Failure spares no one. Some struggles bruise the ego; others break the soul. We cope in different ways-through faith, therapy, or travel-but too many turn to vices that only deepen the pain.
None of these were options for British novelist J.K. Rowling when she hit her lowest point. Her life had all the ingredients of an epic failure -one that could’ve driven others to the brink of insanity-but instead, she looked inwards and harnessed all her inner strength to survive and succeed well beyond her wildest dreams.
‘Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life,’ said J.K. Rowling in the 2008 Harvard Commencement Address, a line that has become a mantra for anyone clawing their way out of despair and searching for hope.
In 1993, at 28, J.K. Rowling’s one-year marriage to Portuguese journalist Jorge Arantes collapsed, and she was thrown out of their home in Portugal. The relationship had been marked by control and abuse, forcing her to leave. But it wasn’t that simple-her four-month-old daughter, Jessica, was still with Arantes, and Rowling had to seek police help to get her back.
She left Portugal and moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, with her daughter. At this point, she was a single mother, unemployed, on a dole receiving an equivalent of US$103 a week from Social Security and housed in a flat that she described as ‘mouse-ridden.’
That ordeal would be terrifying for anyone, especially as she grappled with the trauma of abuse. But that was the ‘picnic’ part of her misery-the greater burden was the crushing economic distress she faced. Simply put, J.K. Rowling was broken and broke.
At this point, she saw nothing in her but failure. Every force that could break a person’s sanity weighed on her. Crushed by poverty (perhaps not the kind we see in the Philippines, but it is poverty just the same) and haunted by despair, she sought professional help to keep herself from committing suicide.
Says Rowling: ‘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..That period of my life was a dark one.’
She recovered from depression after months of therapy, was able to move to a better flat, and found a teaching job. It was because of hardship that she was able to focus on a dream: finishing the book she had started several years earlier.
Failure became a weapon rather than a cross she was bearing. She examined it and looked at failure in a different light and began seeing the benefits rather than drawbacks, and used them to full advantage.
‘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,’ said Rowling.
In the midst of misery, she saw magic. She was writing any chance she got: in cafes while waiting for her daughter to finish school and in her quiet moments at home. The book series, as we all know, is Harry Potter, in which magic becomes the animating force and inspiration.
In 1995, two years after her troubles began in Portugal, she finished the first Harry Potter book. In December 1998, it hit The New York Times Best Sellers list. She completed the series and was released within 10 years, from 1997 to 2007, selling over 600 million copies.
With Warner Bros. purchasing the movie rights to her books, she officially became a multimillionaire in 1998 and reached billionaire status in 2004, according to Forbes. Her success is nothing short of magical-just like the lifeblood of the Harry Potter books she wrote.
The magic didn’t end with her escape from poverty. She also met Dr. Neil Murray, whom she married in 2001. She found belonging, purpose, success, and love-all because she refused to give up when everything around her was falling apart.
Let me share with you paragraphs about failure from her Commencement Speech in Harvard from 2008-because nobody else could say it better:
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.
Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself or the strength of your relationships until both have been tested by adversity.