8:45pm July 12, 2014

Some old rambling about Hogwarts houses, found on my hard drive.

I was talking with Anne today. As usual, when we aren’t the same, we’re weirdly complementary:

Anne is a Ravenpuff with some Gryffindor tendencies.

I’m a Gryfflepuff with some Ravenclaw tendencies.

Both of us can appreciate the better parts of Slytherin, but simply aren’t very Slytherin at all.

I see myself as…

I’m Hufflepuff at the core. There are times in my life when that would have shamed me to the bone, but I’ve learned to be proud of it. I used to think it made me weak. I used to think that caring about people, caring about fairness, made me pathetic and weak and stupid. I used to think that it held me back in situations where my peers could do things I couldn’t, or where I’d do the same things and end up all night crying. I used to hate when my mom would call me tender-hearted. I tried to be tough, but I’m not. No, I am tough, but I’m not tough in that way. I’m tough in a way that comes from the heart because from the heart is the only way I can operate honestly. And that’s why I’m a Hufflepuff, deep down, always.

My friends call me Neville. As in, several friends who don’t even know each other have independently called me Neville. He’s a fellow Gryfflepuff who learned courage late. I’ve learned an immense amount of courage by going through absolute hell. I’ve learned more Gryffindor traits, like sticking myself out there as the target that anyone can shoot at. Taking one for the team, as Anne put it, is one of my Gryffindor tendencies. I’ll put myself out there knowing that people can try to hurt me, but doing it because it seems the right thing to do at the time.

My primary motivations in life are all Hufflepuff, though. Embarrassingly so, sometimes. And I have all the weaknesses that come with being a Hufflepuff too.

I have never trusted loyalty. My friends try to convince me that loyalty isn’t always a bad thing. But I have come to realize that I have the kind of loyalty that can be a bad thing. The kind that makes you stick up for a friend even when you know in your heart of hearts that your friend has done wrong. This tendency in myself has always ashamed me, and I spend a lot of time fighting it. This may be the dark side of Hufflepuff. We are loyal to our friends, even to a fault. I used to spend so much time dissing this kind of loyalty that I didn’t realize the reason it bothered me so much was because I saw it so strongly within myself.

My Gryffindor traits are clearly secondary.

By which I mean…

I have a friend who’s 100% Gryffindor, like she’s the prototype of Gryffindor. If there’s a battle, she will be out in the front, wand waving wildly, taking curses so that other people don’t have to. She thrives on that kind of thing. She doesn’t have to gear herself up, that’s just who she is and what she does. And she’s amazing at both strategy and tactics when it comes to battle.

Me… I may sometimes find myself in the same place, doing the same thing. But it’s reluctant, and motivated differently. Battle doesn’t excite me the way it excites her. I don’t enjoy it. I see it as a means to an end. Sometimes a necessary one. Sometimes you have to stick your neck out. But I always have to prepare myself, I always have to put myself in the mindset of not being afraid. Because my first response is always flight or freeze, never fight.

I’m a hard worker. I have always been a hard worker. If I had my druthers, I would do hard work in the background. The way my life has propelled me has not allowed that to be my role, most of the time. I’ve felt like I’ve been forced into the limelight whether I want it or not, and I’ve had to deal with the consequences. (As such, I identified a lot with Harry Potter sometimes. I’m nowhere near as famous as he was, but the issues are the same, just on a smaller scale. My ex refers to my stalkers as ‘Rita Skeeter types’.)

But then Cedric ended up in the limelight too, and he was a Hufflepuff. There’s nothing about being a Hufflepuff that says you always have to be in the background doing unacknowledged hard work. It’s just something that Hufflepuffs are known for being good at.

My dream, when I first moved out on my own, was to be a gardener or something. To have a tiny house on someone’s land, with an Internet connection and not much stuff. And to unobtrusively take care of their grounds while they did whatever the hell they wanted and didn’t interact with me much. That sort of thing was my dream job: Stay in the background, do basic physical work, get paid just enough to get what you need, don’t interact with anyone much, live my life. It was an unrealistic dream, but I loved it just the same. I was kind of doing something like it – living in a tiny apartment off of my neighbor’s house, working in her garden when she couldn’t and I wished I could make it a career, but my body was falling apart and I couldn’t.

Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs tend to share a strong sense of justice and fair play. And that is something I have always had. Something that, when a childhood neighbor was asked to describe my personality, she wrote that I had an intense sense of justice and could not understand anyone who didn’t.

I think there’s a different flavor it takes in Gryffindor and Hufflepuff though, just like Hufflepuff and Slytherin loyalty have both commonalities and differences.

My sense of justice is based on my tender-heartedness. It’s based on my squishy weak parts that care about people too much. Not that Gryffindors don’t care about people, but they’ll more often get wrapped up in causes for their own sake, too. These are of course just generalizations.

