Eating Silence: Let Feelings Speak Before Food
Three biscuits. Then five. Then I stop counting because counting makes it real, and I’m not ready for this to be real yet.
The realization hits like delayed lightning: I haven’t been eating food—I’ve been eating silence. Eating the words I should have said to my brother last week. Eating the grief I haven’t processed about my mother’s anniversary. Eating the anxiety about next month’s rent that sits in my chest like undigested stone.
When did my mouth become the graveyard where feelings go to die?
The mechanism is elegant in its simplicity: emotion arises, demands attention, threatens discomfort. Body intervenes with oldest solution—consume something, anything, to change the internal chemistry. Chewing becomes meditation, swallowing becomes relief, digestion becomes the physical processing of what the psyche refuses to address.
But here’s what took me forty years to understand: every emotion I eat instead of feeling doesn’t disappear. It just moves residence from my heart to my stomach, where it ferments into shame, indigestion, and the particular heaviness that comes from carrying unprocessed experience in your body.
“Feeling your feelings won’t kill you, but not feeling them might,” my therapist said once, back when I still believed therapy was for people weaker than myself. Now I understand she was offering archaeology lessons—how to excavate the buried emotions before they calcify into physical symptoms.
The Sufis understood this connection between consumption and avoidance. They wrote about nafs al-ammārah—the commanding soul that seeks immediate gratification over spiritual growth. They knew that every time we choose comfort over consciousness, we strengthen the part of ourselves that prefers numbness to awakening.
I think about the last time I cried—really cried, not just the eye-watering that comes from cutting onions or watching movies, but the full-body release that happens when dammed emotions finally break free. I can’t remember. This should terrify me more than it does.
Instead, I remember the last time I ate my way through difficult emotions. Yesterday. The day before. This morning, when I read news that should have made me angry but instead made me hungry for things I wasn’t actually hungry for.
The cruelest part isn’t that I eat my feelings—it’s that eating them provides just enough relief to prevent me from developing better coping mechanisms. Why learn to sit with discomfort when you can swallow it? Why develop emotional vocabulary when physical consumption offers immediate, if temporary, solution?
But emotions, I’m learning, are like water: they find their way to the surface eventually. Eat enough grief and it shows up as depression. Swallow enough anger and it emerges as chronic irritation. Consume enough anxiety and it materializes as insomnia, digestive issues, the body’s revolt against being used as an emotional storage facility.
The path back to feeling is simultaneously simple and terrifying: stop. Before reaching for food when you’re not physically hungry, pause. Ask the question that changes everything: What am I actually hungry for?
Connection? Put down the snack and call someone who matters. Understanding? Close the refrigerator and pick up a journal. Comfort? Notice that you’re seeking comfort, honor that need, then find comfort that doesn’t require digestion.
This isn’t about food restriction—it’s about emotional honesty. It’s about learning to feed feelings with what they actually need instead of distracting them with what’s immediately available.
Tonight, when the familiar urge arises to solve internal problems with external consumption, I’ll try something radical: I’ll sit still. I’ll let the feeling exist without rushing to medicate it away. I’ll practice the lost art of experiencing my own emotional weather without immediately seeking shelter.
The feelings I’ve been eating are still there, waiting patiently in my body for acknowledgment. They’re not monsters to be defeated—they’re messengers carrying information about what my life actually needs.
Maybe it’s time to stop shooting the messengers and start reading the messages.
