Teleidoscope

Wed, Jul 25, 2007

Autonomy

Posted at 11:45 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Someone in the Harry Potter comment thread at Making Light pointed out that Harry tries to do too much himself because his childhood in the Dursleys' household had taught him that he could not expect help from others.

The lessons I learned during my adolescence were that I was not safe except in my own place with the door locked, and that the people who supposedly had the power and responsibility to help me were useless, at best, and could not be trusted for support.

I never had a roommate in college, in the usual sense. I spent all of the four years living in a building that had clusters of single rooms.

And the only time I have shared a house or apartment for any amount of time, since I first left my parents home to go to college, was when I shared a house with another student during the year I worked on my library science degree. We shared the kitchen and bathroom, but otherwise, she had one end of the house, and I had the other.

Looking back, I wonder what would have happened if I had not successfully avoided undergraduate housing involving an actual roommate in shared space. As it is, I had a bout of what I suspect, looking back, was undiagnosed clinical depression, but pulled out of it

Would having to deal with a lack of my own space have relaxed some of my barriers? Or would it have led to a complete meltdown? I suppose it would have depended on the hypothetical roommate.

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