My Harry Potter Journey, a Personal Essay

This was written for the Why I Geek collection of Harry Potter fandom essays, which was cancelled after JK Rowling’s most recent foray into being a human pile of garbage. Nevertheless I’m very proud of it, so here it is.


This was, without a doubt, the worst day of Hermione’s life. From the moment she swung her legs out of bed and her feet hit the cold dormitory floor, she had definitely been cursed. There could be no other explanation. No amount of bad luck could have caused this dreadful turn of events.

The first day of school was a cherished day for Hermione. The evening before classes she would pack her books carefully in her book bag, arranged by class and then alphabetically. She would take care to pick out her newest quills, and fill her ink bottles until they almost overflowed. Everything was ready and in its proper place before she laid down to try to get some sleep, almost unable to doze off due to an inordinate amount of excitement. If they’d ever seen her pre first day ritual, Harry and Ron would have rolled their eyes so hard they’d get stuck staring up to the sky.

Hermione woke up on the first day of her seventh year having rested very fitfully, The bright sunrise streamed through the tower windows and lit up the four-poster beds, all but Hermione’s had their curtains drawn tightly closed. Careful to make as little sound as possible Hermione got out of bed and tip toed towards her trunk, where she’d carefully laid out her school robes. The stone floor was chilled under her toes and she silently wondered where she’d left her slippers. Then, with a disgusting squelch, Hermione stepped in… something. Was it liquid? No, it was a little bit more mushy, but chunky at the same time? She looked down to find a pool of slightly pink cat vomit squishing itself between her toes.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

If you wanted to take a deep dive into this passage looking for authorial intent, which I do not recommend, you might surface with a few different theories:

Maybe I’ve set out to misdirect you, to give you a false sense of dread only to resolve with a comedic turn.

Maybe I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating the tragedies of an alternate universe in which my beloved characters are resigned to a life of mundane misadventures, and must share with you one of my anti climactic musings.

Maybe I’ve stepped in my roommates cats vomit one too many times (read: one time) and I needed to talk about it, to process it, and to make someone else cringe at the uncomfortable description of the consistency of cat vomit. 

However, it doesn’t actually matter whether I was stretching my writing muscles, exploring alternate universes, or telling a story that’s very personal to me. I was creating in the amazing and versatile fanfiction space, and that space is whatever I want it to be.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*Flashback*~*~*~*~*~*~*

When I was nine years old I got the most important Christmas present I’ve ever received. I’m sorry to those who have spent hours painstakingly picking out a gift for me, wandering the local mall, pouring over pages of amazon top sellers, or transforming a special memory into a cherished keepsake. You were bested before you even began.

n December of 2000 I got a book from a friend of my mothers that I barely remember, but whom we happened to live with at the time. A woman who, I’ve theorized, walked into Barnes and Noble, found a display table situated strategically between the children's and young adults sections labeled “best sellers”, and picked up whatever looked the most fantastical. I’ve compiled a collection of circumstantial evidence to support my theory. The most compelling piece of evidence? This book was the fourth installment in a series that I had never read.

My introduction to the Harry Potter universe was, needless to say, confusing. I’m sure I must have thought all sorts of things like “Who starts a book series during the main characters fourth year at wizard school?” and “Why is everyone obsessed with Harry? He seems to need an awful lot of help to accomplish anything.” and by the end “Was this book in the children's section?!”. However the only thing I really remember thinking or feeling was that I loved the book, and I needed more. 

I love to tell this story. As far as origin stories are concerned, I feel like it’s a pretty good one. A young girl gets a not very well thought out gift from a family friend on Christmas and it changes her life/ruins the entire mystery of Chamber of Secrets once she gets around to reading it. What a hook. I wonder what happens to her next. 

Anyone who was around during the wait between Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix knows how painfully long it was. As we all waited to see what would happen next, the fandom took to the internet. Theories where Harry woke up in the cupboard under the stairs and it was all a dream were a dime a dozen. During this long gap between book releases a particular part of the fandom was flourishing. Among the flurry of fan theories, fanfiction was growing, feeding frenzied fans all looking for their fix. 

