Many people end up becoming “prophecy fulfillers” of the prominent ideas continuously implanted in them since childhood.
Beyond the plain, verbal repetition your simpleton mind will initially think of, this indoctrination happens more precisely through a multitude of mediums.
Because many repetitions you’re aware of, but there’s also a bunch of white noise in the background you are blind to.
Media
This might be one of the easier ones to pinpoint, but it still controls people despite us being more generally aware of its control. I Know-itis in the flesh.
One of the tools media has always utilized to paint narratives is repetition. When you hear a storyline over and over again it becomes true. Especially for the boomers who love the news, everything on tv is Gospel.
Today, media consumption looks a bit different. But the same skeleton shows up in modern clothing through curated social feeds. We fall into abyssal echo chambers of our own biases. The addiction to scrolling makes us believe we have the right perspective.
If you understand this, then you can take this same ideology and apply it to the people you associate yourself with.
Environmentally Afflicted
What are people saying to you on a consistent basis? Pay attention to your own verbiage too. What are you saying to yourself?
“What we perceive and what we accept is an important part of what we too will become.”
Shad Helmstetter, What To Say When You Talk To Yourself
Internal and communal audibles get etched into our psyche, and become dominant thought patterns we hold as precedent.
Heck, these are some warnings I constantly heard growing up in the hood, some from well-meaning people, some backed by the guise of statistics:
“You’re a lot more likely to end up in jail because of where you live, and your ethnic background.”
“People like us never get out of here.”
“Everything is rigged, you’ll never win.”
“You really think you can do that??”
Language like that becomes prophecy. It gets reinforced everywhere you look. Intellectualized in schools (ex: school to prison pipeline), music (pick a random rap song; debauchery widely floods the genre), speeches (listen to all the politicians telling you you’re hopeless and you need them to bail you out), documentaries (drug dealers and criminals romanticizing their enterprises), even the neighborhood gossip. It’s so woven into you, you don’t notice it anymore. “It’s just the way it is.”
“You either spit it raw, or sell crack and dribble the ball”
Meek Mill, Hip Hop (2013)
That quote is the sentiment, the only ticket out the hood for most of us growing up there.
The worst part is once you accept it, you start living like it’s already true. So you walk slower, your head lowers, your ambition fades, and you stop trying to compete as hard because the world around you feels predestined.
When you eventually fail, whether from a bad environment, bad decisions, or bad luck, it doesn’t shock you. It’s just prophecy fulfilled.
You nod and point the finger at the world, not realizing that the prophecy became self-fulfilling the moment you believed it more than you believed in yourself.
When The Kingdom Of Darkness Surrounds You
I can be very hard on myself as I’ve mentioned in our About Us. In some ways being my own drill sergeant has benefitted me. It has given me unbelievable drive. The kind of drive that drove me to a refusal of letting the words spoken over me, the prophecies of failure, strip me of self-respect.
It kept my light alive. Some days it was barely alive, like the tiny flicker in a candle about to sputter out.
There were nights where holding onto that light felt like carrying the cross through Via Dolorosa.
But the thing about a flicker is — it still cuts through darkness.
My stubborn flicker was a symbol of rebellion. It was my non-verbal “No” to every voice that tried to convince me I was already defeated.
Sermons Of Decay
Too many people grow up drinking from poisoned wells — with corrupt sermons oozing out of broken mouths.
Some of these voices belong to family members trapped in their own hopelessness. Others come from teachers or authority figures who have no business shaping anyone’s self-worth. And, of course, there’s the system itself. Sometimes it doesn’t even have to push you down, it just convinces you it’s universal law.
And so the decay begins, slowly. Confidence rots, dreams fade, people stop imagining themselves in certain rooms, wearing certain clothes, shaking certain hands — because in their mind, that’s not for people like us.
But let’s rebuke that package. You do not have to receive it.
“Where there is no vision, the people perish”
Proverbs 29:18
Poisoned sermons build homes in your head with moldy walls. And if you let them, they collect rent in your self-esteem until nothing of value is left.
Self-Esteem, Self-Image, Mumbo, Wumbo
Helping someone rebuild a shattered self-image is one of the most uphill battles you’ll ever fight.
Because you’re asking them to evict tenants who’ve lived in their mind for decades. Tenants named “You’re not enough,” “You’re doomed,” “It’ll never work,” and “Your past defines you.”
Those tenants decorated the place. They take bubble baths with rubber ducks and cucumbers on their eyelids. They even rewired the plumbing, they’re comfy.
To evict them, you have to speak new prophecies, more consistently than the old ones. You have to undo years of invalidation. You have to make them realize the mold on the walls is not normal.
You have to show them they have value. They have something worth protecting.
“Life and death are in the power of the tongue.”
Proverbs 18:21
And tongues have been speaking death into people’s lives long enough.
That ends now!
Breaking Prophecy
If the prophecy in your mind says you’ll fail, if it says the mountain is too high for even a mustard seed of faith, if it tells you the story is already over before it starts, rewrite it.
The new prophecy doesn’t have to be poetic. It just has to be believable enough for you to act on it.
Your old prophecy never had a mystical power. It just had repetition. It was said so often, from multisensory angles, you made room for it. And the only way to erase it is to drown it in new programming.
You have to decide that prophecy isn’t mine anymore.
C-C-CCC-CON-NN-CLU-SSSSION
I sang this over and over again on my mom’s CD player by the age of four-years-old. I forgot about it for many years, but it would periodically resurface out of my mouth (whenever my body would randomly sing songs it has not heard in forever).
I can’t be the only one who does that?
But maybe this hymn was a foreshadow, one of the good prophecies I clung onto in the midst of all the other ones that tried to perish my spirit.
Anyway, this is about you.
And your light might be flickering. You might be in the dark. You might be in rooms that feel designed to dim you. You might be staring at obstacles so big you don’t know where to start.
Start anyway.
Because the second you refuse to live out someone else’s prophecy, your flicker becomes a flame.
And a flame doesn’t ask permission to burn.
Credits & Features
This rant was inspired by a video @Mr.Thoughtbender made a few years ago titled “Prophecy Fulfilled”.
Author’s Note
This is an interconnected idea with other writings I’ve done on belief and the subconscious ways environment can influence the people we become before we realize it.
Sociologically, this dynamic is actually called self-fulfilling prophecy. I thought I was a genius when I came up with the title and metaphor. Little did I know it was an exact term.
Give us a piece of your noggin