ehowton ◾ Changing Your Stars (Reply)

"'And I pray one prayer--I repeat it till my tongue stiffens--Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you--haunt me, then! The murdered DO haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts HAVE wandered on earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad! only DO not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I CANNOT live without my life! I CANNOT live without my soul!'" ~Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights

My destiny isn't a fixed point in space. Its a goddamn explosion with a thousand points of light illuminating a dizzying array of possible paths, each as unique as they can be coming from a single source, and that source is me. Yet I am as varied as an atmospheric firework; uncontainable, forcibly ever-expanding, and swinging between minutely and grossly individual each and every time.

God but I hate self-pity. I remember one time I was sullen (I can count those times on my hand) and my girlfriend at the time asked me why. I confessed I was worried about one day becoming apathetic, as I couldn't convince myself of a way to always stave it off. She sneered. "Anyone who is as concerned as you are about apathy will never be subject to it." I've never forgotten that.

The definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy in psychology is that negative beliefs predict negative behavior (or problems in life). Surprisingly, the psychological explanation of a self-fulfilling prophecy is not that positive beliefs predict positive events.

A self-fulfilling prophecy is different than the Law of Attraction. The original psychological definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy is from Robert Merton: "a false definition of a situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true."

In other words, what you believe will come true because you will subconsciously and consciously act in ways that cause the event to happen. Self-fulfilling prophecies are powerful, and real.^*

The problem with self-fulfilling prophesies, as seen above is that they do not create positive change. I deftly wrap my arms around all which I am responsible for without missing a beat because I awake every morning filled with joy and wonder.

Usually.

Here lately however, bedlam! I am unaccustomed to waking filled with fear and trepidation, and found it does not bode well for me or mine, for the responsibility I so effortlessly embrace then becomes a burden, and I allow it to destroy me. Stressors which I would normally not even notice I let pick at me - rather than deflect them subconsciously I was absorbing them at an alarming rate.

So I wrote my own future.

I stripped everything away, and stood unabashedly naked - not just without the earthly raiment of this vessel I wear, but without all the magical enchantments of protection in which I clad myself. For the first time in a long time, I stood completely vulnerable.

I changed my stars.

Like CGI armor in a bad movie I'd noticed that I was involuntarily protecting myself when I entered the waking realm - after seemingly endless dreams of running, hiding, relocating, living on the run (or even the one where I went back to Germany, this time to train on the world's first stealth self-propelled artillery - which looked like a cross between a Soviet-era BMP and [G.I. Joe] Wolverine's "tank" (it looks more like a MRL to me) - only it was freaking HUGE because it was also the world's largest ground armored troop transport...) But that wasn't me. Isn't me. And something had to give.

I'm back.

With nothing left to lose, I peeled away layer after layer of disenchantment and doubt and that which remained was holy, and magnificent. Unclean to clean. I was whole again. I cycled my staff to rearm, and girded myself with the armor of the ages - for our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the unseen forces of evil in the realms of attitude and mood. To stand firm with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the knowledge of peace. Take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helm of brilliance and the sword of self-confidence!

And I shall never leave this place again.

I am now fitted with the knowledge of what has transpired, and it will forever be on my radar, never to get this close to me again.

^{* http://www.suite101.com/content/selffulfilling-prophecies-a15843}