I was 9 years old, I didn’t have a computer at either my moms or dads places, and I was woefully out of the loop. Sitting in my bedroom, when I thought no one would catch me, I pulled out a fluffy pink journal from under my bed and opened it up to begin penning my first fanfiction. It was called “Wandering Alone”. It was not good.

During this time I remember imagining myself picking up mundane household items and they would turn out to be portkeys. I would feel that tug right behind my bellybutton and the world around me would blur as I was pulled away. Once, I told my little sister that Dumbledore was coming to get me, that he’d enchanted something in the house and one day when I picked it up, I would be gone. I imagined that Dumbledore was finally bringing me to the wizarding world to fulfill my destiny and when I got there things would be different. In the wizarding world being a little strange, being poor, being bushy haired and nerdy, wouldn’t make me an outcast. It would make me a hero. 

When I graduated elementary school (queue vitamin C’s “Graduation (Friends Forever)”) two very important things happened. I changed school districts and my dad got a computer. There were new friends to be made and I had the chance to totally reinvent myself. I started going by my middle name, I started pulling my bushy brown hair back into a tight bun, and I vowed to never again make the type of friends that hit me or belittled me. I moved my fanfiction notebooks from under my bed to my bookshelf, as if to put them on display for all to see, then I got on the computer and discovered the glorious world of fanfiction that lay beyond my bookshelf on the World Wide Web. What a time to be alive. The heyday of Harry Potter fanfiction right there at the tip of my fingers.

There have been a myriad of times in my life that Harry Potter and the Harry Potter fandom have been instrumental to increasing my quality of life. At this time, there had been three times when fan fiction specifically helped me out of a difficult time. The first when was very young and needed the outlet to create a world where I was important, then when I was less young needed an outlet to release my creative energies, and this very crucial time when I needed friends.

I often wish that I had anything that resembled a long-term memory. It’s usually when I find myself staring blankly at the computer screen, the cursor blinking dully back at me, willing it to just auto fill my password so I can access an account I haven’t logged into for two years. Right now it’s because I cannot remember how she and I started talking about fanfiction, and it was such an important moment.

My first “in real life” fanfiction friend and I met when we were 11, and I don’t remember how. What I do remember is dozens of sleepovers spent scrolling through fanfic websites to find some particularly fluffy Ronmione oneshots to giggle over. She had her own computer in her room, which I found particularly cool, and even when we weren’t together we were sending each other links to our favorite fics. We would sit in her house and dream up all the different ways Ron and Hermione could end up having their first kiss. Would we have to wait until after the defeat of He Who Must Not Be Named? Or maybe Hogwarts would hold another school dance and they would end up swaying together under the Great Hall’s enchanted night sky. They would kiss. There would be sparks, or fireworks, or some other pyrotechnic experience.

While I had made a real life fanfiction friend, I made many more online ones. I couldn’t believe how much content there was available and how many different websites I could find it on. There were the standbys like fanfiction.net and harrypotterfanfiction.com, which I frequented, or my favorite, the official Warner Brothers fanfiction forums (more formally known as the Harry Potter Dialogue Center). When I first signed up for the forums you had to have a parent or guardian sign a permission form and send it in if you were under 13 years old. At the age of 11 I printed out a form, had my dad dubiously sign it, and mailed it off to WB to start my forums journey.

I participated in writing competitions, I followed story threads religiously, and I had a specific artist in the cover art forum that I liked to do my banners. I was taking the fanfictions from my journals and notebooks, and typing them up to share on the forums. Ronscutiepie was my name and romance was my game. You could always count on me for a new piece of ronmione fluff, but I would occasionally write some other ships to cleanse the palate. The forums gave me a space where I was free to read, to create, and to make new friends. My story structures and style came from what I wrote and read on the dialogue center. Even when I wasn’t writing on it, it was hard not to make my titles *~^_^~*lOoK LiKE tHiS*~^_^~*. When Order of the Phoenix was finally released I was 12 years old, and I was as prolific a fanfic writer as you could find.

