Annie Weisman is the creator of the Apple TV+ series Physical, which ends its first season today and has recently been renewed. In the series Rose Byrne plays a San Diego housewife who channels her bulimia and obsession with weight loss into a career as an aerobics instructor. Below, Weisman writes about how she drew on her own experience with bulimia to write the show— and what it meant to go public about her eating disorder for the very first time via television.
There is a secret society that I’m a part of, and it’s not the masons or illuminati. It has a wide range of members, in all walks of life. Though it’s mostly women, men are part of it too, although less inclined to admit to it. And who can blame them! It’s a shitty deal, to be honest. It offers very few perks, and it’s incredible costly. It can even be deadly… Okay, I am running out gas on this metaphor. Might as well come clean. I struggled for years with an eating disorder that I kept a secret from everybody in my life until well into adulthood.
Let me get one thing out of the way. I hate the term Eating Disorder. It does not match my experience at all. And it has a very sticky implication to the forces of diet and exercise industry: as if eating is the problem. If you fix your eating, you fix yourself! Sign up for our no-think meal system and never feel bad about yourself again! I’m sure even by typing these satiric words into my computer I’m inviting the ads for a hundred diet and exercise plans promising to “fix” me… (can someone tell me what mushroom “mud” water is and why I’m getting so many ads for it?) But no fix to my eating would fix me.
My experience is more like this: It’s a Thinking Disorder.
It’s more like what addicts and obsessive compulsives describe: being compelled to do a series of increasingly destructive behaviors. When I would enter a binge and purge cycle, it felt totally out of my control. It was as if I was walking down the street and someone pulled up in a car, put a blanket over my head, and pushed me into the backseat. I was going for a ride, whether I liked it or not.
I need to be honest about recovery, because I want to be honest about the expectations people have going into it. I didn’t go from rocking in sadness and shame to skipping through fields of flowers in a linen dress. I didn’t go from an early Angelina Jolie vehicle to a Dreft ad. The reality is more nuanced.
I still feel all the bad things some of the time: the doubt, fear, anxiety, and shame. But I’m no longer compelled to act on them with destructive behaviors around food. The car still pulls up next to me sometimes when I’m walking through my life. But nobody leaps out and grabs me. This time, somebody rolls down the window, and asks me if I want to get inside. I get a beat to say, you know what? I’m good.
It took a lot to get there. A combination of factors involving therapy, medication, love and hard work.
And there is a lot of grief in the recovery process. For the days and nights lost, the work not done, the relationships not nurtured, the body not cared for, the friendships untended. Admitting all of that was painful for me. And a big barrier to starting the process in the first place.
But here’s what I can say without any hesitation to anyone suffering with an ED who hasn’t come out yet: DO IT. The ED is a big fat liar when it tells you that it will define you forever if you let it out.
My method of doing so was a little unconventional.
I put it in a television show. At first, it felt therapeutic. Writing, not just about behavior I was ashamed of but the feelings I was avoiding by engaging in them. Ugly, unappealing feelings that found expression on the page. That felt good. But this wasn’t poetry, or journaling. This was going to be a TV show, which meant someone would be saying those words. And not just someone, but a fabulously famous movie star by the name of Rose Byrne.
What’s more, I’d soon find myself sitting in meetings with a prop master talking about the kind of fast food bags she’d be carrying in to a binge, and then watching a set decorator set them down at a table, and then sitting at a monitor watching Rose go through the whole harrowing process. Not once, but over and over again. I’d even find myself in an expensive sound mix studio, giving notes on the level of sound we wanted for the toilet flushing. I’m not going to lie, there were times when it was all a bit much. My set armor: jeans, hat, boots, sneakers, it all felt ripped away and raw. Sometimes I’d take a walk. Sit in my car and pretend to be on a call when I was really just hiding and trying to remember that taking deep breaths actually works.