J.K. Rowling: How to Deal with Failure

Before the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling was clinically depressed.

In the early 1990s, she returned to the U.K. to settle down in Scotland near her sister. A three-year stint in Portugal had led to a short, unhappy marriage, and she left the country as a single mother of a newborn child.

Rowling spent the next few years struggling to meet ends.

“I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless,” she said in her commencement speech at Harvard.

During this period, her depression took a dark turn, and she considered herself a failure. She had fallen and felt stuck. She even contemplated suicide.

Luckily, she found it in her to seek help, and writing became an outlet.

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