3:25am June 11, 2014

What I’ve learned from people in other Hogwarts houses.

I’ve learned a lot from the Hogwarts houses. They tap into something deep and archetypal. I can tell this because most systems of classifying people fall flat for me. Myers-Briggs tells me I’m an ISFP (or did, last time I took the test) and I call bullshit more than I find anything insightful in that, the Enneagram, and other things like that. But somehow in the House system J.K. Rowling created, she’s tapped into something that actually makes a meaningful impact with my brain.

I don’t wish I’d been to Hogwarts. Although I do sometimes wish I’d been to the Hufflepuff common room, and been to an idealized version of Hogwarts that never existed outside of the head canons that I and a lot of other people think up. But I think about the Houses constantly, and the people I know, who I am.

Learning I was a Hufflepuff taught me a lot about myself, and not all of it good. I’d always seen loyalty as a bad trait. Now I see it as a trait that can be either bad or good. But when seeing it as a bad trait, I didn’t realize that I had this trait, in its worst form, as far as I’m concerned: I will stick up for my friends even when I know they’ve done something horrible and that I should really be telling them off for it. This is a tendency I have to fight in myself. And I am more aware of it now than I ever was before, because of Hufflepuff. And all the examples in the books where doing that went horribly wrong. And knowing that I am a Hufflepuff, a real Hufflepuff, and share most of the qualities, good and bad, that the House has to offer.

But it’s not all bad stuff. Learning about the Houses has also helped me clarify my priorities.

I’m drawn to Ravenclaw because I’m a classic nerd and always have been.

I’m drawn to Gryffindor because I feel like I need more courage, and I admire their ability to take a stand, to jump right out in the middle of something and stand in front of those that are threatened, and fight for them.

I’m drawn to Slytherin… it’s not because I have ambition or cunning. I may have a little ambition here and there, I know I have a few of them, but it’s not an overriding force in my life. But I’m a very watery person, and Slytherin is the house based on water. Based on a different type of water than I am (I’m the water in the soil of a redwood forest, Slytherin is the mysterious depths of the ocean), but still water. And those mysterious depths still hold a sense of mystery to me… but also a sense of fear and foreboding. There’s a haunting beauty to it, but I can’t see myself there. It’s the only house that I hands-down can’t see myself there. And it’s not because it’s the ‘bad house’, I know plenty of good Slytherins. It’s just not something that fits me well overall, despite the appeal of its aesthetics.

I’m drawn to Hufflepuff because I care about people more than I care about anything in the world. Because long hard work, whether physical work or things like stuffing envelopes, is something I have always genuinely loved, even when others find it boring or repetitive. I used to get so happy in school when the secretaries would tell each other to choose me to help them because I was a hard worker who never complained. I remember bringing home my first paycheck and how proud I was — it was for shoveling horse crap into a wheelbarrow and dumping it at the other end of a flooded field, then going back and doing the same thing again. I didn’t at first see the loyalty thing, but now I do. But most of all, it’s the fact that I care about people before I care about anything else in life. Love, in its active expression, matters more to me than courage or cunning or ambition or intelligence, and it matters more to me than the more expanded versions of what really matters to each house.

And that tells me that whatever other tendencies I have, I’m Hufflepuff through and through. I can’t help it. I’m not sure I want to help it. Well, maybe at one point I did want to help it. I wanted to be a Gryffindor. It sounded more interesting. And I have Gryffindor traits — like Neville, I’m a cross between Gryffindor and Hufflepuff. But when it comes down to it, the Hufflepuff traits are more who I am, they’re at a deeper level.

But being Hufflepuff also means I have a lot to learn from my fellow Houses. Fortunately I know people (both human and cat, oddly enough) from all of the different Houses, and they have all helped me get a better sense of what I have to learn from each House.

I have an extremely close Gryffindor friend. She is the prototypical Gryffindor. If there was a battle, and there were people needing protecting, she would jump in front of them with a sword in her hand before she even had a chance to think about her actions. She is fire, through and through.

She has taught me courage. And she has taught me that there is more than one form of egotism. There are people who hog the limelight, and there are people who are afraid of the limelight. Doing either one when it’s not what is needed to be done is an act of egotism. I had to learn to allow people to put me in the limelight when that was what needed to be done, even though my ego was screaming at me to go hide in a hole. If it weren’t for her, I would’ve been hiding in a hole, and I wouldn’t have even noticed that it was egotistical of me to be hiding in a hole. The same way it’s egotistical for someone to hog the limelight for no good reason. Same exact thing, polar opposites. I had to learn that, and the lesson came best from a Gryffindor. So did the lesson of courage in the face of situations like that, that I couldn’t fully control or predict. She calls me “Neville” a lot when she thinks I need to learn to be the more courageous person I could be, or to feel my own fire a little more.

