Sarah’s Story
For years, I shared in 12-step meetings that my experience of addiction was one of deafening mind-noise that tortured me when I wasn’t able to quiet it. It’s probably why meditation became one of my most transformative tools of recovery. When I started recovery, in 2006, I was prescribed Suboxone, which at the time, was pretty early-days of the medication being offered to ordinary junkies like me. I was desperate to find a life that seemed worth living, and while I was skeptical that a little orange, chalky pill was going to aid in that pursuit, I was willing to do just about anything someone told me might help. (Reiki and yoga and acupuncture and hypnosis and step-work and therapy and running and reading and breaking up with people I loved all made the list of desperate to-do’s.) I followed directions.
For the next two years, I dutifully took my Suboxone and my life utterly transformed. I achieved a laundry list of previously impossible feats — life long goals that are legitimately very difficult for anyone to accomplish (like publishing a novel, starting a business, eventually earning motherfucking tenure), let alone a person who had previously spent most of their time committing credit card fraud and hoping to die.
All of that happened because the brutal, screeching volume of my mind’s obsession had subsided and when it was quiet, I was able to hear all of the urgent, interesting, complex, hilarious ideas I hadn’t been able to hear over the all-encompassing racket of dope. Suboxone is a miracle drug, I told anyone who was open-minded enough to listen and not kick me out of the clean-clique that insisted I had traded one drug for another. And so what if it had, I thought? The results of my life were all I cared about. And I’d built a life, day after day, that I loved.
I tapered down, and lived the next fifteen or so years doing normal-life: good stuff, bad stuff, boring stuff, exhilarating stuff. There was only one problem. The eating disorder I’d had since I was 11 was still following me around, rearing its head when I went through periods of extreme stress or grief. I tried to apply all the recovery tools I’d learned to tame it, and they worked to varying degrees, but I was still dragging around my first, worst dance partner.
Enter GLP-1s. A few years ago, the Instagram accounts and news features started. I scrolled for hours, listening to ordinary women who breathlessly talked about what was happening in their grainy homemade videos. They all used a phrase I’d never heard before: food noise. And all of them reported, poof, it had vanished. They ate when they were hungry and stopped when they were full. They weren’t obsessed with what they’d just eaten, when they were eating next, desperately calculating a never-ending ledger of food-math.
I immediately told a friend from recovery that GLP-1s were “food Suboxone.” It was obvious to me from the very early days of listening to these women that they were experiencing the same exhilarating peace I’d found in 2006. And because I trusted myself after almost two decades of painstaking responsibility to my daily care and maintenance, I listened to my instinct that these medications would turn down the volume on the food noise for me too. I’ve been taking a GLP-1 for two years now, and I was right. They’ve done exactly what Suboxone did for me twenty years ago. The distracting noise of my food neurosis is muted. And in its place, it turns out, there are still lots of new, tender, important whispers I’ve finally been able to hear.