Hope Nation

by Hope Nation- YA Authors Share Personal Moments of Inspiration (retail) (epub)

  Because at that point in my life, I was feeling pretty alone too. But Harry was more alone than I could ever be. And knowing that helped me keep my own head above water.

  It gave me hope that things could get better.

  After that, I was done for. I devoured Goblet of Fire when it came out the next year. I got my first Hogwarts poster and hung it over my bed. I got an amazing Potter throw blanket that, like a little kid with her favorite teddy bear, I took with me everywhere—friends’ houses for sleepovers, faraway cheerleading competitions, student council retreats, spring break road trips to the beach, you name it.

  I’d just graduated from high school when Order of the Phoenix came out, but I wasn’t *too cool* to wrangle a couple of friends into joining me for the midnight release party at our local Barnes & Noble.

  Wearing witches’ hats, of course.

  Heck, I’m in my early thirties now, and though I tell people we’re listening to the Potter audiobooks in the car to keep the kids engaged during our commute, I’m totally lying. Those audiobooks are for me.

  Harry Potter—the boy, the books, the films, the world—is something I love to my very core. (I’m a Slytherin, by the way.)

  So to hear a guy I initially took for someone who might hurt me say he liked something that represents my deep and abiding love for a Thing that’s such a huge part of me?

  Yeah. Utterly life changing.

  The whole way back to the cabin—and ever since, really—I thought about my own thinking. My fear. My intense noticing of my African Americanness in certain situations.

  The prejudice those things engender within me in the name of *safety*.

  And don’t get me wrong: It’s important to stay safe, and in our present political and societal climate, the fear many marginalized folks feel is overwhelmingly valid. Within the past month of my writing this essay, another unarmed African American teen boy was killed by a police officer (rest in glory, #JordanEdwards), and two white men were stabbed to death while trying to protect a pair of Muslim girls from a third white man who was hurling racist and anti-Muslim insults at them.

  The danger is real, and I would never, ever tell any marginalized person they shouldn’t be afraid.

  But what the encounter taught me (and maybe it’ll be true for you too, dear reader) is that my fear of others strips them of their humanity.

  Before this encounter, I would’ve never even considered that someone as different from me as Pickup Truck Guy could like something I like. That there would be a point of connection we could probably have a really exciting conversation about. It brought up all these questions for me: What house could this dude be in? Would he be into the Dark Arts (my sweatshirt does imply that I’ve done time in the notorious wizarding prison)? What are his thoughts on house elfs? Did he see that twist coming at the end of Half-Blood Prince? Which of the Deathly Hallows would he pick if he could have one?

  Whether this guy is as rabid a fan as I am doesn’t matter. The bottom line is there’s something capable of transcending our differences.

  Which means it can also transcend our fear.

  That’s what Potter (and, okay, pop culture in general) does for people. It transcends and then connects. It pulls the stuff that makes us human up to the surface: the power of loss and grief, the desire to love and be loved, the capacity for awe and wonder. Within the pages of those books, many of us found solace. Empowerment. Courage to dream. Harry’s adventures allowed me to momentarily escape my circumstances and find my self, my fire, my will to live, even just by watching him struggle and triumph.

  In vanquishing Voldemort, The Boy Who Lived genuinely saved my life.

  Who’s to say he didn’t save Pickup Truck Guy’s too?

  June 26, 2017, marked twenty years since Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published in the United Kingdom, and though that makes me feel mad old, I couldn’t be more grateful for the book that downright started a revolution.

  I hope we can keep it going. Because at this time, in this place, we need sources of connection and transcendence. We need stuff that has the power to trigger a shared smile between a black girl from Atlanta and a country white boy in a pickup truck in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.

  I need this stuff. Because—voila!—I’m still African American. And at this point in history, that feels like a Big Deal. So I’m thankful for that encounter. Because now, though I notice my African Americanness more often than not, when I see someone with a different skin color or gender identity, someone who might love or believe differently from me, I have hope because there’s always a chance they love Harry Potter.

