Reading the Same Book as a Different Person: Tom Riddle

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

I've always remembered Tom Riddle as one of the coolest reveals in Harry Potter.

You meet this mysterious, handsome Hogwarts student preserved inside an old diary. He seems helpful. He shows Harry the past. He knows things about Hogwarts that Harry desperately wants to understand.

And then:

TOM MARVOLO RIDDLE

becomes

I AM LORD VOLDEMORT.

Great reveal. Great villain moment.

But reading Chamber of Secrets again as an adult, that wasn't the part that stuck with me.

Instead, I kept thinking about something much stranger:

Tom Riddle is sixteen years old when he learns what happened to his future self.

A Message From the Future

The Tom preserved in the diary isn't innocent.

He's already cruel, manipulative and responsible for opening the Chamber of Secrets. He's already created the name Lord Voldemort and has a pretty clear idea of the person he intends to become.

Tom thinks he's destined for greatness.

And, in a horrible way, he's right.

He becomes one of the most powerful and feared wizards alive. People become afraid to even say his name.

But sixteen-year-old Tom doesn't know any of that yet.

Then Ginny Weasley starts writing in his diary.

Through her, Tom learns about Harry Potter and eventually discovers something that must have been almost impossible for him to comprehend:

Lord Voldemort was destroyed.

The great wizard Tom Riddle intends to become has already risen, conquered, and fallen.

And somehow, a baby was responsible.

Then that baby walks into the Chamber of Secrets.

What Would Sixteen-Year-Old Me Think?

This is where rereading the book got weirdly personal for me.

Because Tom Riddle gets to experience something the rest of us can only imagine.

His sixteen-year-old self gets to find out what happened to him.

It's one of those questions people ask all the time:

What would your younger self think if they could see you now?

Would they be proud?

Would they be disappointed?

Would they recognize you?

Would they wonder what the hell happened to some enormous plan you were absolutely certain about?

I've thought about that question before. I think a lot of us have.

But Chamber of Secrets does something almost jarring with it.

It actually answers the question for Tom Riddle.

Sixteen-year-old Tom gets a report from the future.

And it isn't the future he expected.

That immediately made me wonder:

What would sixteen-year-old me think of me?

The Person You Thought You'd Become

At sixteen, I definitely had ideas about what my life would look like.

I think we all did.

And now I'm old enough to look back at that person from a pretty significant distance.

Some things happened.

Some didn't.

Some things I desperately wanted then wouldn't mean nearly as much to me now.

And some of the things that matter most to me today probably weren't even on sixteen-year-old me's radar.

That's why Tom hit differently this time.

He's standing at the beginning of his life absolutely convinced he knows what success looks like.

Power. Fear. Immortality.

And technically, he gets most of it.

But look at the person it creates.

Tom destroys his own soul trying to escape death. He loses his humanity. He has followers but no real friends. He has no family, no love, and no meaningful connection to another person.

Tom Riddle dreamed of becoming immortal. He never stopped to ask what kind of life would be left for him to live.

That's a much more interesting idea to me now than it ever could have been when I was younger.

Because getting older has a funny way of changing your definition of success.

Reading the Same Book as a Different Person

When I first read Chamber of Secrets, Tom Riddle was the twist.

The handsome Hogwarts student in the diary was actually Voldemort.

Reading it now, I can't stop thinking about the sixteen-year-old instead.

Because he gets something none of us get.

He gets to learn what became of him.

And rereading that scene decades after I first encountered it turned the question back on me.

What would sixteen-year-old me think of me?

I hope he'd be surprised.

I hope there are things he'd be proud of.

I'm sure there are things he'd want explained.

And I'm pretty sure there are things I'd have to tell him didn't matter nearly as much as he thought they did.

We don't get to sit across from our sixteen-year-old selves and explain how everything turned out.

But every once in a while, a book lets us get pretty damn close.