Relevance Post- Gollum Thoughts

This post is gonna get a bit personal y'all, so strap in and bear with me.

I have been going to see therapists for many years and I had not felt that I made significant progress until last semester and carrying into the present. I have been diagnosed with Depression, Anxiety, and PTSD and all of them have been very challenging in their own repsects, nevermind in tandem. Anyhow, I have been working mostly on my anxiety the past few weeks and felt a bit miserable thinking there was no way I could get out of it, that I was just stuck in a dark well. My therapist was aware of this class and during sessions I usually like to bring in my Tolkien coloring book (yes guys, I am able to color in not only LOTR things, but also Hobbit and Silmarillion). After telling her the way my anxiety has a voice that I usually cannot consolidate with my own, she suggested that I think of them as "Gollum thoughts"and that way I could be aware of when the bad things I am telling myself are not actually based on logic and I am not obligated to believe them.

So for several weeks, I have been a sexier version of Sméagol, telling Gollum to shut up and eat a fish every time he tells me that I am stupid or that I can't succeed and especially when he growls that nobody cares about me and I should isolate myself. I have fiund it incredibly helpful, but it has also made me wonder if that is the real reason Tolkien included Gollum/Sméagol. Was he, like me, dealing with mental illness and the onslaught of PTSD resulting from his experiences? Did he have Gollum be helpful in the end becasue he wanted to symbolically take advantage of this obstacle and push past/ use it as fuel to succeed in his own life? In any case, I am deeply aware of how important it is in my life that Tolkien wrote this character into life, because it has had a great impact on my mental health and I am deeply grateful, many decades later.

{Nienna}