Happy memories

Why I believe I’d never be able to produce a Patronus

Whenever I watch “Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban” (and I watch it often — I love Harry Potter and that film, and the book, is one of my favorites) I think about what memory I would use to produce a Patronus.

I don’t know if I’d have a memory strong enough to make one. I have been happy many times — in fact, I believe it’s safe to say I am happy to some degree almost every day. But the kind of memory you need for a Patronus is a particular one, isn’t it? I think my memories are more along the lines of “first time I rode a broom” than “only memory of my parents”.

Or, and this is what I am most afraid of, maybe I’ve never been really happy. Whenever I reach back to find a happy memory, I find it tainted with something else — worry, guilt, shame. For example being in my room, reading, on a sunny afternoon, when I was a child, about ten, or maybe twelve. A whole afternoon absorbed in a book. So happy and yet, somewhere, somehow, conscious that this is not what I should be doing, that this is really wrong because it means I have no friends, and if I have no friends it means there’s something wrong with me. My mother’s always there, lurking somewhere in my mind, looking so sad, and I know she’s sad because of me. And I’ve taken that with me into every other happy moment I’ve ever had. No matter what I’m doing, there will always be a moment when one thought burns me: this is not right, I shouldn’t be doing this — I shouldn’t be enjoying this.

There’s a whole field of wizard psychology: therapy for people who can’t produce Patronuses because some kind of past trauma. Or worse, people who can’t make Patronuses because they are afraid they won’t be able to make one.

But what if it’s the other way round? Maybe the guilt and shame are what make the memory powerful and complex enough. Maybe the trick is the find not a childish memory of momentary bliss, but a more adolt and complicated feeling. Like Harry says: “It’s not exactly — happy.”

Yet, I’m pretty sure the majority of Patronuses are related to one’s feelings for others. Like Harry for his parents, Snape for Lily, or Tonks’ Patronus changing to a wolf when she falls in love with Lupin. I guess what I’m really afraid of is that my feelings for others are not strong enough, that I’m most happy when I’m alone, and that that makes me an egotist. That’s my biggest fear: that I’m really a bad person at the core, and everything nice I’ve ever done for anybody has just been — camouflage. That the only reason I’m still more or less “good” is because I’m too afraid of being bad.

And that, I’m afraid, is why I’d probably never be able to make a Patronus, not even the kind that have no shape.

If they were, you know, real.