My Ravenclaw friends have taught me that it’s not bad to have an intellect. I was badly wounded by gifted programs growing up, to the point that I was afraid of my own intelligence. Not that I think I’m more intelligent than other people. Not that I even think I’m something called ‘gifted’. But I do think that, just like everyone else, I have intelligence. And I had been hiding from my own intelligence for a long time, for fear all those horrible gifted program experiences would pop out and ruin my life again, until it became a matter of life or death for me to do something about it. I had to use my brain more actively, or I was going to stand a higher risk of dying from complications of delirium. As I began to do so, I began to realize that this was not a bad side of me. That there was nothing wrong with having an intellect. That everyone has an intellect. That they aren’t bad things. They serve a purpose. And that simply having an intellect would not cause people to swoop down on me and do what they did to me in childhood.

My Slytherin friends have taught me that sometimes it’s possible — and important — to be good without being nice. That, in fact, sometimes if you’re being nice, you’re doing the exact wrong thing. They’ve also taught me, along with Gryffindors, that the rules don’t matter as much as I expected them to. They make me wish I could go over my life again in school and stop caring about breaking the rules. Because breaking the rules isn’t the issue, the issue is whether you’re doing something wrong. And sometimes you have to break the rules to do something right. As a chaotic-good person, I’ve always known this, but as an autistic person, I’ve often struggled with rule-breaking in practice. Slytherins have helped me there.

And Hufflepuffs…

I look to the best Hufflepuffs as role models. Fred Rogers was a genuine Hufflepuff, all the way through. He was so real people assumed he was phony until people got to know him and realized he didn’t have an insincere bone in his body. He cared about people so deeply that he dedicated his life to showing people what caring meant. And I think everyone should wish they could have a millionth of the impact that someone like him has had on the world. The best Hufflepuffs care deeply about people, put that caring into action, and put their ego to the side in the process (or even better, do a lot of work towards dismantling that ego, which is a lifetime’s work or more). I am always looking for Hufflepuffs to emulate.

It’s not that I think Hufflepuffs are better than other Houses, mind you. It’s just that I think that each person has to be the best person they personally can be. And that if you’re a Ravenclaw, that means being the best Ravenclaw you can be, not trying to be a Slytherin or a Gryffindor or a Hufflepuff. If you’re a Gryffindor, be the best Gryffindor you can be. If you’re a Slytherin, be the best Slytherin you can be.

(This is all a metaphor of course. Houses aren’t real. People can exist outside the boundaries of the Houses. What I’m trying to say is that you can only be the best you, you can’t be the best someone else, and I’m using Houses to illustrate the point.)

You can learn valuable lessons from other Houses, but when it comes down to it, you are who you are, and you have to take the raw materials from who you are, not who someone else is that you happen to admire. So I try my best to cultivate a list of amazing Hufflepuffs that I can at least try to be a little more like.

Dave Hingsburger is high on my list of amazing Hufflepuffs. Fred Rogers is another, as I mentioned before. And there are a lot of people I’ve met, just going about their lives, who are amazing Hufflepuffs who work for no recognition at all. But they show me things about myself that I could do better. Or they show me bad things about myself that I need to watch out for. Sometimes it’s easier to see the bad things on another person of your House, than to see it in yourself, at first. So role models can show you not just what to do right, but what you do wrong, and how to handle yourself when you do things wrong.

I’ll never be like Fred Rogers, I don’t think. But I think I could work towards being like Dave Hingsburger. There’s something more accessible to me about his particular form of Hufflepuffiness. And I’d love to be like Brodie, my friend Anne’s Hufflepuff cat who talks with his ear movements and can get along with anybody, even her grouchy Slytherin Siamese.

So as far as I can tell, the lessons you learn from other Houses are about traits that may not be your central traits in life, may not be your central focus, but are still not bad traits to have and learn about. And the lessons you learn from your own House, are how to better be yourself, and also the pitfalls that you’re most likely to fall into as yourself.

And that goes whether we’re calling them Hogwarts Houses or any other categories. As long as the category system has any legitimacy to it, this sort of thing will happen: People in other categories can teach you about things that may not be your main focus, and people in the same categories can teach you how to be yourself at your best, and how to avoid being yourself at your worst.