given a time turner i would tell my 21 year old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that
life is not a checklist of acquisition or achievement your qualifications your
cv are not your life though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two
life is difficult and complicated and beyond anyone's total control and the humility to know
that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes you might never fail on the scale i did but some
failure in life is inevitable it is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live
so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all in which case you fail by default
there's a quotation that i almost used in the harry potter book in magic man has to
rely on himself but that's the perennial appeal of magic the idea that we ourselves
have power and we can shape our world i came from a place where i was with i was a single mother
and it really was hand to mouth at one point it was it was as literally as poor as you can
get in britain without being homeless at one point if you've ever been there
you will never ever take for granted that you don't need to worry never i had a very very
tiny baby and then i walked straight into poverty and depression clinical depression is a terrible
place to be because it's not sadness sadness is not a bad thing you know to cry and to feel but
it's that it's that cold absence of feeling it's even the absence of hope that you can feel better
that really hollowed out feeling that's what the dementors are we all have to decide for ourselves
what constitutes failure but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it
one of the many things i learned at the end of that classics corridor down which i ventured at
the age of 18 in search of something i could not then define was this written by the greek author
plutarch what we achieve inwardly will change outer reality that is an astonishing statement
and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives it expresses in part our inescapable
connection with the outside world the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing
but how much more are you likely to touch other people's lives your intelligence your capacity
for hard work the education you have earned and received give you unique status and unique
responsibilities if you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of
those who have no voice if you choose to identify not only with the powerful but with the powerless
if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages
then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence but thousands and
millions of people whose reality you have helped change we do not need magic to transform our world
we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already we have the power to imagine better
poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression it means a thousand petty humiliations
and hardships climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride
yourself but poverty itself is romanticized only by fools what i feared most for myself at your age
was not poverty but failure ultimately we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure
but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it
so i think it's fair to say that by any conventional measure a mere seven years after
my graduation day i had failed on an epic scale an exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded
and i was jobless a lone parent and as poor as it is possible to be in modern britain
without being homeless the fears that my parents had had for me and that i had had for myself had
both come to pass and by every usual standard i was the biggest failure i knew i had no idea then
how far the tunnel extended and for a long time any light at the end of it was a hope
rather than a reality so why do i talk about the benefits of failure simply because failure meant
a stripping away of the inessential i stopped pretending to myself that i was anything other
than what i was and began to direct all my energy into 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 arena where i believed 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 the solid foundation on which i rebuilt my life
looking back at the 21 year old that i was at graduation is a slightly uncomfortable experience
for the 42 year old that she has become half my lifetime ago i was striking an uneasy balance
between the ambition i had for myself and what those closest off to me expected of
me i was convinced that the only thing i wanted to do ever was write novels however my parents
both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college
took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay
a mortgage or secure a pension i know the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil now but
so they hoped that i would take a vocational degree i wanted to study english literature
a compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody and i went up to study modern
languages hardly had my parents car round of the corner at the end of the road then i
ditched german and scuttled off down the classics corridor i cannot remember telling my parents that
i was studying classics they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day
of all the subjects on this planet i think they would have been hard put to name one
less useful than greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom
now i would like to make it clear in parenthesis that i do not blame my parents for their point
of view there is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction
in the first harry potter book dumbledore says to harry the happiest man alive would look in
the mirror and see himself exactly as he is so i would have to say that i'm pretty close as is a
tale so is life not how long it is but how good it is is what matters i wish you all very good lives
you