Woxidu

Lately I’ve been focusing on the idea that people often get stuck in cycles that control how they interact with others. They start out with an idea about themselves, they rig things so that they communicate this idea about themselves with others, and then the people around them behave in ways that uphold and confirm the ideas the person had in the first place. At some level, this is just the idea that people make prophecies that are self-fulfilling.

But I’m not talking about simply making prophecies that make themselves come true. I’m talking about making prophecies that not only guarantee their own delivery, but in doing so trigger their own rebirth in the person. Prophecies that fulfill themselves and also restart themselves.

It might be argued that most self-fulfilling prophecies are self-restarting. A teacher might make a generalization about which children he expects will perform well in his class. Then, after acting out the pygmalion effect, this generalization will have been confirmed, and the next year’s batch of children will be subject to modified expectations. While this is perhaps true and could probably be upheld reasonably in argument, the thing that interests me is the situation where the person who makes the prophecy and the one who receives the prophecy are the same person. This feature of the prophecy seems, to me, to distinguish it from other forms of prophecy insofar as it enables the person to execute the prophecy again and again at will, with little to no outside help.

Consider the following situation:

Warren is a teenager in the city who hangs out and spends time with other kids his age in his neighborhood. Each week, all of the kids go to the skating park to ride their skateboards and show off. It’s a big deal in the area and everyone gets excited about it. Some kids get pretty competitive, but everyone mostly enjoys participating in the skating and looks forward to it… except for Warren. One day when Warren was 5, he was skating and some big bullies bent the wheels on his board. They made fun of him, convincing him he was a bad skater. Since then, Warren has avoided skating. When the subject comes up in conversation, he gets nervous. When invited to skate with his friends, he says, “No thanks, skating isn’t really my thing.” If he’s put in a situation where he’s forced to skate, he does poorly and feels bad for embarrassing himself. Others around him begin to feel like Warren does indeed skate quite poorly.

The focus of Warren’s situation is the fear of skating that the bullies gave him. This fear will set him into the groove of a cycle; one that starts with his fear of the consequences of his own poor skating. The next logical step for Warren, knowing that he’s bad at skating, is to not skate. After keeping this up for a while, he’ll probably find himself unable to totally avoid skating. Now he’s forced to reevaluate his skating skills, potentially in public. He’ll find that his skating is poor from lack of practice, and he’ll re-convince himself that he’s no good on a skateboard. Warren has now given himself the next reminder that he shouldn’t try to skate. The cycle repeats.

Anyone can see that Warren’s story is tragic because A. it’s not his fault that he started to think he was a bad skater in the first place and B. his fear was all it took to permanently keep him from doing what he does actually enjoy doing. By not skating, Warren can keep himself in a safe place. In addition to being able to avoid the further embarrassment that he expects to receive, he can also avoid confronting the reasons he hasn’t been skating for years. He can say, “I’m a bad skater” or “Skating’s not my thing” if he just avoids it. He’s learned the lesson that skating is a bad idea, but never bothered to question why that might be the case. The consequence is that he stacks on his own reasoning (“I’m a bad skater”) and keeps going around in logical circles with it.

Is there hope for Warren? Can he break out and have fun skating again? Can he confront his painful past and uproot his misinterpreted life lessons? Where does the de-looping start?