My Personal Azkaban
“You can exist without your soul, you know, as long as your brain and heart are still working." ― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
If you’d like to eavesdrop on my inner monologue, consider letting me read to you—just press play on the voiceover above. Includes footnotes, excludes headings.
This entry was originally drafted on 4/14/23.
Borrowing a metaphor.
I am one week into a four-week leave of absence from Work—a leave of absence that I am taking in order to recover (at least partially) from a strange malady you may have heard of, called “burn out.” I have experienced this phenomenon as, basically, a slow death where my soul gets sucked out incrementally by the Dementors of my own personal Azkaban.
I assume Harry Potter references are still widely culturally accessible, but I’m at a very weird age right now where I can’t actually tell.1 For reference, Azkaban was a prison for criminal wizards in the Harry Potter universe. It was guarded by evil creatures called Dementors that “literally fed on human happiness and thus generated feelings of depression and despair in any person in close proximity to them.”
But there’s a fun twist to my personal version of Azkaban! As it turns out, I actually built it for myself. My personal “Azkaban” is really just a mental model of How-I-Expect-Things-to-Work that I have historically used to protect myself from the chaos of the world. I’ve been secretly building it my whole life, creating Dementors out of identifiable fears, and then using all my effort to keep them indulged and satiated. I tell myself that if I can make them need me, they won’t hurt me…so I bury myself in little fears to hide from bigger ones. Then I hide Azkaban itself behind concepts like “responsibility.” Azkaban is the ultimate hiding place. It is a formidable psychic structure and, if I trick myself into being honest, I’m pretty proud of the craftsmanship.
Blame everything on Work.
Let’s pretend that, for me, ‘burning out’ is the metaphorical equivalent of realizing, for the first time, that the things I’ve been doing to protect myself are actually making my life way harder (i.e. suddenly the Dementors are sucking too much and I’m starting to think I’d rather take my chances with alternative horrors). My strategy of hiding behind “Work” (or responsibility) was no longer making me feel competent and emotionally safe…in fact, it was starting to do the opposite. Hence, my leave of absence. I just need some distance, I thought. That’s all.
But the first week of my leave has mostly been spent learning that “Azkaban” is actually not at all the same thing as “Work.” To be fair, Work (in the archetypal sense) has been increasingly integrated with the Azkaban systems for some time now. Azkaban Management2 made this strategic choice because Work provides a lot of low stakes, high maintenance Dementors to guard the place.
Low-stakes, high-maintenance Dementors are the ones that suck only a carefully calibrated amount of soul so you live a mostly normal life while they’re attached to you. But they are also really picky and want your soul to taste a certain way.3 The Work Dementors take a lot of effort to accommodate, but I always know where they are and what they want from me. They keep me busy, but they rarely put me in real danger.
As an example, one of the most formidable Work Dementors in all of my personal Azkaban takes the form of an intelligent and empathetic authority figure who reflexively assumes the emotional baggage of their underlings and expects their underlings to do the same for them.4
In childhood I learned to be responsible for other people’s feelings (especially those of authority figures), so picking up and carrying emotional baggage that doesn’t belong to me is my natural impulse. But in adulthood I learned that an effective way to minimize my responsibility for other people’s feelings is simply to avoid most relationships. So the “Work” version of this particular authority figure (as opposed to the religious or familial or political version) lulls me into docile cooperation—it requires no personal relationship and I’m only responsible for professional obligations that modulate the Boss’s feelings, not the feelings themselves.
Easy peasy, I got this. Work/Azkaban is so lucky to have me! And I am so lucky to have Work/Azkaban instead of something worse.
Bigger boss monsters.
But when you take a month off of Work because of burn-out and the whole point of your time off is just to not be around the Work Dementors for a while, you realize that Azkaban still exists without Work, and that Work Dementors are not the only type of Dementor…they aren’t even the worst ones! They are just the ones you recognize, and you realize you’ve been hiding behind them to avoid the really devastating guys.
Like, “Sorry Fear-of-Rejection Dementor, I am all tapped out today, those Work Dementors really took it out of me!” but then Fear-Of-Rejection and all his buddies gather around your bed while you sleep at night and laugh at you for thinking you’re in control of the situation…and then they beat you with a sock full of quarters and they suck your soul anyway.
Or, for a more realistic example…it might go something like this:
“Ohh! I need emotional support! But work was hard and I don’t have the energy to figure out what kind, let alone ask my husband for it and risk being denied—that will feel like rejection! Whatever shall I do?!
I know! I shall become increasingly upset for no apparent reason until I have an adult tantrum, which will force my husband to pay attention to me, which will prove that I am loved, and therefore prove I am worthy of love!
I am a genius and this is a fool-proof strategy.”
But after I have my adult tantrum and my husband proves he loves me, I still feel like an absolute piece of shit worthy of nothing but the rejection I deeply fear.
Rinse repeat.
At the center of the labyrinth.
That is how Azkaban works; a recursive labyrinth of self-fulfilling, self-defeating prophecy. I don’t yet understand the layout of my personal Azkaban, but I am starting to feel its pulse…my own pulse, but distorted. My rhythms, but syncopated. My patterns, but inside out.
A pattern is a pattern though, and I wonder…can I decode these distortions and turn them back into clean, authentic signal? I think, if I can be brave and unflinchingly honest with myself, I can.
By examining the distorted patterns inherent in Azkaban operations, can I reverse-engineer my own natural way of being?
I certainly mean to find out.
This is a prison-break and any viable escape plan starts with reconnaissance…
Things are getting weird in my 30s, grocery stores start playing my favorite music and I keep hearing the word “vintage” in reference to the cultural icons of my youth.
Azkaban Management is really just Me, but since this is a metaphor for my subconscious and stuff we’re going to think of Management as like…the Algorithm that analyzes my behavior/thoughts/feelings and determines the best distractions to keep me from escaping.
Some popular flavors include professional, polite, dedicated, compliant, etc.
This character is not a particular person in my real life; rather it’s a mental projection of the relationship I manage to cultivate with my boss(es) in pretty much any job I’ve ever had.