“Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”
— J.K. Rowling
Rowling said this at her 2008 Harvard commencement speech about the benefits of failure. She meant the mid-1990s: divorced single mother on welfare in Edinburgh, clinically depressed, with nothing but a half-finished manuscript. The point is practical: when you lose everything you feared losing, the fear itself disappears. You stop hedging. You build from the only thing left, the truth of what you actually want.
In 1993, I was a single mother in Edinburgh on welfare, writing in cafes because walking my daughter in the pushchair was the only way to get her to sleep. My marriage had collapsed. I was clinically depressed. I had one thing: a half-finished manuscript about a boy wizard. Twelve publishers rejected it. But at the bottom, rejection loses its power. I kept sending it out because giving up meant dying without knowing what could have been.