Fasting as a Creative Exorcism: How Emptying My Gut Cleared My Head

[reading_again_581]

I’ll be honest—starting a fast this winter felt less like a spiritual practice and more like I was punishing myself for surviving another year. I’m 23, queer, living in a drafty Chicago walk-up, and yeah, I used to deliver mail before I burned out and just… stopped. The rhythm of that job wired me to push through discomfort until my body literally quit. So when I read about fasting as a way to reset your relationship with the world, I was skeptical. Yet I was starving. Not just for food. For meaning.

Day three is always the wall. That’s when the physical hunger stops being about calories and starts feeling like an emotional mirror. I’ve been working with ritual as a creative practice for a while now, but fasting? It’s brutal. It strips away the distractions and leaves you alone with whatever you’ve been avoiding. Jung called it confronting the shadow, but in my experience, it’s less dramatic and more like staring at a blank canvas until you realize you’ve been painting over the same crack for months. Carl Jung didn’t write about hunger, but he definitely knew about the terror of sitting with what you’ve repressed.

What surprised me was how the body practices I usually skip—grounding, breathwork, even just standing barefoot on the hardwood—started working differently when I wasn’t constantly fueling or numbing. There’s a quiet shift when your nervous system stops processing constant input. I’ve been leaning into the silence instead of filling it with noise. The hunger eventually fades into a strange kind of clarity, like fog lifting off a lake. I started journaling again, not to document the fast, but to let the thoughts bleed out without editing them. It’s messy, and it’s uncomfortable, but for the first time in years, I’m not running from myself. If you’re considering a fast, don’t do it to punish yourself. Do it to make room. The emptiness passes, but the space it leaves behind is where the actual work begins.