“I Am [Your Name] and I Am in Control of My Instincts”

“I Am [Your Name] and I Am in Control of My Instincts” is a prescribed abstainer’s mantra in The Abstainer’s Handbook (second edition), intended to help a vampire resist an approaching overwhelming blood-thirst episode. The phrase turns self-control into a repeated verbal practice, but its confident declaration is set against the handbook’s warning that blood magnifies craving and Rowan Radley’s eventual relapse into drinking.

Definition and Use

The handbook presents the mantra as the fifth item in its advice for preventing an OBT attack. After taking several measured breaths, an abstainer is instructed to repeat the sentence as many times as seems helpful. The surrounding instructions also recommend moving away from other people, switching on the lights, avoiding imaginative stimulation, watching certain sports, and doing a practical task. The mantra is thus one part of a larger effort to redirect attention and calm the body, not a guarantee that desire has disappeared.

Its wording makes an assertion of agency: the speaker names themself and declares control over instinct. That assurance is complicated by another statement from the same handbook: blood does not satisfy cravings but magnifies them. The mantra offers a form of self-command in a world where appetite can grow stronger through the very act of feeding.

The Handbook and Rowan’s Crisis

The expression belongs to a handbook that Rowan consults during a period of suicidal depression. After a difficult encounter with Eve Copeland, he listens to his favorite Smiths album, Meat Is Murder, and searches the index of The Abstainer’s Handbook. The passage he finds identifies suicidal depression as a common curse among abstainers. This moment places the mantra’s project of control alongside a recognized vulnerability of abstinence, rather than presenting self-command as effortless.

Later, Rowan sits with a bottle of vampire blood and wonders whether he could take only a sip. He hides it when he hears his sister approaching, placing it beneath the bed beside an old papier-mâché puppet he made as a child. The scene makes the bottle a concealed temptation, while the handbook’s advice remains a counter-practice based on deliberate attention and repetition.

Failure of the Mantra’s Promise

Rowan’s next choice follows a memory of being knocked down and pinned by Harper while other boys, including Toby Felt, laughed. At the time, Rowan had wanted to disappear into the earth rather than fight back. Remembering this, he picks up the bottle and drinks; the narration describes his worries and tensions lifting and his familiar aches disappearing almost immediately. The episode gives the handbook’s promise of control a sharp narrative counterpoint: Rowan does not use the prescribed mantra, and the immediate relief of drinking overwhelms the abstainer’s discipline.

The expression therefore functions both as practical guidance and as an exposed ideal. Its repeated first-person claim makes resistance something an abstainer must actively rehearse, while Rowan’s sequence of depression, concealment, painful recollection, and drinking shows how vulnerable that claim can be under pressure. The book does not establish that the mantra is useless; it shows that a declaration of control exists beside cravings and distress that may exceed it.