And as far as generalizations go.

J. K. Rowling has made it clear that every House has people in it who would seem to fit in another house. Percy Weasley seems like a Slytherin, Neville Longbottom seems like a Hufflepuff, Hermione Granger seems like a Ravenclaw, but they are all in Gryffindor for specific reasons of their own, and those specific reasons have less to do with their talents and innate abilities, and more to do with their core values, or with life lessons that they need to learn, or choices they have made. So there is no House that doesn’t have people with strong traits from every single other House, in that House. No matter how much the other House may seem at first to be an opposite.

(For some reason, people have trouble imagining Slytherpuffs. But there’s plenty out there.)

I think as a child I would have wanted badly to be Gryffndor or Ravenclaw, but would have been sorted into Hufflepuff because that’s where I most needed to be. Hufflepuff not only reflects my strongest values about the world, but it would have made me stop being ashamed of who I was, and helped build me into who I was, rather than who I wasn’t.

Having to learn to be who I was, and stop trying to be what I wasn’t, was a major theme of the time period in my life when I would’ve been being sorted. In particular, I was losing my academic skills and growing into a whole other set of skills that nobody talked about because nobody really measures those skills. And I think that trying to end up in Gryffindor or Ravenclaw would’ve resulted in the Hat gently but firmly putting me into Hufflepuff, just as my life was tending to go at that point in time.

I was in a situation where I was “sorted into Ravenclaw” so to speak against my will, by means of gifted programs. Gifted programs assume that everyone there is a Ravenclaw just because they tested well at some point on a standardized test. I was expected to fit in because I had high test scores. But I did not fit in. In fact, I was bullied worse there than I was anywhere else. And when Ravenclaws turn bully, they are scary because they use that amazing mind of theirs to invent horrible ways of hurting you. Unfortunately, the programs encouraged a kind of amorality that only made it easier for the bullies to take hold and frighten off all the decent people. And there were plenty of decent people who had the Ravenclaw love of learning and truly belonged in Ravenclaw, and some of them were targeted by bullies as well. But those of us most likely to be targeted were those with disabilities and those who weren’t really Ravenclaws at heart.

When I say I’m not a Ravenclaw at heart, I don’t mean that I’m not a nerd. I’m a nerd. I enjoy learning. And I’m a quick learner in some areas, even still. But learning is not one of my higher values in life. It doesn’t sustain me. If I lost all my nerdiness and lost all my intellectual skills (and I’ve already lost more of them than people might guess, and only regained some, yay brain damage) I feel like I would still be myself. These aren’t things that define the core of who I am. They are attributes I can take or leave.

I think in order to be a Ravenclaw, I would have to have more than Ravenclaw-esque talents. I would have to really put certain kinds of learning first in my life. I would have to value them strongly in a way that I don’t. Plus I think I’d be stuck outside the Common Room door all day long, I’m terrible, generally, with that kind of question.

I also know that I would not fit in, in Ravenclaw. I don’t fit in, in groups of people where wit, learning, and intellect are considered the best things. I know people who do fit in, in those places, and that’s great. For them. I’m not one of them. I can’t fit in. In fact, trying to fit in, in those settings, has always turned into an embarrassing disaster. There’s a big disconnect between me and them, everyone senses it, and things get awkward. It’s not that I can’t have Ravenclaw friends and get along with them, but when I’m in an all-Ravenclaw environment, even when people are trying to be friendly, it just doesn’t work out. I don’t even know exactly why. It just doesn’t.

I still have analytical, intellectual skills that would make Ravenclaw maybe want to take me. But I wouldn’t be taken there, because the Hat is smarter than an standardized testing machine. The Hat would see wherever I belonged, and put me there, instead.

I have not much in the way of Slytherin traits. I can be mildly ambitious, but so can anyone. I love their common room, I think it’s second only to the Hufflepuff common room. But I’m not very ambitious, and I don’t have many of the other traits officially or unofficially given to Slytherins.

I actually sometimes think it’s cool when I run into a Slytherin woman. Women aren’t supposed to be ambitious in this society. I know a woman I’m 99% sure is Slytherin. She’s ambitious, not exactly a people person, she looks out for herself, she’s got a touch of arrogance. But somehow, those things work for her. She’s going into a field where she’s going to need all the ambition and arrogance she can get, just to survive the training. And I think she can do it. And I think it’s really cool that she’s like this as a woman, when women get so much shit for being ambitious or arrogant. Not that all Slytherins are ambitious and arrogant, but she is, and she makes it work for her. I like her.

