Shaka Senghor recounts falling into depression, using reading and journaling to confront his life trajectory, and realizing he had "thought himself into prison" by internalizing violent and fatalistic beliefs. He emphasizes reclaiming personal agency—while acknowledging structural harms—and describes consciously reprogramming his mindset (e.g., reversing beliefs like 'I'll be dead in jail' and 'I'll shoot first') into positive alternatives.
When I fell into that bout of depression, I would just pick up random books and read through pages for encouragement. And one of those books, as a man think of, talked about thinking into existence, the reality that you want. I was like, okay, all this philosophical foo foo, what's really here. I just challenged myself to think about what do I want my life to be and what are the steps I need to take. When I was doing the journaling, I went back and I realized that I thought myself into prison in the work of a reform. We don't talk about the personal accountability. Not to say that there's not structural and systemic racism, abuse and ptsd, but there is a of it that we don't talk enough about, which is personal agency. I was able to see so clear how I had programmed myself, I thought myself into this environment. I can't even tell you how many times where I said that I'm gonna shoot first if I get into a conflict. I can't tell you how many times that I had heard growing up that I would be dead in the jail. And I believe that I began to reverse engineer that. The question universe, if this is absolutely true and a negative, then it has to be absolutely true and a positive.
