A Fear of Potter

My distain for Harry Potter stems from the bleak smear of my childhood. Why was he chosen while I suffered? A misfit devoid of agency is taken by magic in which many boys have squandered their lives hoping for. Harry was delivered to the doors of fortune by the radical call of a hat; how does a novice of the universe find himself up to bat in big league? This story has taken nothing from me, and is a quintessential childhood read, so why do I hate Harry? Can’t I ever root for the home team?

Confusion and despair, as much as a grade schoolboy can experience. I set my sail to what appeared to be the end of the earth. The Harry Potter series was my escape, a dream to hide behind, a place to leave my terrors behind. Greedily I gorged on Harry’s successes, and the love of his friends. Upon my completion of the series, I came to recognize a deep void within that dictated my mental health. It was another decade before I caught the first glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. My feelings of inferiority bread resentment towards Harry’s successes and every single one of his devoted and loving friends.

My grudge against Potter has been exhausting; the weight of hate is twice that of gold. It is time that I find common ground and make a truce. Harry and I are quite similar, he was isolated from the world under his little staircase, living a life void of youthful frolic. My isolation came from living in the countryside with no communication to the outside world, this formed a black crevasse between me and my fellow classmates. Like the Potter staircase, my childhood was spent underneath a bush in our front yard, loaded with a stock pile of apples to ward of potential starvation if I decided to leave my family altogether. The darkness of it all appeared infinite like my nightly homework. It was in third grade that I was ripped up from my meager existence into my own Hogwarts, the EXCEL program. There was real magic here, it was a place I could finally be understood. My teachers redirected my abuse of powers, such as levitating pencils across the classroom to disrupt the flow of class or transforming a pencil sharpener into a bladed weapon in which I destroyed gymnasium floors during our assemblies. My powers may not have been magic, but they were at least misdirected boredom. They were transformed into the ability to cook dishes from across the world and to alchemize numbers into a solution. Both me and Harry needed a place that fostered abilities inherent within us. I need to give the boy a break.