Reading With the Lights On
I did not grow up with a long list of heroes. My grandfather held that title effortlessly, simply by being the kind of person whose presence made the world feel steady. But if I had to name one more figure who shaped my childhood, it would be J. K. Rowling. She didn’t just write stories; she cracked open the idea of what a woman could be. In school, aside from one famous Serbian poet, women writers were completely ignored. Literature seemed to belong to men by default, as if imagination itself had a gender. But Rowling’s success showed me something different. Watching her, I began to dream bigger, to imagine that maybe I could write stories too — stories that mattered, stories that made people feel. For the first time, writing felt like a path I was allowed to walk, not a door I had to sneak through.
I was also the perfect audience for Harry Potter: a scared kid looking for a world that made more sense than the one I lived in. While some children read the books for fun, I read them like a survival manual. I carried them everywhere — under my pillow, in my schoolbag, and yes, even to the bathroom, where I perfected the art of “just one more chapter” until my family wondered if I had fallen in. Hogwarts wasn’t just a school of magic; it was a place where adults protected you, friends chose you, and courage actually meant something. Those books gave me a place to breathe, a place where the quiet child could imagine becoming someone braver, someone who might one day find her own version of magic.
And it wasn’t just escapism. It was structure. It was a world where rules made sense, where good and evil were clearly labeled, where justice — though delayed — always arrived. In my real life, things were rarely so tidy. Adults contradicted themselves. The world felt arbitrary, confusing, and occasionally cruel. But in Rowling’s universe, the moral compass pointed somewhere. Even if the characters were flawed, the narrative itself promised that meaning existed. For a child who often felt lost, that promise was intoxicating.
But growing up has a way of turning on the lights. In recent years, I’ve had to face the uncomfortable truth that Rowling’s political views and mine now sit on opposite sides of a very wobbly bridge. And I’m not interested in proving anything, nor in appointing myself the moral referee of the internet. This isn’t a denunciation of her. If anything, I’ve come to believe that turning against people — even when we disagree with them deeply — has never moved humanity forward. What I’m trying to understand is something quieter and more personal: how to hold a story that shaped me, now that I know its creator holds views that clash with my own. It feels a bit like discovering that the architect of your childhood treehouse has some questionable theories about gravity — the structure still stands, but you can’t climb it with the same innocence as before.
Once you let yourself look closely, the whole picture shifts, and the things you once missed begin to insist on being seen. Suddenly, the books reveal details I skimmed past for years: the Manichean worldview, the traditional gender coding, the neoliberal shine, the antisemitic shadows, the racism tucked into corners, the confident march of heteronormativity, the quiet hum of weight‑based prejudice, and the list goes on. It’s like returning to a beloved childhood coffeeshop only to realize that, with the lights turned up, you can see the crumbs on the counter, the sticky menu, and the barista who has very strong opinions about oat milk and is not afraid to share them. I find myself holding both affection and critique at once, like two mismatched mugs — one chipped, one beautiful — trying to make sense of the strange mix.
And there’s another layer: the grief of losing a sanctuary. When a story has been your refuge, questioning it feels like questioning the part of yourself that survived because of it. I sometimes catch myself defending the books out of sheer muscle memory, as if protecting them is the same as protecting the child I once was. But nostalgia is not a moral argument, and affection is not a shield against complexity. Growing up means learning to separate the comfort something gave you from the truth of what it contains.
Over time, something settled in me. I don’t need to condemn the books, nor do I need to cherish them the way I once did. I still love the child who pushed through B1 English just to read those books (and not wait a year for the Serbian translation), the child who devoured 500 pages in a single day because magic felt urgent, necessary, and entirely real. I still honor the way those stories held me when nothing else did. But I don’t need to carry them into every room of my adult life. They can remain where they belong — in the past that shaped me, not the future I’m choosing.
There’s a quiet dignity in letting something stay behind without bitterness. I don’t need to rewrite my childhood to align with my adult politics. I don’t need to pretend the books were flawless, nor do I need to pretend they meant nothing. They meant everything — then. And that “then” is allowed to stay intact, even if my “now” has moved on.
That’s the strange grace of growing up: discovering that old reverence can be cherished without being carried, that enchantment can be remembered without denying the unenchanted parts, and that the future opens more easily when the past is allowed to rest. Maybe that’s the quiet revelation at the end of this inner struggle: that stories can shape us, but they don’t have to define the limits of our understanding. That it’s possible to outgrow the worlds that once held us without losing the wonder they taught us. That sometimes, the best thing we can do is step out of the old narrative, and write a new one — one where magic is lived daily, in the way we choose to give, to imagine, to create, and to become.
