You Have More in Common With Voldemort Than You Think
By: Atheno Boldly Fearless
Tags: Life Lessons, Psychology, Self Improvement, Life, Self

You Have More in Common With Voldemort Than You Think

We all leave little pieces of our soul in the world around us

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Photo: Eric Charbonneau/WireImage/Getty Images

What could the average person possibly have in common with the fictional mass-murdering noseless wizard whose name ought not to be spoken? It’s a bold claim, I know.

Well, each of us constructs our identity in the same way Voldemort does — or, Voldemort provides an illuminating allegory for how we build our identities.

Voldemort, that dastardly villain, created these things called Horcruxes. The concept of the Horcrux, for those of you who don’t already know, was that ol’ Voldy split his soul and stored the shards in different objects or beings. This ensured his life — nobody could kill him unless they first destroyed all the Horcruxes.

We do have to put one element of this analogy aside: the fact that he created these Horcruxes by murdering people. Let’s just ignore that bit for the sake of this analogy, as I don’t think most people are secret murderers.

When you take that element out, though, this premise has some surprising backbone to it. A person latches pieces of their soul onto objects and people with sentimental significance to them, and they cannot truly die until these Horcruxes are all destroyed. The destruction of one brings them pain, and they will stop at nothing to protect their soul shards.

When put in these terms, could we not accurately say this about ourselves?

We all ground our identity in ideas, memories, and experiences. But we don’t stop there. We humans like to create physical symbols of abstract concepts. So, we use objects and people as symbols of the ideas upon which we base our identities. We keep sentimental jewelry and knickknacks; we cling to family and friends; we buy clothes with icons and slogans on them.

And we each have a few key things, from necklaces to cars to plots of land, that make up the core of who we are.

Moreover, because we have based our identities on the ideas these objects represent, we will protect them with our lives. An attack upon our identity is akin to an attack on our person — it’s a threat to a foundational aspect of our being. We will voraciously defend these ideas or the items that represent them.

Who among us has not been thrown into a momentary panic when a friend or family member almost threw away something that was meaningless to them but sentimental to us?

And lastly, so long as these ideas remain in the world and are built upon, we never disappear. Even the objects that represent these ideas can live on and grow past our lives. The farmer identifies with his farm — and his children will continue to cultivate it.

So, I think it could be said that we all have Horcruxes, though we don’t need to kill people to make them. And we don’t die if all of our Horcruxes get destroyed.

Or do we?

Well, no. But our Horcruxes do have a relationship to the quality of our lives.

Life, fundamentally, is a delicate balance of order and chaos. Life requires unpredictability to work. We can see this truth in something as fundamental as evolution — the random (chaotic) mutation of genes that ultimately allows us to adapt and survive. But it also requires order. If our DNA was too unpredictable, nothing resembling a species could form.

If every core piece of your identity is destroyed, you would be left feeling like nothing.

The necessity of this balance is present at all levels of our lives. Thus, life exists and thrives in this precise balance of the two elements. Order and chaos. Change to something new and maintenance of what is.

Our identities are integral to our existence as individuals, and the same rule applies. Our identities must gradually grow and change if we are to survive, and they must also maintain core elements to achieve any level of stability.

If every core piece of your identity is destroyed, you would be left feeling like nothing — like no one. As though the person you were had died, and whoever you became next would be totally new.

Many people have experienced this kind of rebirth through extreme loss.

On the other side, an unchanging identity is effectively dead. It is stagnant. There is nothing left of its story to tell. It is merely waiting for the literal death to catch up to the spiritual end.

Similarly, when death strikes any person, their identity freezes.

Having an unchanging identity has many of the same consequences as death.

Death is to know, completely and absolutely, who you are — never to have the will to become a different, better person, nor to have any questions remaining about your true nature.

That said, it is, in a way, possible to survive without an identity. Victims of severe childhood trauma often achieve this, because any identity one develops in a situation of abuse becomes the target of attack. An identity is a weakness to be exploited by the enemy, so the individual creates a protective barrier of nonassociation and nonattachment.

One can never achieve complete nonidentity — we will always grasp something to help keep us alive and moving. But in these situations of constant attack, the identity is minimized and hidden. It becomes almost undetectable, even by the individual that holds it.

So, one might ask, if it is possible to survive and even become immune to emotional attack by minimizing one’s identity, is this not the ideal way to live?

You can probably guess my answer.

No, because identity is necessary to create anything.

Or, to create something is to give form to a piece of your identity. Without an identity, you have nothing to give shape.

Moreover, it is necessary to identify with something before you can improve or build upon it.

This is similar to the fact that before you have a right to change something, you must first have at least partial ownership of it.

But what do ownership and identification have to do with each other?

Well, they are parallel processes. To own something is to, at least partially, identify with it. If you didn’t identify with it, you would cast it aside. Similarly, when you strongly identify with something, even if you are not the sole owner of it, you protect it and tend to it as though you were.

Because identity is both our strength and our weakness, we must be particularly careful with what we identify with.

You need to identify with things to own them. If you want anything, if you have even a single solitary desire in life, you must open your identity to it before you can acquire it.

Identifying with things is necessary for achieving goals. In a state of nonidentity, you may be immune to emotional attack, but you are also incapable of reaching any joy in life. It’s an emotional scorched-earth policy — you can’t steal what is burned to ash, and you can’t attack something that doesn’t exist.

All this is to say that, ultimately, we must construct an identity for ourselves. We cannot go about our entire lives without connecting to anything in the world around us. Or rather, if we did, it wouldn’t be a life much worth living.

But because identity is both our strength and our weakness, we must be particularly careful about what we identify with. We cannot hurl our soul around haphazardly and make Horcruxes of everything we touch. If we did, we would disappear for lack of distinction and become susceptible not to attack, but to the random nature of life. Catastrophes would consistently strike one or more of the things we are identified with.

We must identify with that which is more core to our desires and leave all else behind.

It will only slow us down.