Answer: it doesn’t feel like anything. That hunger and drive simply disappears, and is replaced by as many other thoughts, activities and feelings as it takes to forget.
All of us have, regularly I think, experiences of amnesia, where we were doing one thing and find ourselves doing something else. It is a type of hypnosis.
And sometimes some part of us WANTS to forget. I coined the word Forgession some time ago to connote the process of forgetting, of forgetting what we want to forget, and forgetting that we forgot. It all disappears, from all but the innermost recesses of our psyches.
Memory is a strange thing. It endures everything, but it is sometimes hidden for a lifetime.
I will add on a related note that I think our nature is to grow, to expand. The only “growing pains” are those of growing beyond restrictions within us. As one lecture I listened to put it, we go through many pairs of increasingly large shoes before we reach adulthood, and of course spiritually this process never stops.
And often these limitations only become clear when we are on the brink of something new. They were latent, part of the landscape, assumed, until something different became possible. And the juxtaposition of the small within us, with the imagined largeness at the next stages, creates cognitive and emotional dissonance. Because you do not transition instantly from the one to the other. There is faith needed in the middle.