Anyone for a serious Harry Potter metaphor?
Yesterday I was absentmindely polishing glasses at work and daydreaming when I started to think about dementors… totally normal right haha.
As strange a thought as it was, I began to ponder the idea of dementors actually existing in real life. Dementors, if you live under a rock and don’t know, are the big, black, ugly, cloaked creatures in the Harry Potter stories that work for Azkaban prison and suck out all your happiness.
Anyway, my daydreams about dementors led me to wonder about how good I would be at fighting one off. In the stories you are supposed to think of happy thoughts and the happiest times in your life in order to produce a ‘patronus’ that will scare the dementors off. For a while in the books Harry Potter struggles with this task. He struggles to think of happy things because of the overwhelming sadness and devastation he has known.
Now I know a scary amount of people who have had/do have self-esteem issues, depression and/or suicidal thoughts and it was frightening to think that if dementors actually did exist in society today, a great majority of people wouldn’t have the strength to fight them. Personally, I don’t think I could muster up enough happiness to fight one off and I’m nowhere near as bad as I was.
After all these thoughts, I finally realised…
Depression/suicidal thinking/self-hatred ARE the dementors of today!
Dementors are supposed to make you feel cold, alone and hopeless. They’re supposed to suck the happiness out of you and make you feel as though there is no joy left in the world. And all you have to do to defeat them is think happy thoughts, keep positive and remember what is good about life. I thought it was the most fitting metaphor.
I had depression for two years and it really was like fighting a dementor round the clock. Like Harry Potter, I wasn’t very good at fighting it at first, I didn’t really know how. But soon enough the practice made me quite skilled at it. I still have to fight it 24/7 and sometimes I lose concentration for a second and the sadness creeps in, but overall, I’m winning.
So I think the point of me writing this is really just to say that if your dealing with your own dementor (as many of us are), just hang in there and fight it all you can. The more you fight, the better you’ll become at keeping it at bay. And it might always be there, but it was never once mentioned in the stories that dementors cannot be tamed.
