Mostly, walking down New York streets in spring sunshine is the cinematic, euphoric ideal of what it is to be alive. It’s the thing I looked forward to for decades. It meant to me, back then as a kid in Ireland, listening to songs about Lexington and 14th Street, freedom: an almost deranged amount of freedom.
Sometimes, though, walking down New York streets in spring sunshine is agonising in both a physical and spiritual sense. This may be so, for instance, if you have no health insurance and are very stupid. Like me. That was in February 2023. I had been in increasingly acute pain for days, but because of a stubborn ability to ignore bodily breakdown and also a reluctance to spend money on healthcare in the US when I was only visiting, I kept going until I collapsed into an urgent care centre that I luckily passed one evening as I was dragging myself with manic good cheer to another dinner, despite being barely able to walk.
After a consultation and a dash to the ER, I had a minor surgical procedure, was fixed up and back in my bed within 12 hours with the small traditional sack of US opioids I had been sent home with. I was put on a course of heavy duty antibiotics. I recovered from the original illness within weeks, but the antibiotics caused a dreadful reaction in me, a full-body depletion that meant I completely lost my appetite for approximately six months and lost a good deal of my body mass with it. For the first time in my life, I was losing weight without meaning to.
At the same time as I was losing my appetite and experiencing low-level but ceaseless gastrointestinal distress, a lot of people were beginning to pay handsomely for the very same symptoms. Ozempic was on the rise. A drug used to treat diabetes, in spring 2023 it was becoming increasingly available for weight loss and articles abounded about its new use. It was supposedly available only to people above certain weights, but already-thin rich people were finding it easy to obtain in their quest to become really, really thin. Magazine articles quoted anonymous users, but nobody anyone knew in New York would go on the record. As I continued to lose weight, girls at parties when they got drunk enough would ask me, ostensibly joking: “Wait, girl, are you on Ozempic?”, and then, if they were really drunk, would drag me into bathroom cubicles and continue: “No – wait, girl, tell me for real, are you on Ozempic?” A friend in London asked me how I did it and I took great pleasure in responding that I had been sick, actually.
In a way, this was the dream – this had always been my dream. To be thin without effort. It had never been the case that I didn’t know how to be thin. I knew very well that I could be thin, from my years of youthful, life-destroying eating restriction. I was 15 and ate a bagel a day and lost a quarter of my body. It was only that I had learned eventually it wasn’t worth the incessant mental gymnastics it required of me, nor the operatic self-recrimination. I found I didn’t have the energy to do it as well as all the other arduous logistics of staying alive. So I relearned eating and got it wrong and loved it and hated it, going up and down 23kg (50lbs) in a small number of years, unable to grasp what was natural to want, what was greed and what was normal desire, what was an expression of joyful libido and what was a sign of depression. I ate too much when I was happy and I ate too much when I was sad. I never stopped eating as a sign of sorrow. No matter what happened, I always wanted to eat.
So, to not want at all, and therefore to not have to quiet your food brain all day. Even after I wasn’t sick any more, I didn’t regain an appetite for ages. What could be better? I hated it, though. I hated losing my appetite. I hated the oddly flat, video game landscape that a lack of appetite meant. It made me numb and indifferent to the world at large. Some on Ozempic for weight loss say it makes them relieved to stop thinking about food all the time. I found that without the daily pleasure and obligation of food at play, the world yawned out before me with a threatening formlessness. It’s a threat that always looms, is always beneath everything, but I knew now that in my before-life, the one with appetite, the interludes of nourishment and pleasure had buoyed me when that threat became overwhelming.
I knew, too, that food meant love to me in a very direct way. My friend John took me out to a fancy atmospheric restaurant and I dressed up and then could barely have any of my ludicrously expensive steak. I felt defeated and wasteful and insignificant, unable to speak to him or care for him as I would usually. My friend Emmie hosted a dinner party on a rooftop and all I could bear to eat was some lettuce while everyone else was in the full throes of an actual meal. The view from the roof stretched out around us, mocking, obscenely perfect.
Such a strange concept, to strip yourself of want. What is a human being without desire? I found that without it I was very little at all. It’s not good to live entirely in thrall to your desires and whims. I know this as well as any addictive person does. But nor is it necessarily good to chemically cauter yourself of desire. My desires are me, they are what I’m made up of. I gained the weight back, which was both frightening and a relief. I looked better in photographs when I was sick. I got messages from dozens of people saying how well I looked when I was unable to eat. But I looked like someone I’m not, which is a person without appetite, a person who needs nothing. Last weekend, I sat in bed next to my boyfriend, laughing, as I ate an enormous bunch of green grapes and a cookie I had warmed in the oven, and we talked while I ate, and licked my fingers and inadvertently made a disgusting noise of pleasure. And I got paid the nicest compliment from my boyfriend, who said, admiringly: “Nobody knows how to enjoy themselves like you.”
Megan Nolan’s most recent novel, Ordinary Human Failings (Viking), is out now