My little sister likes to make fun of me for how possessive I was of this space when I was young. How much I didn’t want to share it with anyone, but her especially. It was my happy place, my private world away from prying eyes. It was where I went to write a first kiss fluff piece after my own terrible first kiss experience. It was where I wrote my first Hermione gets a makeover story, hoping for my own transformation from a caterpillar into a butterfly. It was where I wrote my first story about death and the toll I believed the wizarding war would take on our brave heroes. I kept a very distinct line between my online writing presence and my “real life”. While I made more and more friends at school who knew I wrote and read fanfiction, and who I often convinced to read and write themselves, the forums were just for me. 

I’m not sure when I stopped writing, or why. Once I started High School it‘s possible that I got too busy with extra curricular activities. There was no superlative awarded to the student who had participated in the most clubs, but it seemed like I was still trying to win it. It’s also possible that I thought I’d outgrown it. I was entering a new social climate, one that seemed very grown up and serious to a 13 year old. High School, an intimidatingly large building full of real life teenagers. For one reason or another, while I still would shout my love for Harry Potter from the rooftops if anyone asked, I just didn’t need fanfiction anymore.

Until I did. I was 16 when I wrote again. My mom had taken a job opportunity in another city, and while my sister and I had stayed behind to live with our dad, we agreed to spend the summer with her. We occupied our time doing three things; riding our bikes to the public library, watching and rewatching the first four seasons of Lost, and fighting over computer time. My sister was very into “Club Penguin” at the time, an online game were you completed tasks as a Penguin I suppose. I was adamant that my computer time was more important because running six simultaneous writing competitions on the forums was hard work. Which was true, it was hard work and I took it very seriously. I would print out my submissions then sit on my bed and take my pen to them, ripping apart the grammar and punctuation, finding the gaping plot holes and mischaracterization. It felt like I was an English teacher with a penchant for commas in a previous life. My hand flew across the pages, littering them with notes and assigning them with points based on a very strict rubric. I was harsh, but not too harsh, a master of constructive criticism. 

That summer I also entered a few writing competitions. I never won them, but I loved the challenge of writing to a prompt. I was pulled out of my comfort zone by these stories, forced to write characters and perspectives that I otherwise wouldn’t have touched. Then, inspired by some of my mildly mundane adventures in my summer city, I started to write bits of exaggerated non-fiction. My mind was on a creative kick, and I was riding the wave wherever it took me.

As any summer is bound to, my summer of writing ended and my sister and I went home. I remember being so relieved to finally be back home with my friends, but looking back I’m incredibly grateful for the creative journey I went on that summer. If I hadn’t dived head first back into the fanfiction world I may have watched the first four seasons of Lost 8 times instead of 3, and what kind of a person would I be today if I had? I shudder to think of the consequences.

Up until this point I had admittedly been a Potter addict. I attended book and movie releases, I read Deathly Hallows in sixteen hours after they put it in my hands at midnight, and my iTunes library was equal parts pop music, Wizard Rock, and miscellaneous hipster bullshit. Yet it was when I went to college that I really hit my fandom stride. 

Going to college was like a flashback to my seventh grade year entering a new school district. This time I started going by my first name again, I took my hair out of the bun and learned how to defrizz with hair product, and I felt very, very alone. There were a few moments in my young life that I felt irrevocably influenced by my family’s low-income status, but none so much as my first year of college. I watched as all my high school friends who’d chosen to stay in state moved up to the dorms or moved in with each other off campus, and from my shared childhood bedroom I crossed my fingers for enough financial aid to cover my tuition.

My freshman of college I discovered that there was so much more to the Harry Potter fandom than I could have imagined. My classes seemed too big to make any meaningful connections and I was far from my friends without reliable and quick transportation. So I took to the Internet, a place that had yet to let me down. I decided to brush up on my fandom knowledge, falling in love with A Very Potter Musical and getting up to date on the amazing growth of Wizard Rock. When I found out about Harry Potter conventions I almost immediately had my ticket to one happening the next summer, courtesy of my graduation money from my grandma, and I was so excited to go be with hundreds of people just like me. At which point I realized I’d need a plane ticket to get there… and a hotel room to stay in… and money to feed myself. So, I went and got my first job. I had that job for eight and a half years.

