Talking Isn't My Thing But It Is JK Rowling's

Not exactly a TED sponsored speech but since it's on the website I am using it: JK Rowling addressed the graduating class of Harvard 2008 in a commencement speech about the fringe benefits of failure (the title of the video) and imagination in a much broader sense of the word than that of wizards and magic. A speech that more people should watch because these are things that lots of people struggle with and what one of the most successful woman of our generation has to say about them is not only a little comforting but also completely inspiring.

Before she became richer than the Queen of England, JK Rowling had been as poor as you could possibly be in England without being homeless. By her definition of the word, she had failed. And so, with nothing left to lose, she had built her success up from rock bottom.

As a young woman, she worked for a foundation that helped African refugees brave enough to talk out against their controlling government (I'm pretty sure. The details were a little fuzzy). During her time there, she saw pain and anguish like she'd never imagined and the very best of human nature in people that helped those whose situation they could never even begin to comprehend. The imagination JK Rowling was talking about was the way people have the ability to imagine what other people are going through, the kind of imagination only empathy can provide. But there are also people who choose not to use that imagination, who close their minds to to ugliness of the world.

Failure and imagination. In different ways, these are some of my greatest fears.

Failure is a slightly more superficial fear in my mind because how do you constitute a failure? A high school student is conditioned to call an F a failure and an A a success. Get below a 70% on a test, you're marked for life as a failure. An A, you're clearly meant for success. But there aren't grades in the real world. Sometimes, in the little high school bubble, you forget that. Grades make up your GPA but your GPA doesn't define you. That's what sucks though, because no matter how often you tell yourself that, it never feels like the truth until after you stop getting graded and start getting paid. Even then, after school, success is still measured by how much money you make a year. So somehow, your success is always measured by something.

Then imagination, the way JK Rowling talked about it. Being able to understand people's situations and feelings and put yourself in their shoes. Cutting yourself off from all the cruelties of the world and live life ignoring what's wrong. I am terrified of both because the world is a terrible, terrible place and finding some glimmer of good in it is so hard that ignoring it all is just easier. But then, by doing that, selfishness is inevitable. And who wants to be selfish? Nobody who runs this blog, that's for sure.

I just--AH. Feelings and thoughts become too much when you're not sure whether to be inspired or scared. Because everything that JK Rowling was what keeps me up every other night and it's nice to know that I'm not the only one. But still, knowing what's wrong doesn't mean anything gets better. Things just are and you just sit with that for a while until you finally get a chance to form an opinion on it and then you cry because feelings just feel like too much.