Four years ago, my life was a wreck. My self-esteem and confidence were almost non-existent due to a bully who wouldn't get off my back and almost every other part of my life suffered from it; including my spirituality and social life. With all that stress, I felt the need to sit at a gaming console for hours a day, which in the end, when things didn't go right in the game, left me with even more stress.
The stress also paid off in the form of immaturity when it came to getting things I needed to do, done. I was young at the time, so between my age and my laziness, when summer vacation came around, my parent's needed to get childcare.
Although we were never poor, my family was in no way rich either, and Virginia Beach is an expensive city, especially in the area we live in, so to spend the whole summer in camps with the richer kids at the local rec center wasn't financially practical.
As an alternative, they paid less for us to go to a cheap camp at an elementary school in a poorer area of the city, and we hated it. The camp was mostly low-class, rude, loud kids, who were likely there because their parents couldn't stand having them around all summer. (It was actually probably because most of the parents, when you saw come pick their kids up, had bad jobs that would require them to work all the time)
Anyway, every time the kids started to act up, the Parks and Recreation employees who were running the camp would make us all grab a book from the basket in the corner of the room. As someone who had always enjoyed reading, but read less and less over the years as my life fell apart, this normally wouldn't have been a problem; I liked reading a lot better than what we normally did at the camp.
Unfortunately, it turned out to actually be worse. The basket was full of only very basic, kiddy, books because a majority of people in the camp were very young kids, and since this was a poor area, education wasn't nearly as good as the part of the city I live in, so even the older kids couldn't read all that well.
After the counselors called for silent reading time a times, I figured I'd had enough and decided to start bringing my own books. I found a copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets under my bed and decided to bring that to camp.
I had already seen several of the movies years before my life had taken it's turn for the worse, and liked them, but when I first saw them I was really too young to understand much of the plot, and even though I've always had reading skills well above my age level, at the time when I first saw them, I still couldn't understand the books.
This camp, which in the first month I had thought of as a horrible place, I look back on as an extremely valuable portion of my young life. I fell in love with the world of Harry Potter there. Through finding my love for reading again, I saw the immaturity of my gaming addiction and put the controller down.
The stories themselves carried so many moral and spiritual lessons, and I found my love for spirituality again. To this day, I honestly think that this one series of fictional stories has more moral value than any religious text.
Through my love for reading, I found my passion; writing. In December 2012, a little less than two and a half years later, I published my first novel The Runaways at age 13 and became the world's youngest fantasy author. You can buy it here.
So much more in my life has changed so radically thanks to these wonderful novels, and I really do owe my life to Miss Rowling for writing them. If you haven't read the Harry Potter series yet, you really need to, so much can be learned from such a fantastic escape from reality.
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