As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his foolishness. - Proverbs 26:11
The old proverb marks it a circle of shame —
the mind’s loop, tripping over the same dark stone, calling it folly, calling it small.
But consider the scavenger who knows no pride, only the hollow ache of her ribcage, the body’s blunt arithmetic.
To her, it is not vomit — it is salt and protein pulled from the edge of death, a resource the fastidious leave to rot in the dirt.
She does not weigh the optics, only the heat in her blood, the distance still ahead.
Perhaps the real fool is not the one who circles back, but the one who walks away clean, who mistakes revulsion for wisdom and abandons the marrow still locked in the bone —
who never learns to hold bitterness long enough
in the dark
until it turns,
finally, to fuel.
I call that reverse Pavlovian
Psychotherapist and a poet