. Just a major underachiever. Disappointed in myself. Ashamed. Still stuck in the misconceptions of who I thought I was, and who everyone wanted me to be. Only once I let all this go did things start to turn around.
Currently, I'm still a work in progress where the reinvention part is concerned. The gender change, and all its many challenges, are just a portion of the work done, and perhaps even the least profound "building" constructed on my stripped-bare foundation. While still unsure what will come of all these revisions, already I'm happier, and more in touch with who I really am. The bad days are when I relapse, and become 16 years old again, the supposed boy genius and artist who absolutely must conquer the world -- or else. It takes a lot of humility to do what JK did, to look with the eyes of innocence at yourself, and with love, and on some days I'm just not up to to it. But when I am, I start to see possibilities where none existed before. And this alone is quite an improvement over the previous 50-some years.
And I am very thankful that someone with the world's spotlight on her had the courage to reach back into a dark, unhappy chapter of her own life, and present her own failures to the world, in order to demonstrate that even the destitute failure doesn't need to be the end of hope. That's the kind of message that can change lives. And perhaps even change the world.
JK Rowling, Harvard Commencement Address 2008, Part 1 of 2
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