The Snake That Eats Itself

There are mornings where I wake up and feel like I've been alive for centuries. The weight in my chest does not belong to the day ahead but feels older, something that feels small and afraid again.

My eyes cracked open at 6:02 AM this morning and I felt a familiar ping of anxiety take over my body, an old enemy of years. The sun was not up yet, and I shouldn’t be either, I thought. I had another hour left until my alarm was supposed to greet me, but the day had other plans for me. That’s how it goes, sometimes. The body remembers before the mind does.

Unwilling memories flicker like scratched DVD’s in my mind and I can’t make total sense of it. Trauma disorders can be complicated like that. There is no neat narrative, no “this happened, then that happened.” It just returns with no context besides shaky hands.

I wrap my arms around myself and I repeat my mantras to myself “it won’t feel like this forever,” because I know that I don’t always have the time to unravel my childhood at 6AM, life demands the functioning version.

My first panic attack - I was maybe ten. Curled into a ball in the living room, huffing and puffing like a small animal that just learned fear. Unironically, they would always happen upon waking; I’ve blamed Cortisol levels and night terrors but I still can’t find a way to wake up gently. I never learned how. Mornings have always felt like being thrown back into the world too fast.

When nothing else worked, my dad used to lean down and whisper,

“It won’t feel like this forever.” He said it like a fact, like gravity. As if there were natural laws that governed suffering; what rises must also recede.

The Ouroboros is one of the oldest symbols known to humankind. It appears on Egyptian tomb walls, where the serpent forms a perfect circle around the sun god Ra, symbolizing the eternal return, the rising and setting, the dying and renewing.

The word itself means tail-eater. The first time I read that, I felt oddly seen. There’s something terrifying and tender about the idea of a creature surviving by consuming what it once was.

That’s how healing has felt for me.

The child-self lives inside of the adult self.

Fear lives inside growth, and memories live inside of healing.

The body must eat its own history to stay alive.

I cannot escape who I’ve been, but I can learn to hold her.

The Loop that Doesn’t Announce Itself

For a long time, I believed that I had outgrown my earliest versions- outgrown the girl who woke up terrified, the girl who didn’t know how to speak her fears, the girl who thought the world would collapse if she expressed her emotions.

But I didn’t outgrow her, I absorbed her.

She sits right behind my ribcage, she cuts her finger on my sharp sternum and she wakes me up at 6:02 AM because she remembers something that I don’t.

This is the true Ouroboros;

The self that circles back, the self that calls itself home.

It’s not expected to be torturous, it’s integrative in pain.

Avoidance As Devouring

I used to think that to heal, I had to outrun the past. I mastered escape the way others master languages.

I changed cities, hairstyles, friends, the tone of my voice.

I dated people who blurred me into someone unrecognizable.

But the past is patient, and it waits for you to see it.

The snake does not leave its tail, it carries the loop wherever it travels.

And maybe that’s what the Ouroboros really means, that nothing ever leaves us. Every fear, every version of ourselves, every moment we swore we’d never return to, they’re still there, quietly coiling, waiting for us to stop running and look.

Inheritance

Sometimes I do wonder if the loop began before me. I wonder if my father ever used the words of comfort he gave to me, if he clung to them the way I did. I wonder if we all have a type of cellular remembering, if it is passed down until someone begs to conquer it.

Maybe the Ouroboros is an ancestral beast that begs to be recognized, begs to be acknowledged. Maybe it is every parent trying to raise a softer child while simultaneously healing the frightened one in themselves.

If I ever have a daughter, I think I’ll tell her what my father told me.
I’ll tell her that fear has a shape, and it always changes, but it never lasts.
I’ll tell her that when she feels it coil, she can breathe into it, not run.
That even the snake deserves gentleness.

The Symbol is Not a Warning but a Map

For a long time, I thought the Ouroboros was a prolific curse, proof that I was trapped inside my own history. But now I see it differently. It’s not a warning; it’s a map of what it means to live through yourself.

Every ending I’ve known has carried the seed of a beginning. Every breakdown has eventually made space for breath. The snake doesn’t devour itself out of despair. It does so to survive.

It won’t feel like this forever.
Not because we escape it,
but because one day, we learn to hold what hurts without letting it consume us.

If you keep finding yourself in cycles, unrequited friendships, toxic partners, moments that don’t fulfill you, look deeper, not wider. The lesson might not be in escaping the loop, but in understanding why you keep returning to it.

I think that we all repeat what we haven’t yet learned to love gently. Sometimes that means facing the part of ourselves that keeps choosing familiar pain because it feels like home. But the Ouroboros reminds us: even that is a kind of beginning.

One day, you’ll wake at 6:02 AM, and instead of fear, you’ll just feel your heartbeat. And maybe that will be enough.