All of my Internet adventures and fandom searches during my freshman year also brought me to love YouTube. In my quest to make new friends, I joined an all female Harry Potter themed collaboration channel. Twelve girls from around the world coming together to talk about a series that means so much to them. While we were, in the end, not that good at making videos and even worse at sticking to any kind of a schedule, I’d found the friends I’d been looking for. I’ve now been friends with these girls for almost ten years.

The decisions I made that year to become more involved with the Harry Potter fandom made lasting impressions on my life, and gave me experiences I’ll never forget. At my first Harry Potter convention I had a roommate who was the captain of the UMass Amherst quidditch team, which lead me to become involved with quidditch for the last nine years. It’s been such a huge part of my life, I cannot imagine what it would be like if I hadn’t become involved.

Through my early college years involved in the fandom, to my late college years heavily involved in quidditch, I hadn’t picked up fanfiction again. I had found so much friendship and fulfillment in other areas of fandom that I hadn’t gone back to writing or even reading much. I didn’t notice when Warner Brothers took down the Harry Potter Dialogue Center in 2013. 

Sometime in the early 2010’s, after I’d finally moved out of my dads house, my roommates/best friends and I sat huddled in a blanket fort that took up our entire living room. I opened up my laptop, and handed it hesitantly to one of them. They proceeded to read aloud a story I’d written in 2008 entitled “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”. The fort was teeming with laughter from everyone, including myself. Mid laugh, the reader cried out “Did you write porn on purpose?!”. This ignited another swell of laughter. It was, in no uncertain terms, a sexy murder scene. “How old were you when you wrote this?” they giggled. I shrugged. “Sixteen?”

It was just the beginning.  We read more of my fanfiction, then we migrated over to fanfiction.net to search for the most insane pairings we could find. Hagrid/McGonagall? Click that link! How about Hedwig/The Sorting Hat? Let’s read it! Nothing was too weird or disturbing for us, and we read and laughed for hours. The blanket fort crew did this a few times over the years, every time marveling at the abundance of Harry Potter fanfiction in this world. 

*~*~*~*~*~*~*End Flashback*~*~*~*~*~*~*

I’ve rewritten “Wandering Alone” a few times since 2001. It’s still not good. My various notebooks and journals that I filled with fanfiction before we got a computer are gone. The Harry Potter Dialogue Center is a hazy memory from long ago, a memory that I don’t seem to share with many others. I have a folder on my Google Drive called “Old School Fanfiction” that houses what little I still have from 2000 to 2004. Another folder titled “Finished Fanficion” houses everything from my 2008 summer of writing.

In 2017 one of my blanket fort compatriots and I started a Harry Potter fanfiction podcast. We are deep diving into fanfiction published before the release of Deathly Hallows, searching for the most insane and hilarious stories we can find. It felt almost strange to come back to fanfiction after such a long period of time, trying to remember all of the lingo and slowly remembering all of the amazing tropes as I read through dozens of fanfics on fanfiction.net. I especially love the stuff written between 2000 and 2003, the earlier the better I say. Though, it’s possible I’m a little biased.

For our ninth episode we read, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”.

In August of 2018 I finally wrote another Fanfiction. In 2019, my co host and I attended a Harry Potter convention. It was my fourth and her first. 

It’s very possible that this Harry Potter thing is forever, and I’m really okay with that.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

“UGH” Hermione cried out pulling her foot up and away from the offending substance. 

Lavender seemed to stir behind her drawn curtains at the noise. Hermione stood as still as she could, perched on one foot, until the movement had stopped. With a silent sigh of relief she hopped to her trunk, still as quietly as possible. Pulling her wand from her school bag, she quickly disposed of the vomit on the floor, and on her foot. What a way to start the day. 

Placing her wand back in her book back, she surveyed the sight in front of her. Transfiguration was first thing this morning, so that book was placed in her bag, closest to the front. Her red and gold tie was laid out next to her bag, neatly pressed and ready for her last first day of school. A smile spread across her face.

It was going to be a very good day.