“I’ve always been almost sure suicide might be the way I would die. I don’t think that, anymore.”

I am constantly amazed, by you lot, and your incredible stories. The ones you DM me about, tentatively, because maybe I’d want to hear more? Because you feel like you’d like to share them, though you don’t quite know why, but - maybe it’ll help someone else?

Staggered, moved, stunned, so grateful you’d share them with me, and allow me to share them again, here, with everyone else.

The things you tell me.

The experiences and traumas and pain; the resilience and humour, the second chances!

I’m also constantly, and repeatedly staggered (amazed, moved, stunned) by the compassion and kindness, with which the rest of you respond.

It is quite gorgeous. It really is.

This latest is as breathtaking, as any of the others.

C contacted me a couple of weeks ago, around the time I published L’s story about her marriage, her body, her GLP-1 use.

C’s message read:

“Hi Polly - I have read all of your accounts of GLP use with interest . I have BPD - bipolar 1, actually. I started to use Mounjaro over a year ago. I hated everything about myself- but particularly my weight - which was the cause of obsessive and derogatory thoughts since - well - I actually cannot remember a time when it wasn’t the background noise of my life. I had your classic eating disorders throughout my teens and twenties - but after having my children in my early 30s, I could never, ever get to a weight I felt happy in - despite my best efforts (trainers, diets - you name it).
Mounjaro freed me from having to think about my weight all day, every day, every bloody minute. But as I kept taking it, I noticed something else…”

C went on to describe an extraordinary… Oh. To call it a “side effect” of her experience of the drug seems a bit silly, really. Because it’s more like an “utterly unprecedented, unexpected main event”. A change so life altering, so transformative, so important:
“I cannot tell you how much easier my life is, now,” C wrote.

Would you like to talk to me about it in depth, I ask. C agrees, not least because she wants to know if anyone else, has experienced anything like it.

She’s a Brit, who relocated to Australia several decades ago; we arrange a Zoom call which works around both our time zones.

Tell me why you messaged me at all? I ask, when she pops up on my lap top screen, smiley, quick witted, charming, pulled together.

“I think you’re presenting interesting and nuanced perspectives from people who are on GLP-1s. I think it’s so easy to see them as… Not demonised exactly, but certainly, used as a very lazy punchline. Someone who doesn’t want to make the effort, ‘she’s on the jab, oh, look at her, vain and silly,’ et cetera. And because people are so focused on the weight loss - they’re not looking at the bigger picture. The bigger picture is, I think, going to be quite profound. I think the losing weight part of it - which is really powerful. Don’t get me wrong; that’s why I began taking one - but it’s almost become, like, the least impressive part of it - if that makes sense?”

It absolutely does, I say. And I absolutely agree. We’re watching a drug transform us, in multiple ways, all at once.

Right.

Your story, please, C.

“OK. So. I had a really good upbringing. I’m adopted, but that was never a feature of my self-loathing, which I’ll get to. It’s more that [the adoption] makes it harder to trace my medical history. I was sexually assaulted when I was seven, and that is obviously very traumatic…”
I would say so. I’m so sorry.

“And I think there is an element of that which changes your relationship with yourself, and which changes your relationship with the outside world. You are constantly projecting, I think, what you think people want from you.”

C didn’t report the sexual assault. “Didn’t even kind of come clean about it, til I was much older. It was the usual abuser’s pattern of: told me there was something wrong with me. That the ‘game’ that we played, if it hurt me, that meant that I was evil. And if anyone found out, they wouldn’t be able to love me. So, you know, you internalise that hugely. I mean, I think bipolar is a genetic condition. I do. But I think the trauma [of the assault], and, holding on to that, compartmentalizing, what I believed at that moment, and how I thought other people should envisage me… That probably didn’t help. It probably hastened things.”

The abuse occurred over what C describes as a “short “period of time.
“Completely fucking awful, but you just kind of have to move on, don’t you?”

Her bipolar kicked in, when she reached teenage. She recognised the: “periods of depression,” she was experiencing, but not: “my periods of mania. Just thought, that was either me coping, or my anxiety.” This meant she wasn’t diagnosed with bipolar “until I was 24. I’m 55 now.” And the diagnosis only happened then, because a doctor happened to see her, while she was manic. “Normally, I’d present when I was depressed, and they’d go, ‘oh, depressed, da-da-da…’ but this time, they were like: ‘OH!’”

What does her mania look like?

“I become hugely anxious. Like, at first, it’s almost like you’ve had a few drinks and you’re the life and soul of the party. You are more energetic. You don’t need much sleep. You feel like you’re tackling lots of things. You’re juggling!”
So competent? So on top of it all?
“Yes! You are absolutely not. So incompetent, actually. Then it becomes a sort of a spiral. For me, my mania is often a feeling of being hunted. It’s hugely anxious.” She’d described it as “acute” in her initial message, as a sort of multi-faceted, and completely overwhelming sense of self-loathing.

