“Something had happened to the night. The star-strewn indigo
sky was suddenly pitch-black and lightless—the stars, the moon, the misty
streetlamps at either end of the alley had vanished. The distant grumble of
cars and the whisper of trees had gone. The balmy evening was suddenly piercingly,
bitingly cold. They were surrounded by total, impenetrable, silent darkness, as
though some giant hand had dropped a thick, icy mantle over the entire
alleyway, blinding them...a towering, hooded figure was gliding smoothly toward
him, hovering over the ground, no feet or face visible beneath its robes,
sucking on the night as it came…There was laughter inside his own head, shrill,
high-pitched laughter…He could smell the dementor’s putrid, death-cold breath,
filling his own lungs, drowning him—Think…something
happy…But there was no happiness in him…”[1]
Ever since that first day in September 2001 when I cracked
open the Sorcerer’s Stone for the first time in a muggy tent in Winfield,
Kansas, I have loved J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. I felt almost as if I
grew up with the scrawny green-eyed youth. During my childhood, I appreciated the stories
for their entertainment value. They made me laugh, and cry, and sit on the edge
of my seat. But I’ve come to love the story even more as I’ve grown older
because Rowling didn’t simply write a story, she expressed a deep humanity
which not many other stories capture. Her books are full of redemptive moments,
hope, pain, and human growth, as well as truths about the brokenness and
sadness of our world. It is clear to me that this story was imagined out of
real experience with life and its heartache, and parts of it are meant to touch
the hearts of Rowling’s readers.
I experience such a moment a few days ago. I had awoken in
the early hours of the morning, and the heat was such in my room
that I could not fall back asleep. I found myself tossing and turning, finding no position which was remotely comfortable. Unable to drop back off
into sweet slumber, my mind naturally turned to contemplating the day. It was
early Sunday morning, and I started thinking of church and how I had experienced a
small, but still uncomfortable, moment of panic the last time I had been there.
My mind, in its tired and delirious state, could not form rational and coherent
thoughts and I began to picture scenarios in my head that I had no right, as
the cared-for daughter of a King, to be imagining. I began to construct images for what "could happen" later that day in church
that were the height of terrifying, and before I knew it, I had thrown myself
once again into panic.
The panic was different this time. It wasn’t the
heart-pounding, gasping, breathless sort of panic. It was quiet, subdued, but
deeply rooted like cancer. Every nerve in my body was on fire, every muscle
tensed, and every thought that passed through my mind was torment. I had almost
thoroughly convinced myself that I must being dying by the time, a couple hours
later, I finally realized that it was no use staying in my bed (it seemed a thoroughly boring place to die), and I got up
and turned on the light. As it illuminated my bedroom, it also shone on the
many pictures that I keep around my room of loved ones. Seeing their smiling
faces should have brought some sort of joy and hope into my heart, but my
reaction was exactly the opposite. My already trembling heart fell into despair
and I nearly crumpled to my knees with the sensation. “I’ll never be happy
again, and it’s impossible for me to ever have joyful moments like these again.
Everything that has ever been good in my life is over.” The feeling of
hopelessness was so complete that it left no room for reason.
Out of some miracle, I decided to walk around my yard a few
times to try to calm my spirit down. As I did, a sudden word rather bizarrely came
to mind: dementors. I remembered the hooded figures from Rowlings books and how she describes their affects on her characters—like they would never be cheerful again. I
suddenly had a vivid image of what my anxiety and depression is to me, which
personified it in a way that made sense of it and almost made it
understandable. That feeling of despair didn’t immediately go away, but at that
moment, it was diminished into something graspable. I thought in that moment, "J.K. Rowling knows something of anxiety and depression or she couldn't have written such a thing."
My hunch was confirmed later when I typed “dementors and
depression” into my trusty friend Google. It turns out that dementors were
indeed inspired by Rowling’s struggle with deep depression and perhaps she too
found that reducing it to dark hooded figures helped to put the sensation in
its place. Not only that, but Rowling seems to have discovered something in her
life bright enough to provide a strong barrier between her and the soul-sucking
hooded figure. As I write this, I find that I am so far from discovering the
answers. The simple Sunday School reply “God is the answer”, though entirely
true, doesn’t do much for me. It isn’t the sort of answer that hits deeply
enough to calm the soul when it is in the midst of deepest turmoil. But it is
enough to know, for now, that there is hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment