Award-Winning Short-Form YouTube Series ‘Girl at a Bar’ Depicts Challenges of Living with Chronic Lyme

Bay Area  Lyme Spotlights Series

“I hope people with Lyme can see themselves on screen and they resonate with it.” 

– Tracy Mulholland 

We sat down with Tracy Mulholland, actress, writer, producer, and Lyme patient, who wrote, produced, and stars in the award-winning short-form series Girl at a Bar, made possible by a grant from Bay Area Lyme Foundation. The short-form series, now available on YouTube, aims to provide an entertaining, accessible narrative to raise awareness about Lyme. Tracy hopes it will resonate with those living with chronic conditions and spark more conversations and content about these experiences. We discuss Tracy’s personal story as the inspiration behind the show and how the series explores challenges relevant not only to people navigating chronic illness but also to life in general. Conversation topics include:

• How the show is inspired by the creator’s own experiences with Lyme disease, including the social isolation and impacts on relationships that can occur during chronic illness. 
• An exploration around themes of identity, vulnerability, and empathy, drawing parallels to other chronic and invisible illnesses beyond Lyme. 
• In addition to the short-form series, Tracy is launching a related spin-off podcast series where others are challenged to push their comfort zones.
• Each episode aims to humanize the Lyme experience, foster greater understanding, and inspire more diverse storytelling about chronic illnesses in media and entertainment.

Bay Area Lyme: What was the original impetus for Girl at a Bar?

Tracy Mulholland: The series is inspired by my life and is a work of fiction inspired by true events. I wanted to write a story where the lead character has Lyme but is accessible and entertaining, that’s engaging to watch but also provides insight into and education about what it’s like to live with chronic illness.

Bay Area Lyme: Why did you call it Girl at a Bar?

Tracy Mulholland: Before I got Lyme, I challenged myself to go out once a week, by myself, to a new bar, for one year. The rule was that I had to stay for 90 minutes, not look at my phone, and I could have one drink or not drink. It was to push me out of my comfort zone and force me to socialize. I started a blog about my adventures. I think I went to 62 bars in one year! But the following year, I got sick from Lyme and that changed absolutely everything. 

“I wanted to write a story where the lead character has Lyme but is accessible and entertaining, that’s engaging to watch but also provides insight into and education about what it’s like to live with chronic illness.”

Bay Area Lyme: How much of the series was based on your experiences?

Tracy Mulholland: When I got Lyme I was forced to stay inside on the couch. It was about four or five years before I could engage socially again and be in unpredictable environments—for example where I didn’t know if I would be able to eat the food or what time I would get home. When I started getting better, I wanted to regain my identity as a person who went through being disabled. So, I decided to explore that by resurrecting the system I had used before: going out to bars alone, but this time it was different. When putting it on screen, I thought it was an interesting and powerful way to bring Lyme into a storyline and generate empathy and understanding for people with Lyme and other invisible illnesses. 

Bay Area Lyme: You play Gabby, the lead character in the series. In one scene, Gabby runs into a friend who ghosted her after she was diagnosed with Lyme. Is that something you experienced?

Tracy Mulholland: People let me know how much that scene resonated with them at film festival screenings. One person cried, recounting friends who had dropped off. I think it is very common. It is shocking at the time because you expect people you rely on to be there through thick and thin. When that doesn’t prove to be the case, it’s very hard. In the series, Gabby has not processed her anger surrounding it, and we see her knee-jerk reaction. I’ve had people come back into my life five or 10 years later during my Lyme journey, and some not. But I have also been extremely lucky to have friends and family who I could not have gotten through this without. 

“You expect people you rely on to be there through thick and thin. When that doesn’t prove to be the case, it’s very hard.” 

Bay Area Lyme: The series is about so much more than chronic Lyme. You also shine a light on big, relatable life topics in each episode. Can you talk about this?

Tracy Mulholland: Yes, there are underpinnings in the series that explore big questions like: What is the point of a relationship? How do you measure life’s outcomes? How does chronic illness impact family dynamics? What does it do to your ability to be independent? There’s an exploration of empathy—I think it can be very hard to know how to respond to people with Lyme and other chronic/invisible illnesses because it’s not comfortable or taught enough. People fall back on trite responses like, “This happened for a reason,” or “But you look fine!” There is always a reaction to sharing this vulnerable thing that is not well understood and I find that that’s a universal theme—which was one of the reasons why I wrote the series, to examine these experiences. 

Bay Area Lyme: Finances are a challenge for your character in the series. Can you talk about this aspect of the show?

Tracy Mulholland: That was definitely something that I was conscious of because a lot of people are spending so much money for Lyme treatment, myself included. Gabby cannot live independently, so she lives in her sister’s garage. She is in debt from loss of work and treatment not covered by insurance. Paying for a drink at a bar a couple of times a month is not in the budget, but it’s Gabby’s ticket to the outside world in the series. 