“I’m hugely afraid,” she tells me. “And I hallucinate smells, which is quite unusual.”
Wow. Like what? Fire?

“Fire is one of them. You smell things burning, because you’re constantly on alert. ‘Wait, I have to go check everything. Something’s burning’, - and the other smell is decay.”
Decay?

“Yes. So my ex husband died, a little over a year ago, and I found him. Oh, this is all going to sound like awful trauma…”

C smiles as she says all this. She’s incredibly good humoured. She reminds me of every one of the women I’ve spoken to so far for these pieces, all so entirely without self-pity, all rolling-with-the-punches, all “it was a long time ago…” or “sh*t happens…” as they describe crappy, awful, hope-sapping, exhausting, traumatic experiences. There was a point where I wondered why the women who take GLP-1s often seem to also go through so much unrelated trauma. Did them hating their bodies, equate to them enduring more foul behaviours in others, somehow? But ultimately, I think, we do just all go through a lot of trauma, don’t we – especially by the time we reach our forties, fifties, sixties, AKA GLP-1s key demographic.

Anyway.

“It was just one of those things,” C tells me, of finding the body of her ex. “He had been an alcoholic, very unwell, for a few years. We were constantly checking on him, trying to make sure he was okay, and - we couldn’t get hold of him. And walking into his flat, there is this awful moment of recognition. ‘I know what this smell is!’”

It was the same smell C had been hallucinating for years while manic. “Basically - dead flesh. ‘That’s what it is! That’s why it makes me so agitated.’”

When she was hallucinating these smells, C had always needed someone else: “someone external, like one of my children, to say: ‘This smell isn’t real’. Because it is so vivid, the smell. It’s visceral.”

Is it the worst part of the bipolar?

“No. That’s the anxiety, the fear everything is going to come crashing down. That you’re going to be uncovered. That you’re the worst person in the world and everyone’s going to find out.”

Now, I know. We all dance with our self-loathing, from time to time. Maybe more frequently than that. We all get a little fixated on how unacceptable one or other part of us is. Physically, emotionally, personality wise…

But what C describes, is of another order entirely. I have a dear friend with bipolar. Watching her go through those same periods of self-loathing and self-doubt is truly horrendous. She becomes imprisoned by them, immobilised by them. Nothing I say helps. I want to shake her and scream WHY CAN’T YOU SEE HOW WONDERFUL YOU ARE?, but I know it wouldn’t help. It’s devastating to watch - and I can’t imagine what it’s like, to live through.

C likens it to the experience of extreme food noise, the deafening, unending, clamour of that, only… It’s for everything. Every part of her.“You are too loud, not funny, no one likes you, people pity you, they tolerate you. All day, every day - along with the fat/ugly/disgusting thoughts.”

“And you can’t grip onto… Like, if I could grip onto why it is I think I’m such a bad person, I could perhaps resolve it, talk myself through it. But it’s like trying to catch things that are constantly one step away from you. It becomes a whirlwind.”

Before her diagnosis, C experienced these episodes every six to eight months. She developed eating disorders, as a response. “I just wouldn’t eat. It was a way of controlling some of this emotion and some of this anxiety, this self-loathing. Also, when you don’t eat very much, your body and brain don’t put up much of a fight.”
Sounds like you didn’t have much fun as a kid?
“Of course I had fun! My life has not always been miserable. Obviously these periods, they’re significant, and they have an impact - but they haven’t been my whole life at all. I’ve always had really good female friends, always had people that I felt I can be quite honest with, about what’s happening to me. I’ve never felt I’ve had to keep it a secret, or that I should be ashamed of it. I feel like, you know: better to be open because there will be periods, where I’m going to be maybe a bit incomprehensible, and knowing why, is important. So, you flag that up.”

What was C’s relationship with her body like, through this time?

“I was very slim - until I was, 26, 27.”
And how did you feel about that slimness? Given it was all tied in with eating disorders, which were tied in with the bipolar…

“Oh, I coveted slimness! Yeah, I mean, I’m not going to go down the body positivity route, much as I admire younger women for doing that. Oh, I loved it. Loved being thin - that was one of the good things. I didn’t think I was attractive. I don’t know if I ever will really sit with that, think: ‘Yeah - I look okay.’ But being thin was one of the things that made that acceptable for me. ‘At least I was thin!’”

Then, came the bipolar diagnosis. Did that make things easier? Harder?

“I went through the usual path of people who are newly diagnosed, which is, you try something [medication], it either doesn’t immediately work, or when it does work, you’re like, ‘Well, that’s fine! I don’t need to take this anymore. I think we’ve solved everything… Oh, hang on, wait. I haven’t solved it. Let’s go back. Let’s start again’ There were lots of periods of that.”

