Joanne McNally has revealed that she suffered from an eating disorder, and personified it as Louis Walsh.
In a piece written for the Irish Times, the Republic of Telly star told how, at the time, her therapist told her to imagine her eating disorder as a person, and her answer was pretty shocking.
“In your chair now you’re Joanne, but when you move to this chair, you are your eating disorder. We call it the ED voice. How does it rationalise your bulimia to you? I want to see you guys interact, okay?” Joanne’s therapist told her.
“I squint at the chair and think about what this physical manifestation of an eating disorder – or my ED – would look like. It’s clearly male. No woman in her right mind would allow me to swan around St Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre with vomit in my hair, shoplifting cake and gorging on the restaurant leftovers of total strangers,” Joanne wrote.
Struggle: Joanne revealed that she struggled with an eating disorder | VIPIRELAND.COM
“Is he a goblin-style character, hissing orders and coughing up slime balls? No, he doesn’t feel like that. He’s part of me, an erratic one, but a part nonetheless. He feels small, like a Borrower. He’s a bit twee, with chubby cheeks and a mild speech impediment. ED is beginning to take shape in the chair in front of me. He’s smiling at me. He appears innocent enough but he has a glint in his eye. Truth be told, he’s an absolute ringer for Louis Walsh.
“I’ll be honest with you, Bríd, he’s an absolute ringer for Louis Walsh,” she told her therapist, and she replied, “Gooooood! Goooood, talk to Louis.”
“I lock eyes with Louis and begin. ‘Okay, Louis, listen up. I’m done with the purging, yeah? It’s ruining my body and stuff, so let’s stop now’.”
Then, Joanne took on the persona of ‘Louis’, and indicated that she’d cut the bulimia – and stick to eating “lettuce and boiled vegetables” – which concerned her therapist.
“There appears to be zero hostility towards Louis,” Bríd said. “It’s very obvious who wears the trousers here, and it’s not you. You realise he’s simply suggesting you replace bulimia with anorexia? You’re replacing one eating disorder with another.”
Joanne personified her eating disorder as Louis Walsh | VIPIRELAND.COM
After being asked why she wants to be so thin, Joanne answered with the ideas of success, work, men – and said “it is the most important thing in the world to me”.
“I know I have to be thin and I know it is the most important thing in the world to me. And yes, this means I have to miss out on certain things, such as birthday parties and weddings and my best mate’s cancer remission party, because I am off getting sick. It isn’t ideal, but sacrifices have to be made,” Joanne wrote.
“I don’t know what my ideal weight is, because that keeps changing, but that’s only because I am pushing myself to be the best version of myself I can possibly be. I want people to see what I can achieve. I want praise for all my hard work. I want compliments. I want recognition.
“From whom? Your friends? Do your friends compliment you now?” Bríd said to Joanne.
“I have to be honest with Bríd. No, they don’t, not any more. In the beginning the compliments come thick and fast. But as time goes on, they are replaced with a heavy silence, which sends me into a panic. I’m clearly plateauing. I’m just like I always was: a bitta chunk vacuum-packed into her pleather pants, wobbling from one party to another.
Honesty: Joanne told her therapist why she wanted to be thin | TWITTER
“Then the compliments come back, but this time they are delivered differently. The tone is serious, the eye contact more intense,” she wrote.
After Joanne’s therapist asked her if she’s working at the moment, and she replied “no”, and asked her if she’s in a relationship at the moment, and she replied “no” – her therapist finally got through to her, and caused the death of the ‘Louis’ ED voice.
“So really, Joanne, when you think about it. The things that you think Louis is giving you, he’s actually taking away from you,”
Joanne told her story as part of her new one-woman show | TWITTER
“But something in me knows it is time to let him die. I can’t defend him any more. And yet, I honestly don’t know how I am supposed to live without him. Louis takes one last breath, his little arms stretched out to me.
“I can hear the final gurgles of his death rattle, and I burst out crying. I am absolutely terrified,” she added.
Joanne shared this story as part of her new one-woman show entitled Bite Me – which tells the story of “that time she lost her mind for ages”.
Read the full story on The Irish Times here.