Bay Area Lyme: In the series, there are characters with invisible illnesses other than Lyme disease. Why did you decide to have these additional characters?

Tracy Mulholland: It was important to me to include characters who had an alternative chronic illness lens. There is a character who has Complex Regional Pain Syndrome and another character with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. They both look completely normal, of course, and that’s the point. In real life, long Covid has brought a more general understanding of chronic conditions. I wanted to show the crossover of tools and the skills that help people with invisible illnesses manage their energy, medication, therapy, and supplements, to show their vulnerability and to share their daily experiences. 

“I wanted to show the crossover of tools and the skills that help people with invisible illnesses manage their energy, medication, therapy, and supplements, to show their vulnerability and to share their daily experiences.”

Bay Area Lyme: Can you talk about your two years of misdiagnosis? 

Tracy Mulholland: Before I got sick, I had little awareness of chronic illness. When it first happened to me in 2011, it was so scary. I had two years where I was misdiagnosed, and within that time, I didn’t reach out to any community because I didn’t know what I had. I was very isolated for the first five years, even after my Lyme diagnosis because I was fearful of sharing what was going on for the sake of my career. I went to about 50 doctors in those first two years. I had a Lyme panel right away but it was a Western blot, and it came out negative. One of my biggest issues was excruciating pain in my forearms that rendered me unable to comb my hair or turn a doorknob. I even had several surgeries on my arms to no avail. 

Bay Area Lyme: How did you eventually get diagnosed? 

Tracy Mulholland: It was recommended that I do a CD57 test, and I was put in touch with a doctor who was experienced in treating Lyme here in LA. I got a diagnosis before we even ran the IGeneX test. When the IGeneX test came back, it turned out that I had Lyme, Babesia, and Bartonella. I also had Epstein Barr Virus and Mycoplasma pneumoniae antibodies elevated as well, so we attacked it in many ways.

Bay Area Lyme: Can we talk about your relationship with Bay Area Lyme Foundation and explain how we came to give you a grant for the series?

Tracy Mulholland: I had made a short film called Grace Note. At the end of it, there are facts about Lyme. I wanted to make sure these were correct. I reached out to a few Lyme organizations and Wendy Adams (Bay Area Lyme’s Research Grant Director) got back to me right away. We had a great conversation, and she verified that everything that I had written was correct. That started the relationship back in 2015. 

When I was thinking about the Girl at a Bar idea, I wanted it to be about Lyme. I approached Linda Giampa (Bay Area Lyme’s Executive Director) at the end of 2019 to float the project. When we decided to move forward it was right when the pandemic started, so we paused a little bit and then made the series in the fall of 2022.  It’s been amazing to have both Laure Woods (Bay Area Lyme’s co-founder) and Linda’s support throughout the whole process, and a joy and an honor to have done it. I’m so grateful to Bay Area Lyme and to my other executive producers, Alex Gayner and Liesl Wilke.

Bay Area Lyme: What’s your hope for the series? 

Tracy Mulholland: First and foremost, I hope people with Lyme can see themselves on screen and they resonate with it. I also hope that Girl at a Bar opens up the door for more content about people with Lyme and Lyme experiences and chronic invisible illness stories that are told in different ways. I hope this inspires others to tell their own stories. So it’s for us, for Lyme people, but also very much for raising awareness outside of our community.

Having chronic illnesses on screen and portrayed more by the entertainment industry would be amazing. I hope that scripted content and content in general can bolster that. I strongly believe that in addition to the research, having things out there in the vernacular is very important. Hopefully, this series will help raise awareness about Lyme and underline Bay Area Lyme’s mission to make Lyme disease easy to diagnose and simple to cure.

Bay Area Lyme: What’s next?

Tracy Mulholland: I am launching a podcast that’s an offshoot of the series. I’ve started interviewing people from the cast of Girl at a Bar, friends, and people within my network who I tasked with going out for a night alone, just like Gabby. Just like my original ‘rules’ they are not allowed to look at their phones and they have to spend 90 minutes at a bar. They don’t have to drink if they don’t want to. And then we get together and we debrief and discuss why they accepted the challenge—I wasn’t requiring anybody to do this, but a bunch of them jumped on it and had some really interesting takeaways! Did they want to go to meet new friends? Did they want to get out of the house because they have young children? What did they learn about themselves and how can they get out of their comfort zone in another way in their life? The goal is for it to be an exercise in pushing yourself a little bit. So that will also be on the YouTube channel, and I’m going to post the first couple of podcast episodes when I release the series. And then it will be ongoing.

Bay Area Lyme: Thank you for visiting with us Tracy, and all the best with your upcoming projects!

Tracy Mulholland: Thank you!