This was, C says, complicated by her being a twenty something party animal. “I didn’t really take the medication side of it seriously, not til after my children. I was young, a bit of a div. Partying, doing all the things young people do. I probably had enough drugs in my system, quite frankly. I don’t know that I needed to add ones from a doctor to the mix. So they weren’t being given the fair shot.”

In her late 20s, C moved from the UK to Australia. She met the man who would be her husband, the father of her children - and eventually, the ex whose body she found - in her very first month in the country.

This, then, was when she started putting weight on. “Giving up the habits of my 20s, the parties and the party drugs. Kind of settling down. Life was calm. And anybody who’s had eating disorders, or problems with food knows, when you eventually try and be normal, become healthy, your body’s kind of like: ‘brilliant! Bring those calories on. I’m going to protect you, like you’re a mid-European peasant on the run from the snow! ‘And I just kept putting on weight.”

If life was calmer, C’s bipolar was: “all over the place. Still very much a feature of my life, but I think it’s something that …I’m not saying I leaned into it, but maybe, I just felt it more? I didn’t run from it as much? I wasn’t using alcohol as much to mask it. I wasn’t using [recreational] drugs to hide from its impact.”

C and her husband “had two children, relatively quickly.” C’s first child was born a year and a half after she met her husband, after which: “we got married, then we had the second baby. Just before the wedding, I lost a lot of weight, but through severe denial and just horrible, uncomfortable exercise routines, obsessive, again. And I thought, ‘I don’t want to go down this obsessive path again.’”
If motherhood made her take her medication more seriously for the first time, it also made her experience of bipolar more intense. “You’re so exhausted in those first years, you don’t have much defence against normal stresses and strains. You’re just surviving really, and not because you’re unhappy, not because it’s awful, but because your body and mind go into survival mode.”

It was at this point that C, by now, in her early thirties, started managing her condition with Xanax, in addition to: “an antipsychotic, and sodium valproate [a mood stabiliser.]” She thinks she became over reliant on the sedative, over time; she’d give it up entirely, eventually.

If those drugs helped manage the bipolar - they also: “Put a lot of weight on a woman’s body. A lot. That’s one of the side effects. An enormous amount of weight.”
Which left C, she said: “With that choice of staying sane – ish – and losing weight.”

I’m guessing that was not as easy a choice as we’d all like to think it is?

“No, no, no, no. Sometimes – really hard.”
C was, she says, desperate to lose the weight, “seriously trying, veering into that eating disorder realm again.” But even then, “I never went back down to a weight I was comfortable with.”

65 kilos is where she longed to be, she said – a little over 10 stone – “but I got to my heaviest, 97kg, and I stopped weighing myself.”

The weight made her miserable. It was the first thing she thought about in the morning, and the last thing at night.

“You really hate looking at yourself. Someone with a camera, it’s like: ‘oh no, where can I hide? What can I hide?’ Just full self-hatred. And, you know, I have friends of all shapes and sizes who I consider beautiful. This wasn’t about not thinking a bigger body is beautiful. It’s just that - I cannot live in one, and be happy. I could not do it. I could say I was okay with it, but… you become either the funny one, or the smart one. You do things to compensate for what you think is just existing in your larger body. It was a source of huge distress to me, and unhappiness.”

The bipolar, cruelly, would still flare up from time to time, even as the drugs that somewhat controlled it made C’s body unacceptable to her.

Despite all this pretty unimaginable load - C was - is - very successful, professionally, ambitious, and driven.

“I’ve always had high functioning jobs,” she tells me.

How does that work with the bipolar, I ask. Can she still work through the mania?

“Yes. I wouldn’t sleep for two or three days. I would be hugely anxious. Just performing, really. I was lecturing and tutoring at a university, and it would be: from the minute I was in public, to the minute I could get to my car… It was a sheer act of will to perform what was required.”
Her employers, at this time, didn’t know what was happening.

“No.”

How about everyone else? Friends and family?

“Yeah. Or, they could definitely tell.”

“There’d be times,” C goes on “when I would use alcohol, because you just need to contain yourselves, for those periods. If I was home for 14 hours before I had to see other people again, and perform [work] again, I needed to be asleep as quickly and as efficiently as I could. Okay. Deal with yourself. Yeah. Deal with the children. Be back at work, able to function and perform for another day.”
So - you’d drink yourself to sleep?

“Yes. “

What would you drink?

“Wine.”
How much? A bottle?

“Yeah. Take whatever; take the Xanax, have a bottle of wine. That’s it. I could get to sleep. Yeah.”

After the paywall, C’s bipolar continues, she breaks up with her husband… Then, she stumbles entirely by accident, over a pure miracle, and everything changes.