Some ideas need a moment before they will say themselves out loud.
A body can rewrite itself? What sorcery is this?
Hah!
There is a process in the body called autophagy.
It sounds, well, harsh. Maybe clinical. It means “self-eating,” which is an unfortunate name for something genuinely elegant. Whoever named it was clearly committed to precision over poetry. In fairness, Yoshinori Ohsumi helped uncover how autophagy works and won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for that work, so accuracy was apparently doing just fine without charm.
What actually happens is closer to editing.
Tiny cellular workers move through us, gathering what is broken, worn out, or has overstayed its welcome. They dismantle it—carefully, without drama—and hand the pieces back as fuel. Nothing is discarded. Everything is repurposed.
Not destruction. Revision.
The body, it turns out, is a better writer than most of us. It does not hoard its old drafts. It does not cling to a sentence just because it once worked. It cuts, recycles, and moves on, and the whole system runs cleaner for it.
I know this because I am currently testing the theory.
March 23, 2026. Fasting began today. The plan is to go through Thursday: four days of water, black coffee, and the quiet dignity of a person who has made excellent choices. The idea is simple enough. The body will do its little cellular housekeeping, dismantle what is worn out, and hand the pieces back as fuel.
That is the idea, anyway.
We will see about that.
I am not entirely sure this version of me survives until Thursday. Somewhere between day two and day three, a steak is going to start speaking to me personally. By name. With sides.
We tend to think growth means accumulation. More input, more output, more of everything. The body disagrees. It has known for a very long time that clearing is part of growth, that restraint is not absence but preparation.
Sometimes the story gets better not because you added something, but because you finally let the wrong words go.
The steak, for now, can wait.
Probably.
