Finding Light in the Margins: How an Unlikely Book Club Rewrote My Story
It started, as so many strange and wonderful things do, over post-kickboxing donuts.
It was January 2020. A few of us had gotten into the Saturday morning ritual of sweating out our stress, immediately undoing that work at the bakery next door, and talking about anything other than the week we’d just survived. Somewhere between powdered sugar and iced coffee, a mutual love for Harry Potter came up. We were adults, well past the midnight-release craze of our younger years, but the fondness was still there.
Someone mentioned a concept they’d heard on a podcast: rereading the series through a deliberate lens, assigning a distinct theme to every single chapter, and letting that theme guide the reading. We loved the idea. We decided to try it, came back the following week ready to dissect the first three chapters, and held our second meeting just as the world began to tilt on its axis.
We only had two in-person meetups before brunch became impossible. Then COVID hit.
Suddenly, we were cut off from the noise of ordinary life, handed an excessive amount of quiet, and left with time to read, think, and unravel. What could have fizzled out became an anchor. For the next two and a half years, the three of us met faithfully. There were three chapters per meeting—one for each of us to lead. We each chose a theme for our chapter, shared a real story from our own lives where that theme had shown up, and then traced how that same idea lived inside the text.
What began as a playful reading experiment transformed into a sacred, coffee talk that broke through emotional boundaries I hadn't realized I was carrying.
The books became a safe mirror. Through those characters and conversations, I walked through the disorientation of the pandemic, navigated the quiet ache of being beside Jon through illness, and began turning over old, buried trauma I had kept locked away. Examining it through the protective distance of story didn't erase the past, but it softened its edges. It made things that once felt paralyzing feel manageable, understandable, and no longer quite so terrifying.
Recently, finding myself in another season shadowed by change and heavy weather, I felt the familiar pull and pressed play on the audiobooks again.
It still catches me off guard how deeply a fictional world can uncover very real moral truths. The books have an imaginative resonance that cuts past our defenses, shining a bright light into corners of ourselves we usually avoid looking at.
Of course, holding these stories today isn’t entirely simple. In the decades since writing them, J.K. Rowling has voiced public views on the transgender community that are deeply painful and alienating to so many. It creates a complicated tension that many of us wrestle with. But it also doesn't erase what that original work offered at a time when we needed it—nor does it strip away the profound comfort, genuine healing, and hard-won self-reflection we built around those pages. The art, once shared, lives in the relationship between the story and the reader. We took those words, reclaimed them, and used them to care for each other.
It doesn’t have to be Harry Potter. It could be poetry, classic literature, sci-fi sagas, or a completely different kind of shared practice. The vessel matters far less than the intention behind it.
What matters is making the time to look inward. Life has an aggressive way of demanding our forward motion, but without deliberate self-reflection, we’re just reacting to the dark instead of carrying a match. Looking back to see where we've been, naming our themes, and daring to look honestly at who we are is the only way we ever truly find our footing. All we can do is keep shining that light, step forward into whatever season comes next, and do our best to be who we're meant to be.
