Note: I told this story onstage last week at the Hustle’s 2X storytelling conference in San Francisco. It was ????. Here’s the audio recording of my talk (15 min.) if you want to listen!

If you’d rather read, carry on!

By now, you might know that I consider myself an amateur doctor. You need surgery? Well, if I can find a YouTube video of it, I’VE GOT YOU.

Anyhow. A little while back I had to see a head and neck doctor for something or other. And while he was in there, I remembered something weird I’d seen during my own DIY doctor stints in the mirror.

I asked him to please look at these weird little bumps I’d seen growing in my throat. I’d asked my own GP about them, and he had no idea what they were but said they looked like “healthy” tissue so not to mind them.

This specialist took one look, stepped back and asked: “When did you have your tonsils out?”

“About 30 years ago,” I replied.

“Well, what you have here is a pretty rare case of tonsillar regrowth,” he diagnosed. Tonsillar regrowth, I would learn, is a completely harmless but completely bizarre phenomenon in which one’s tonsils can make little efforts to grow back after you’ve had them out. Physicians think this only happens when the original tonsil tissue was not completely removed.

They don’t grow back all the way to full size; in fact, we’ve been calling my tonsil spots “tonsil buds” or “tonsil nubbins.”

But catch this principle: something that was natural and innate in my body was cut out (with good reason, at the time). And that thing so insistently demanded to have its rightful spot in my body that it is growing back, fresh and healthy, over three decades later.

Takeaway #1: Your body is a miracle. It is marvelous. An actual wonder. We focus so often on our aches and pains and cellulite. But ever since that day last year, I cannot stop thinking of my body as this marvelous contraption that is so self-correcting in the direction of its own well-being and healing that it will try to grow back what’s been cut out.

Takeaway #2: What is inborn in you, the innate gifts, talents, callings and destiny with which you came here, can never be totally cut out. Never. Not by failures, not by age, not by even discouragement, or doubt or fear, unless you allow that to happen. Not by a bad childhood. You might think you are too old or too traumatized or too something to do the dream that’s in your heart, but I invite you to try on the belief that these things have all been preparation.

They have honed you, burnished you and thicken your skin. They have tenderized your heart, but also strengthened it. They have helped you get clear on what you don’t want and what you do want. They have helped you become more wise. More loving. More you.

You’ve been prepared.

And now the world needs you. You feel it. I know you do, or you wouldn’t be here. People like you, people who seek out inspiration—which means to breathe in, take spirit in—they tend to be uplifters, too. Just like me.

Prompt Of the Day (POD): Tonsillar regrowth

Do you have a dream or a calling that has been dormant, or has just not been an area of focus, for any reason?

What is it?

Name it. Detail it.

What do you need to be or do or release in order to let it regrow, to breathe fresh life IN to your dreams?