Last Sunday I did something I would later regret. I tried a little bit of a friend’s GLP.
In my defense, I had heard these drugs are good for practically everything. Heart attacks and strokes. Kidney disease. Fatty liver. Sleep apnea. Heart failure. Achy knees. There is research suggesting they can quiet alcohol cravings, and scientists are now testing them for addiction, psychiatric conditions, and neurodegenerative disease. Somewhere between reading the headlines and opening my friend’s fridge, my mind filed it under “vitamin.” A little wellness shot. A treat for my organs.
Also, and I want to be honest here because this is a newsletter about consciousness, I am wearing a bodysuit for Halloween.
So.
I should tell you I did not grow up in a diet family. Nobody in my house counted calories or talked about weight. What we had instead was a code. No processed food. No hydrogenated oils. Nothing artificial, ever. My parents were farm to table before anybody had written the phrase on a chalkboard menu.
As a kid, I hated it. I was the strange girl whose metal Wonder Woman lunchbox clicked open to reveal a whole grain peanut butter sandwich and a side of dried figs, which the other kids, peeling the plastic off their Twinkies, called poop balls. I was so jealous of those Twinkies. Golden, spongy, immortal. Something worth trading for chips. Nobody would trade a fig.
As an adult, I am grateful. My parents never taught me how to diet. They taught me how to eat, and how to eat well.
Which makes it extra rich that on a Sunday evening I found myself injecting a borrowed weight loss drug into my body like it was a B12 shot at a med spa.
I thought it was a microdose. It was not a microdose.
The Great Flattening
I woke up Monday with zero desire to eat. Not “I’m being good today.” Zero. My body had simply unsubscribed from food. That lasted three entire days.
Why am I writing about this in a newsletter that is decidedly not about wellness? Because the not wanting didn’t stay in my stomach. It spread. It moved through my consciousness across every dimension at once, the way fog fills a valley without asking permission. I didn’t want food, and then I didn’t want much of anything. Not music. Not ideas. Nothing.
I felt flattened. What it did to my mind startled me far more than anything it did to my waistline.
Which raised a question. Is everyone quieting their mind with GLPs? Because quieting the mind is nothing new. Mystics have been doing it for thousands of years. When we sit still and watch the mind bounce around like a monkey loose in a banana warehouse, and we stay present with every leap, that is high alchemy. That is true witchcraft. It asks something of us. It asks for attention. And what it gives back is stillness, peace, and presence.
What I experienced on the GLP was not witchy alchemy. It was a chemically induced coma of consciousness.I felt depressed. Because I was depressed. For about 48 hours nothing really mattered, because I had lost my hunger for all things.
When states arise that aren’t agreeable or fun or joyful, our instinct is to push them away. I happen to be an expert at this. Hand me a bad feeling and I will hand you back a positive reframe in record time, gift wrapped, with a bow and a Rumi quote.
This time I could not presence my way out. No breathwork, no reframe, no gratitude list touched it. I knew I had to wait for the drug to wear off.
So I turned myself into a research lab of awareness, with my own mind as the study subject.
One word kept coming to me. Anhedonia.
It comes from the Greek an, meaning “without,” and hēdonē, meaning “pleasure.” So anhedonia is, in a sense, a painkiller for joy. Researchers now use it for more than the inability to feel pleasure. It also describes losing the wanting itself, the motivation and anticipation that pull us toward life in the first place. It sits at the heart of how depression is experienced.
I am one woman who took a dose she shouldn’t have, from a prescription that wasn’t hers, with no doctor anywhere in sight. Please don’t be me. Many show mental health actually improving for people who take them. For millions of people with diabetes, heart disease, or obesity, these drugs are real medicine. I am not here to wag a fig at anyone.
Are we living in a state of anhedonia? Are we all feeling like the world is just too much, all at once? Are we numbing our humanness, chemically and otherwise, just to get by?
And what does that numbing cost?
From inside this experience, the cost looked vast. Thoreau did this math in Walden. He is often quoted as saying the price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it, a line so commonly misquoted that the Walden Woods Project keeps it on a page of Thoreau mis-quotations. What he actually wrote is even better:
“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
A Crisis of the Broken Heart
After a few days of sitting with it, I could see anhedonia for what it is, or at least what it was in me. A crisis of the broken heart.
A heart so broken by the world, and by our own unstoppable, ferocious desire for more, more, more, that we can’t control the wanting anymore. So we coma ourselves into control. We don’t heal the appetite. We flip it off at the breaker.
By the end of those three days I was desperate to feel hungry again. Somewhere inside that longing I understood something. Hunger, in itself, is a prayer. A prayer for life itself. Our drives, our appetites, our feelings are a powerful force, and we should not be so quick to forsake them.
I Shall Not Want
On the last night of the no appetite insanity, I fell asleep listening to Lectio 365, an app I use to hear prayers from the scriptures. I found it through Rick Rubin, my guru of all things, who has been initiating me since I was wee. From the Beastie Boys to Jay-Z to vibe coding to Tetragrammaton. Rick, if you are reading this... hiiiiiiiii.
That night’s prayer was Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd.
I have always thought of it as a child’s prayer of comfort, the one you whisper under the covers when the closet door looks suspicious. Then I heard the next line and almost laughed out loud in the dark.
I shall not want.
I had been living that sentence for three days. Only not like this. The psalm’s not wanting belongs to a person who lacks nothing because she is held. Mine belonged to a person who had lost the wanting altogether. One is fullness. The other is a flatline. Same four words, opposite universes.
He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. Thou preparest a table before me. My cup runneth over.
A table. A cup.
Lying there, I felt hunger return to my body. A small, ordinary growl, and the most beautiful sound I have ever heard. I can’t even tell you how happy that made me.
Never again will I tame my hunger. I love my hunger.
My hunger is proof that my body is full of life force. Hunger to eat, to touch, to dance, to build, to connect. It is the same engine that sends me to the meditation cushion and to the dance floor and to the blank page to write to you.
We live in a world where women are taught, from about the age of a Wonder Woman lunchbox, to curb their hunger. To want less. To take up less room. To shrink to fit the bodysuit. So I want to shout out for hunger as a force of awakening. Without hunger, without our passionate human drives, we lose the very catalyst awakening needs. Stillness is beautiful, but the stillness worth having belongs to someone who could move and chooses to sit. The spiritual path was never about killing desire. It is about becoming so hungry for the real thing that nothing counterfeit will do. We have to be starving for consciousness to bring awakening all the way home in our lives.
So this Halloween, when the veil is thin and the candy bowl is full, I’ll be in my bodysuit with a full belly, and a wide open heart.
Who’s hungry?
You had no reason to try the GLP , honestly…. The meds have helped millions who do have serious health problems. Now used for perimenopausal small needles to shave a few pounds … well there you go ….