Six Steps to Defanging Your Vampire | Dr. April Kendra | TEDxUniversityofDelaware

Vampires have been staples of Western popular culture for more than 200 years not simply because they’re entertaining and dramatic, but because they offer a useful and adaptable metaphor for a wide range of issues we find too painful or frightening to confront directly. The one thing everyone knows about vampires is that they drink blood, but as Renfield declares in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, “The blood is the life.” The vampire is both a predator and parasite, something that hunts us and drains us. Vampires steal our time, energy, health, money, agency—in a word, they take our power. Real-world v...ampires can be individuals—an abusive spouse or partner, a demanding boss, a backbiting “frenemy.” Vampires can be organizations or systems—an exploitative company or a discriminatory policy. They can even be diseases like cancer or Alzheimer’s. Narratives like Dracula, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and True Blood offer us both a powerful metaphor for the vampires in our lives and the tools we need to defeat or at least de-f

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