A Manual for Self-Consumption

By: Ikeu

Graphics by: Cassius Klai C. Francisco

Begin by identifying what you can afford to lose. Start with the soft things — sleep, serenity, the small slices of sweetness that once made your days feel breathable. These are the easiest offerings, pliant as fruit left too long in the sun. They slip from your grasp without protest, and you convince yourself their absence is proof of progress. Loss becomes your liturgy; sacrifice your silent rite.

Convince yourself that output is identity. Some days this trick works flawlessly. Other days it barely holds, wobbling like a poorly tightened screw. Still, you tighten it. You always tighten it. You tell yourself that meaning is measurable if you lean into the grind hard enough.

If the exhaustion starts humming beneath your ribs, reinterpret it as momentum. This won’t hold forever, but it will hold long enough for you to survive the week. Maybe two. Maybe more, if you’re particularly persuasive.

Offer more than you have, and call it generosity rather than self-erasure. Give until your giving becomes instinct, until the boundary between what is yours and what is demanded dissolves like sugar in scalding water. Soon, you will forget which obligations you claimed and which claimed you. This is the efficiency your professors admire — the quiet elegance of a person disappearing for the sake of appearing capable.

Let your presence become more gesture than substance. A nod here, a faint smile there. You pass through rooms like a ghost completing its unfinished business. People say you seem “focused.” You swallow the truth that you’re actually just fading.

Run. Not toward anything. Just forward, because the absence of motion feels like sinking. There is a peculiar comfort in speed — the way it blurs the emptiness into something almost meaningful.

Mistake motion for meaning; momentum for direction. Run because stopping feels fatal. Chase anything bright enough to distract you from the truth that you have no idea where you’re meant to go. Hunger, after all, is easier to bear when you keep moving. In this perpetual motion, you consume yourself most efficiently. Chewing through hours, swallowing doubts, gnawing on the last fibers of who you were before all this began.

Reach the threshold where even your resilience feels counterfeit. Here, the body quivers in revolt: a tremor, a breath that refuses to deepen. The mind follows, thin as paper, ready to tear. You realize you have mastered every instruction in this manual except the one that teaches restoration. You are polished, but fragile; determined, but dissolving.

Then — stop. Not heroically. Just finally. Let the machine clatter to a halt. Let the silence you avoided return like a tide. In this abrupt stillness, you encounter the phantom of the person you used to be — not warm, but undeniably yours. It offers no comfort, only recognition. And that is enough to begin.

Return to whatever remains untouched by ruin. A flicker. A fragment. A stubborn ember refusing to extinguish. Gather what you abandoned. The quiet hunger, the pieces you once labeled “excess.” Reclaim your hours, your softness, your right to rest without requisition. This is not rebirth; it is reclamation, deliberate and unglamorous.

And finally, rewrite the manual. Not to erase your undoing, but to annotate it. Strike through the lies, underline the truths, expand the margins until there is room to breathe. Transform this handbook of self-devouring into a testament of return.

Because survival is not the apex of the story — the real triumph is choosing, at last, to stop consuming yourself.