Disclaimer: World and characters belong to J.K. Rowling. Bold italic passages are direct quotations, with occasional minor adjustments, from "On Self-Respect" by Joan Didion.
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
During the 1977 N.E.W.T. examinations, Severus Snape knocked over his inkwell. In a room filled with black robes hunched over half-answered tests, none of the scribbles stopped when Snape realized, as he watched the ink spread, that he had made the wrong choice.
Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception.
The next few meetings, he felt commensurately false. His friends detected nothing; nothing had changed except a secret knowledge that his inclusion, his place among these people, was all wrong. But habits wore on. He didn't show his friends that he regretted their friendship. All still laughed at sixth-year gossip and whispered promises of greatness to one another, at home inside the heavy curtains surrounding Dolohov's bed.
As the staircases moved on a walk with Avery, Snape felt something wrong within himself. The people he faced, even the flickers of face-like-things, triggered impulse to yell excuses and run, to explain unfixable problems with himself that no one had asked about. Scratching himself in his robes felt dirty and nasty. The twitches in his sleep, the oiliness of his skin, seeped with personal vileness. As months dragged on, Snape began to rot. Even the walls began to hate him.
The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself; no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions.
Now! Now the Dark Lord favored him, Snape walked with the security of a man protected. The Death Eaters sidestepped on their missions to give him room to charge. Their power- his power- shone to the world in bridges dismantled and people swept to sea, in bonfires where they oughtn't be, and in levitating women flown elsewhere and used without consent. Sometimes he and his friends apparated to a rainy shore where in a cave celebrations ensued, but in lost moments, Snape gazed longfully at the crashing waves. Finally acknowledged by others, he could no longer acknowledge himself.
One shuffles flashily but in vain through ones' marked cards the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed.
Despite the destruction, Snape imagined his path headed into an acceptable world. Yet he could not circumvent the feelings of inadequacy that he believed came from being human, feelings he believed he might still have had had he made the right decisions. Even now, his antagonists felt so far away as to be rain in the wind. Potter, Black, and Pettigrew had become a cold ire long ago.
Enduring the pain of each time he was forced to act contrary to himself, Snape felt further and further away from his own physical presence. Anger grew dull as Snape discarded unchangeable things. It was as though, in better times, he felt like two people: the one floating indifferent to the reality, and one writhed on the ground, choked with soap.
However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves.
Lily's murder forced a coalescence of the two people inside of him. He could no longer detach himself from the hate into which he had dropped. The hate, the empathy, the truth of his own actions, the illusions he had force-fed himself...
Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.
He was consumed with every bad feeling he had ever known. His insides churned in hot sand, eyes burst with pressure. His forehead pounded with the migraine of constant despair. Life stopped being poetic.
Approaching Dumbledore was the most falsely courageous act he would ever commit. No act can be courageous when one fears nothing, knowing that nothing could be worse than residing in one's own skin.
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
When he dropped the inkwell in sixth year, and refused to clean it up, he had signed away his ability to love, yet could still feign love to an old man looking for it. But he could no more be indifferent to his own falseness than he could be indifferent to his obligation to stay awake in a world he had made dark.
If we do not respect ourselves, we are the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses.
He hated children no less than he hated himself. Teaching was only an occupation that kept him alive whilst seeking restitution.
On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notion of us.
Severus had created a person so believable that even he could not break from the clay. What person he had been, he could scarcely remember. He had once dreamed of doing good things for their own sake. Now he made the only conscious decisions he could make, but he made them right. Still, he lay trapped in the cocoon of image. Having been seen as a bat, he had turned into a bat. A war raged on in which he was a moving spectator, every act determined by his hollowness inside, doing the right things out of fear of answering to himself should he stand up to his past actions and present fate.
We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give.
As his back pressed against the wall and Nagini flew at his fear-choked face, Snape realized he was a hero for all the wrong reasons. His images slowed down to still-frames, and he had, for the first time in years, freedom to think of the person he was without preparing for future behavior. He realized, in clarity as great as the dropping of a quill in fifth-year exams, that the person he had always felt he was, had gone and would never, in the whole future of all experiences felt by anyone, return.
Without self-respect, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.