  There’s this quote in Deathly Hallows—“The Boy Who Lived remains a symbol of everything for which we are fighting: the triumph of good, the power of innocence, the need to keep resisting.”

  That’s what Harry Potter is to me. Connection. Transcendence. Hope.

  Always.

  DAVID LEVITHAN LIBBA BRAY ANGIE THOMAS ALLY CONDIE MARIE LU JEFF ZENTNER NICOLA YOON KATE HART GAYLE FORMAN CHRISTINA DIAZ GONZALEZ ATIA ABAWI ALEX LONDON HOWARD BRYANT ALLY CARTER ROMINA GARBER RENÉE AHDIEH AISHA SAEED JENNY TORRES SANCHEZ NIC STONE JULIE MURPHY I. W. GREGORIO JAMES DASHNER JASON REYNOLDS BRENDAN KIELY

  JULIE MURPHY

  Hoping for Home

  I AM 99.99 PERCENT TEXAN. The place I call home. The .01 percent of my heart that is not belongs to the tiny state of Connecticut—which is basically the size of the entire Dallas–Fort Worth area, the city I call home.

  I had lived most of my life in my grandparents’ house, where my mother was also raised. That house felt like home. It smelled like home. It was home.

  When my family moved from Connecticut to Texas, we left much behind, but the hardest thing to let go of were intangibles: the sense of closeness that comes from living within walking distance of family, and that at-times-difficult-to-define feeling of home. But because the world is big and opportunity isn’t always where you wish it to be, my family made the life-altering move when I was in second grade.

  I wish I could tell you the move to Texas was always a wonderful adventure. But it wasn’t. There were big family events back in the Northeast we missed, from weddings to deaths. For what? The jobs my parents had taken didn’t even last long enough to warrant such a drastic move. We could’ve gone back home to Connecticut, and at a certain point, most people would have, but we didn’t. Stubborn ego runs in our blood. We were determined to find our own home in this wild new place where everything was indeed bigger. But it took time. Longer than anyone expected, in fact.

  By my freshman year of high school we had moved houses fourteen times. Many of our belongings were eternally packed into the same crumbling boxes. If the electricity wasn’t being shut off, it was the water. And if it was neither of those things, we were probably being evicted.

  But something happened around eighth grade—we finally got into some kind of groove—and my parents were in the position to buy their own home. Our very own little slice of the world.

  The weekend after we moved into our new house, which felt like a castle, I called upon my dearest friends to help me stake my claim on my brand-new bedroom. We painted the walls a harsh, unforgiving shade of red that absolutely invigorated me. My parents hated it, which meant I loved it. I was finally at home again. I felt like Goldilocks, but instead of beds, my search was for a home and my lucky number was fifteen.

  For those four years of high school, I was at war with many things: my body, my sexuality, religion, society, and whatever kind of future I hoped to have. But one thing I took comfort in was our home and my bright red room. For a while, our lives were calm. For so long, we’d only survived, but somehow we began to thrive. Or so I’d thought.

  I should’ve seen it coming. The stacks of unopened bills with URGENT stamped on the envelopes. The unattended home repairs. The moments when I would jump to answer the phone, but my mo
ther would quickly shoo me away, telling me to ignore it.

  Instead of paying attention to all the different clues, my sights were set on what was next. It was my senior year, and I had big dreams for life after high school. I was going to move to LA with my best friend and head to fashion school, where I knew I would turn into a fashion game changer for plus-size people everywhere.

  I’d spent most of high school as a total theater nerd despite being relegated to forever playing everyone’s grandma. (All my other fat theater girls know what I’m talking about. The curse of the fat girl! We fall in love too, ya know! We can even save the world if we feel like it. Alas, another essay for another day.) Many things came from my love of theater, but I was most drawn to costuming. Something about clothing spoke to me. As a fat girl, I’ve found that most people have already decided exactly what they think about me before I have a chance to even utter a word. Clothing always felt like the best way to subvert that—to show people who I was before the world could make that decision for me. So, yeah, the future was too exciting for me to be bothered with the present.

