When I was eleven I killed a man. I had all the mitigating circumstances you could want; he was attacking me, he had let Voldemort inhabit his body and was trying to bring Voldemort back, I wasn't trying to hurt him but merely holding out my hands in self-defence. Of course, when I realised what those hands did I grabbed him all I could. It was justified, you might say, but that doesn't change the facts. When I was eleven I killed a man.
His name was Quirinus Quirrell. He wasn't an especially bad man before he met Voldemort, ambitious, yes, but not bad as such. He went wandering in the wrong places and got seduced by Voldemort. He wasn't the first or last to be seduced by Voldemort, Voldemort could always be very persuasive when he wanted to be. I know of others who ended up doing things they wouldn't normally dream of doing because Voldemort persuaded them. They all paid the price; Quirrell died.
Dumbledore dressed it up with clever words. Quirrell couldn't touch me because my mother died to save me, protecting me with an even deeper magic than Voldemort possessed. Love. Voldemort was destroyed when he tried to kill me when I was a baby because my mother died to save me, so the curse rebounded on him.
I learnt something then, a lesson I did not fully appreciate until years later. Love is pure and the opposite of everything Voldemort was. Love is, above all, the greatest thing worth fighting for. It is more powerful than any dark magic; it is an avenging angel, greater and more terrible than any Dark Lord. Love is vicious and possessive. Love is cruel and love will kill anyone, like Voldemort or Quirrell, that would destroy it. When I was eleven I killed a man with love.
It is true that in some ways my life has been a fairytale. I was a poor, orphan boy, treated worse than a house-elf by my cruel relatives. I did not even know that I was a wizard until I was taken away to a magic castle where I learnt and fulfilled my destiny to save the world from a Dark Lord. That is the story you have all heard, and I suppose, in essence, it is the truth, but war is hard, war is bloody, war is dirty and whatever you might have been before you cannot leave undamaged. I started fighting when I was eleven. I didn't realise it at the time but I did. It was not a fairytale with heroes and villains.
Above all, I never wanted the title you gave me. 'The Boy Who Lived'. I never wanted the whispers and the stares, later, the hatred and the accusations of shameless attention seeking, which rankled even more because I hated the attention. You never listened, all you saw was the image and the scar, or the deluded liar the Ministry told you to see.
And yes, I did kill Voldemort, but that was not my victory. I won because better witches and wizards helped me, guided me. I did not die largely due to luck. I made numerous mistakes and have indirectly caused many people's deaths. I will hold them on my conscience forever.
I am not the pure hero the media and those unofficial biographies paint me as. In the end, I was a boy who was merely trying to do the right thing. I have been cruel and I have been stupid. I have also, I suppose, been heroic.
I realised a long time ago that I would always be annoyed at how the media portrayed me. I made an effort to stop caring, as you have probably deduced from that fact that I am writing to the Daily Prophet, I have failed, but this is my one last effort before I give up and go live as a hermit in a cave and live of rats. I am not your fairytale hero. You want it to be clean and pure, you want good and evil, you want a saint who vanquished a devil. You want 'The Boy Who Lived', 'The Chosen One'. I am none of those. I can't give you what you want.
Harry James Potter.
