How Harry Potter and Business School Saved My Life

You start to get twitchy, there is a worry that you don’t know where your next fix is coming from, and you plan your day around how to alleviate the stress of your never-ceasing thoughts. You are a Harry Potter Addict.

There is a new study being submitted to the Journal of General Psychology that indicates that Harry Potter is addictive. The study, by Dr. Jeffery Rudski, found characteristics of addiction in at least 10 percent of the 4000 HP buffs he surveyed online. He used smoking scales to judge addictiveness of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” before the book came out, after a person had read it, and six months afterward.

“The 10 percent of respondents that Rudski considers addicted described spending more than four hours a day on Potter-related activities, experiencing interference with appetite and sleep patterns, engaging in less physical activity, having a lower sense of well-being and being more irritable after completing the series.”

I particularly love why this researcher chose Harry Potter. It was a choice for him between the boy wizard and the end of The Sopranos; he choose Harry because he saw some addictive traits in his own daughter. (She learned to play guitar so she could be in a wizard rock band. If you don’t already own Draco and the Malfoys - go now straight to iTunes!).

Rudeski later mention in his findings that unlike meth-addicts, Harry Potter addicts can channel their addiction into creative outlets more readily than other addicts. It’s hard to focus an entire fanfic post on your smoking or caffeine addiction.

Around this time last year, the publication date for “Deathly Hallows” was announced. I promptly put in on my Google Calendar and forgot about it. Well, no, that’s not exactly true. I started theorizing. I was way behind the hardcore addicts when it came to trying to figure out what was going to happen in book seven. I subscribe to the Mugglecast and Pottercast podcasts, read Mugglenet.com, the Leaky Cauldron.com, and other various Potter sites, and I make charts. I make charts of what happened in which books and draw diagrams of how they relate to one another. I’m not ashamed, so you can just shut up now.

At any rate, my life wasn’t at a particularly glowing moment when the book was announced. I was in what will probably remain as my lowest depressive bout: I was unemployed and out of school; broke off an engagement; broke up with my therapist; had a house I couldn’t sell; decided not to study music professionally; and all the time I felt guilty about being a downer for my parents who “just want you to be happy” (which believe me, is another blog entirely!). It was the darkest, crappiest, and most lost I’ve felt during my quarterlife crisis.

I don’t want to alarm the authorities (or get my ass Baker Acted), but I certainly had suicidal moments. When you’re that depressed, you look for a way out, and death seems like a quick and promising end. The problem was I didn’t want to go before I knew how Harry Potter ended. I don’t mean to make light of suicidal thoughts, but really, when you have something to root for, it’s a powerful tool. Instead, as the months approached, I started to fear that I would die before I was able to read Harry Potter.

As those months dragged on, I realized that I had to start doing something else - anything else - to get my life back on some kind of track. I didn’t need a career or a goal or a purpose - I just needed a hobby. That’s when I enrolled in business school. I didn’t love business by any means and the thought of taking a class entitled, “Managerial Finance,” made me yawn. But I figured that any knowledge of the business world I’d gain would help me at some point in the future. I started taking classes at night and re-reading the first six Harry Potter books during the day.

Summer started to rear its ugly head (in Florida that means staying inside with the AC turned as low as your electric bill can stand and not moving if you don’t have to). I was taking two classes at night and one accelerated class during the day. I was nervous. D-Day (“Deathly Hallows Day”) was approaching, and I had exams and homework. I couldn’t be bothered with that! I worked ahead as much as I could and cleared my schedule for that weekend.

“Deathly Hallows” came out on Saturday, July 21, 2008. I was at Wal-Mart (we don’t have bookstores here) at 10:30 Friday night with my preorder slip and a stomach of butterflies. It will go down as one of the most exciting times of my life. Nothing like that will happen again. I can only liken it to the Beatles coming to America, and I wasn’t alive for that. To see all those people lined up in the middle of the night for a book?!? To be there was to be a part of something - surrounded by other people who understood you.

And the book was awesome. I finished chapter one while waiting in line to check out (with my earplugs in in case someone yelled, “Harry Died!” while I handed over my Visa). I finished the rest of the book that night. I didn’t sleep, I didn’t eat. I drank pot after pot of fancy teas and cried at every death. As the end approached, I realized that this was it. This wouldn’t happen again. I wouldn’t be waiting in line at midnight for book eight. I had 100 pages to go and it would be over.

I let it out.

I cried like I hadn’t cried in any depressive episode or during any of the string of stupid, life altering things that had happened to me in the last year. But with the ending of Harry Potter, I was allowed to let go of that crap. Harry Potter was over, but it was going to have a resolution. I likened it to that shit in my life that had put me where I was. It was over, but I, too, would have a resolution. The bad things didn’t have to define me. I was a student again, and I had things to work towards. I had a beautifully crafted novel in my hands that I wouldn’t have gotten to read if I had given up.

So, kudos to Dr. Rudski. My addiction brought me through an incredibly hard time, and I am proud to stand up and say, “Hi, my name is Mari, and I am a Harry Potter Addict.” Now, I’ve got to run - “Project Runway” comes on any minute.

(P.S.- Managerial Finance is actually really interesting, I got an A in it, and I even laughed at a joke about EBIT. So there is life after Potter that is just as nerdy.)