  And then one day, I came home from school to find both my parents home from work and waiting for me with a pile of moving boxes. Foreclosure. Our home, my bright red room included, had gone into foreclosure. Neither of them said the word out loud, but we were moving because the bank was kicking us out. There were only two days before my high school graduation, and suddenly nothing felt guaranteed.

  Not only were we losing our home, but I was also preparing to say goodbye to all my friends and the security blanket high school had provided. That big move to California in pursuit of fashion school? It was 100 percent off the table. If you can’t pay bills, you definitely can’t afford overpriced art school.

  During the weeks and months that followed, I turned off my emotions like a faucet—my own personal coping mechanism. Nothing hurts if you can’t feel. Numbly, I watched my friends leave for college and whatever other adventures they were setting out for. My only great adventure was to the mall, where I worked for many years while my family tried to bounce back from financial ruin.

  As I grew older, I learned that for my parents, buying that house had been a big gamble that they’d unfortunately lost. I spent a long time feeling angry with them for giving me this false sense of security. But in the end, nothing about our home with my bright red room was false. My parents never gave me that home with the intention of taking it away; they’d been just as desperate for a home as I was.

  I don’t think struggle necessarily makes you a better person. It wears you down, that’s for sure, and makes you a little wiser. But I don’t think you have to suffer to become a badass. However, losing my home gave me one invaluable thing: perspective.

  After my senior year, we were back to rental house jumping, flickering lights, repossessed cars, and eviction notices. I didn’t pack up my bright red room and have this wonderful revelation about how fate had turned this into a positive experience with an unexpected happily ever after. Instead, I watched many of my friends come and go as they made mistakes their parents could afford to fix, in places I might never afford to go to.

  Slowly, I found home in places I never even thought to look. My job at the mall. A tiny community college creative-writing class. Politically active and socially minded newfound friends. Online journaling communities. Hell, even MySpace. (Yes, I’m that old.)

  Of course I was sorry to see my California-shaped bubble burst, but I say all this to let you know that if you’re searching like I was, there will come a day when you wake up and realize that you’ve found home. And if you’re anything like me, you’ll see that it didn’t happen all at once.

  For me, it was a quiet and gradual thing. It didn’t take traveling the world or sleeping on some random beach or paying an obscene amount of money for an education. All of those things are great and might even be life changers for you. But no matter what, even if you end up with none of those things, please know that you’ll survive, and your friends—the ones who are going places and doing things—are as lost as you. They’re just searching in different ways.

  I think I’m still searching for home, but I’m searching for it in the same way a curator might slowly add to a collection—particularly and deliberately. Currently home is a collage of all my favorite people, places, and things. Home is a person who holds the most fragile parts of me, in the words I scatter on the page, in my cats (who sometimes like me), and in my dog (who always adores me). My home is in the family I’ve handpicked. Some are blood and others are pure kismet.

  When I look back and think about losing my home and graduating high school all at once, the only way I know how to describe it is as a wind tunnel of shit. (Yes, I know. I’m very articulate.) But something I figured out along the way is that you don’t always just have to grin and bear it. Sometimes you just have to survive. Sometimes you have to search for tiny hopes until tiny hopes make bigger hopes. Maybe it’s a job at the mall or a pen pal or a tweet or a cat or a favorite scarf. Whatever tiny hopes you have, let them do their work on you. Let them be the hope that carries you when nothing else will.

