---
title: Hidden Feelings
description: what you feel beneath your eating disorder symptoms.
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date: 2012-08-14T14:28:02Z
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What are your feelings - the ones your eating disorder numbs out or buries with obsessive thinking and compulsive eating? How on earth is it possible to answer such a question without bringing up feelings you can't bear?

I'm at a [writers' conference](http://www.unm.edu/~taosconf/) in Taos, NM, cultivating my creativity and opening mysef to what my psyche wants to write next. At this stage I'm not sure if it's a novel, a self help book, a series of essays or a probe into something that has long interested me. This is quite a range. It's extensive because I'm not going to decide what comes next. I'm going to discover what comes next.

This process got me to thinking about you and how you might discover what's within you, layers beneath the life determined by your eating disorder.

I suggest you expore the stories within myths of different cultures and times. They are fun to read. They are non threatening. They are more acceptable to your unconscious than any kind of rules or regulations and certainly more acceptable than any diet program.

Karen Armstrong, author of *[A Short History of Myth](http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Myth-Myths/dp/184195800X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278891824&sr=8-1)*, writes, "Myths are uiversal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives -- they explore our desires, our fears, our longings, and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human."

If you have an eating disorder, you dull your own humanity and need to be reminded of "what it means to be human." I recommend that you read her book and also books by:

Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, AS Byatt, David Grossman, Milton Hatoum, Vicor Pelevin, Donna Tartt, Su Tong and Jeanette Winterson.

Read them at your leisure. Journal on passages meaningful to you. Open your mind and heart to what you can discover. And by all means, enjoy yourself.

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