Have just spent half an hour looking up the story of Vortigern’s tower on Wikipedia, and I suspect that my memory from Mary Stewart’s ‘The Crystal Cave’ is a little faulty, but I’ll give you the gist because that’s what set me off on this line of thinking.
Vortigern tried to build a tower at Dinas Emrys (‘Fort of Ambrosius’) in North Wales, but it kept collapsing overnight. His advisors told him that he needed the blood of a boy with no father to mix with the mortar in order for the tower to stand. They brought to him the boy wizard (no not that one), Aurelius Ambrosianus (aka Merlin, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, and M Stewart), who told him instead to dig under the foundations of the fort, where the workmen found a pool, at the bottom of which were two dragons, whose fighting caused the tower to collapse.
Last night it occurred to me that Vortigern’s tower was a good metaphor for my psyche/soul/personality, whatever you want to call it. However hard I try to build it up, down at the bottom of the pool there is a dragon which refuses to give me any peace.
I may appear on the surface to be coping well, to be getting on with life, ignoring what’s going on down there, but the dragon, though it may be asleep, never actually goes away, and night after night it comes back to do battle.
I believe ‘The Hobbit’ has some comments to make about dragons, though I can’t be arsed to look them up after the struggle to check out Vortigern. I never really took to ‘The Hobbit’, probably because I read it at just the wrong time, in my late teens, when it struck me as too much of a kids’ book - a few years earlier or later and no doubt I would have loved it.
Anyway, I digress. Dragons are tricky beasts, and I guess the dilemma with them is this: is it better to leave them alone while they’re asleep, and just hope they won’t wake up, or to fight them and try to destroy them, given that in order to fight them, you have to wake them up and bring them out into the open?
John Bunyan (a good old Bedford boy, BTW) would probably name my dragon ‘Dragon Self-doubt’ – a catchier moniker than ‘Dragon Negative-Mental-Attitude’, IMHO. However, his advice for dealing with it would probably involve me putting my faith in the Lord – not something that Cassandra or I am comfortable with
My dragon is capable of sleeping for long, long, periods, and sometimes I manage to kid myself that it’s gone away altogether – but it never actually does. Even when it’s quiescent, it still affects my self-esteem and assertiveness. Occasionally people will notice and say things like: ‘You should stick up for yourself more’, or ‘Promise me that next time someone interrupts you, you won’t apologise’, or ‘I don’t like the way you begin you profile with the word “failed”’, or ‘If you describe yourself as “unemployable”, you will be’. I’m sure they’re all very well-meaning, but what happens is that they wake the dragon. While it’s asleep, it only really affects myself, it might make me miserable, and stop me living a truly satisfying life, but hey, I say to myself, who has a really happy and satisfying life anyway, what makes me so special that I should be entitled to happiness?
But when people notice and say to me: ‘but why aren’t you happy, you deserve happiness?’, I start to wonder if maybe I could be happy, as in long-term, everyday satisfaction with my life that doesn’t evaporate at 2:00AM every night; as in waking up every morning looking forward to what the day will bring…

Then up leaps the dragon, and I have to fight it again and again, and it wears me down, night after night it comes back and I can’t escape.
So, it would probably be better if I could get rid of the dragon permanently, but I don’t know how to do that. Nothing I’ve tried has ever worked for long.
It may, though, be weakening slightly compared to how it used to be. For example, I haven’t seriously considered suicide for a long time, and I don’t think I despise and loathe myself quite as much as I used to; these days I tend more to get angry and frustrated with myself, which I think is an improvement. But at this rate of change I don’t think I have enough time left to get rid of it for good. So maybe I’ll try to go back to ignoring it, or at least stop inflicting it on other people. As long as people can accept that this is how I am, and not expect me to suddenly turn into Pollyanna.