Just as I have strong traits from both Hufflepuff and Gryffindor, Anne has strong traits of both Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw. I think on balance she might be a Ravenclaw with strong Hufflepuff tendencies. She’s a classic nerd in a very beautiful way, she seems capable of creating practically anything with her hands as soon as she learns how to do it, she’s got a voracious appetite for information, and she’s an engineer. And while I share many of those traits, for her they seem more central to her personality and values than they are to mine. I can’t explain the difference, but it’s there, even though the two of us are nearly identical in so many ways.

She also has Hufflepuff traits and values, of course, but they’re wrapped around the Ravenclaw values from the outside, the same way my Gryffindor values are wrapped around my Hufflepuff values. She cares a lot about people, about fairness, about hard work done well in the background. She would make a good Hufflepuff if she didn’t make a slightly better Ravenclaw. In fact, I could see her going either way at different points in her life.

And she has Gryffindor traits, but like my Ravenclaw traits, they’re not as strong as her main two Houses. I can really see a difference between the degree to which I’m willing to put myself out in the way of harm for a cause, and the degree to which she is willing to do so. I’m not judging her for this, mind you — we need all types in this world. But I do see a difference. I’ve been in situations where she’s told me she’d never have done something risky that I’d done without even thinking of the consequences.

But she’s no coward. In fact, she hates the idea of cowardice so much that she’s allowed herself to be goaded into things by the threat of being considered a coward. There are ways in which she’s braver than I am, even though I put myself out there more than she does.

And like me, she’s just… not very Slytherin, although I would suspect she likes the common room and the visual aesthetic as much as I do.

So I’m Hufflepuff at the core, with Gryffindor wrapped closely around it, and a fair number of Ravenclaw traits, with not much Slytherin. And Anne is probably Ravenclaw at the core, with Hufflepuff wrapped closely around it, and a fair number of Gryffindor traits, with not much Slytherin. And combined together, as we often are, we make a really cool team.

Oh I forgot to mention that Anne has the most kick-ass Slytherin cat I’ve ever heard of. Her name is Nikki, and she’s a purebred Siamese. She embodies something I’ve seen in a lot of Slytherins, which is that she is good but she is not nice. She would choose voluntarily to be in Slytherin, because she would see it as being to her advantage. She guards the house from foes both visible and invisible, and takes her guard duty deadly seriously. Woe to anyone who thinks it’s cute or funny.

Interestingly, she is extremely similar to my cat, Fey. The only difference? Fey is Gryffindor. One of my friends says that Gryffindors and Slytherins are far more similar than either one is likely to admit. But Fey and Nikki have such similar body language it’s a shock sometimes to watch Nikki interacting with people, and seeing Fey’s body language on such a different-looking cat.

Anne’s Hufflepuff cat is named Brodie. He’s amazing. All her cats are amazing. But Brodie has better social skills than any cat I’ve ever seen. He was the first to be able to make friends with Nikki, which he accomplished by unfailing politeness and observance of any and all boundaries that Nikki was willing to set. And he’s kind of the glue that binds their whole cat family together. He is quiet and shy in a lot of ways, and he has the most expressive ears of any cat I’ve ever seen. He’ll be sitting there seemingly not saying anything, but his ears will be twitching out all these patterns that clearly have meaning to him and the cats around him. He’s incredibly polite. And oh so very subtle, so subtle that you could overlook him if you weren’t careful.

Coraline is Anne’s Ravenclaw cat. She’s the one who figures out puzzles the fastest, and is always looking for new ways to learn and new ways to physically manipulate her environment. She’s curious about everything and has to explore and find things out.

And Shadow is Gryffindor. He’s pure fire. Sometimes he looks like a glowing piece of amber. Sometimes he looks like liquified sunlight. Sometimes he looks like molten lava. But always fire. He’s not the kind of misdirected, squashed up fire that leads to angry outbursts. He’s the kind of wide-open, well-connected fire that leads to intensity and passion and beauty and creativity and warmth and goodness. The kind of fire I’ve only recently been able to discover in myself. Cats often have an affinity for sunlight, and Shadow has more of one than I’ve ever seen. Sometimes I swear he is sunlight in liquid form, that just happens to be shaped like a big black cat.

I find it interesting that with four cats, Anne managed to end up with one for each House, and it’s not even slightly ambiguous in which House each cat belongs.

I also find it interesting that with all our similarities, Anne and I have different Houses. And yet the way our different Houses fit together is almost like an interlocking set of patterns. Two strong ones wrapped around each other, both sharing a Hufflepuff in that part, and then one weaker one, one practically nonexistent. We seem to complement each other very well: Gryfflepuff with some Ravenclaw tendencies and Ravenpuff with some Gryffindor tendencies. Although I say “Gryfflepuff” and “Ravenpuff”, though, when really each of us does have one central House, I think, not two. It’s just that we each also seem to have a very near runner-up in a second house, and that has to be acknowledged.