  DAVID LEVITHAN LIBBA BRAY ANGIE THOMAS ALLY CONDIE MARIE LU JEFF ZENTNER NICOLA YOON KATE HART GAYLE FORMAN CHRISTINA DIAZ GONZALEZ ATIA ABAWI ALEX LONDON HOWARD BRYANT ALLY CARTER ROMINA GARBER RENÉE AHDIEH AISHA SAEED JENNY TORRES SANCHEZ NIC STONE JULIE MURPHY I. W. GREGORIO JAMES DASHNER JASON REYNOLDS BRENDAN KIELY

  I. W. GREGORIO

  Caution: This Hope Is NSFW (but it shouldn’t be)

  IF ASKED TO IMAGINE THE origin story of a female urologist, most people probably wouldn’t picture someone who couldn’t say the word penis in public without blushing until her early twenties, or a girl who was so embarrassed about her body that she didn’t wear skin-tight shirts until college.

  And yet here I am: The kid who changed her gym clothes in a bathroom stall through junior high is now someone who examines people’s privates on a daily basis. I spend thousands of hours a year talking about urinary incontinence, vaginal prolapse (look it up), erectile dysfunction, and premature ejaculation . . . with relatively more acceptable topics of dinner conversation such as cancer and kidney stones thrown in here and there.

  In other words, I am 100 percent certain that Teen Me would have died of mortification if she’d known what her adult self would be up to. Modest is probably too tame a word with which to tag my younger self; repressed is more like it, but it doesn’t truly capture how my issues weren’t just about sex. They were about body image, gender-specific shame, and cultural boundaries.

  How did a body-shy teenager end up working in the most risque specialty in medicine? It’s been a long road, one that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. But as I raise my young kids, I have hope that they can be spared my hang-ups. All I can do is try my hardest to break the taboos that surround our bodies. All I can do is keep trying to talk about subjects that aren’t initially comfortable, so future conversations won’t be quite so awkward.

  I’ll continue to speak loudly, even as educators and parents have intense debates about what’s “appropriate” for what age.

  It could save lives. I’ll show you how.

  * * *

  • • •

  I was nine years old when I first felt that my body was not my friend.

  My breasts had just started to grow in, and my grandmother had already impressed upon me that they were a source of shame.

  “That shirt too tight. People think you bad girl!” she scolded, and thus began a progression of ever baggier T-shirts. In my defense, it was the eighties. But there isn’t a single picture of me in my early teens where I didn’t have the silhouette of a cereal box. I’d also patented a bust-reducing slouch, which could be differentiated from my book-reading slouch only by the tilt of my shoulders.

  Looking back, it’s hard for me to pinpoint what my grandmother’s fears were. She raised me after my parents divorced, and she
was clearly of a different generation. Was she afraid that I would be targeted, sexualized, or objectified? Was she afraid of what the appearance of my breasts signified to others about the type of person or student I was? Or was she actually afraid my clothes would be able to exert a subliminal influence on my character through a kind of Insta-Slut Mojo?

  Either way, her objections stuck, along with all the other subtle reminders that good girls do not emphasize the things that make them feminine: I basically wore sports bras for most of my teenage years. My family never went swimming, and you can bet that I never went to school dances. I wore pants during the summer, except for the occasional knee-length skort when it was really hot. When I graduated from junior high school, I wore a dress that looked like it could have come out of Little House on the Prairie.

  I should add that I never got the birds-and-the-bees talk, aside from health class and a very insightful kids’ biology book that my dad got me in fourth grade. Five years later, my best friend dressed up like a French maid for Halloween; I literally dressed up in a burlap sack (as a gravestone).

  It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I realized my body was a source of power.

  It was the first summer since puberty that I’d spent with my mother in Taiwan, and I was finally old enough to appreciate the joys of shopping. For much of my life, I’d lived on hand-me-downs from my aunt, who was more than a decade older than me. Let’s just say my style was a little bit . . . dated.

  That trip to visit my mom changed everything. That was the year I fell in love with sundresses, the summer I got my first shorts that would fail a school dress code. My mother took one look at my bust-reducing slouch and grabbed me by the shoulders to force my chest out. “Ting xiong yi-dian,” she’d say. Stand up straight.