Letter to my Anorexic Daughter

“Mom,

I’m scared. I can’t gain weight. I’m too thin. Help me, please.”

— Sofia, 15 years old

Your cry reached me by email just after you started high school. During that summer, with your usual humor and radiant spirit, you kept repeating that this would finally be the one when you would slim down your mermaid legs enough to wear skinny jeans like “everyone else.”

Until one day, everything shifted.

Driven by an impossible ideal, you pushed your limits far beyond where your body could safely go. You lost sleep. You lost your joy for life. You lost your confidence, the gentle warmth of a body that wants to live. Anxiety took hold. The obsession with calories crept in. Cold settled into your bones. Tears came easily. Even life itself began to feel uncertain. A dark abyss opened beneath you.

We had to move quickly to reassure you and anchor you before that abyss swallowed you whole. You needed to feel the strength of my love wrapped around you like a lifeline.

No questions. No judgment. Only presence.

A strong medical team was put in place immediately. It was intense but necessary, to make sure you could hold on to that flicker of clarity that allowed you to send me that desperate cry for help. Breaking free from the grip of your illness was like shaking off a powerful addiction. You suffered. You endured torment in both body and mind. Everything felt dark and then suddenly you would marvel at a rainbow and cry because you wanted your life back.

Three months later, the improvements brought relief. A few pounds regained. Fewer night terrors. Your smile, faint but real, returning. We allowed ourselves to breathe again.

Until another message shattered the fragile calm:

“Mom,

I’m not as okay as I seem. I just had a panic attack trying on my jeans because I could barely close them. You can’t imagine the anxiety taking over me again. I can’t stop crying. All these dark thoughts are coming back. I don’t know what I want anymore. I’m really useless.”

No, my love. You are fighting. And the reason the darkness fights harder now is because it is losing ground. This intruder inside you is like a vampire. It survives by convincing you that you are nothing. It wants your light extinguished. It wants you invisible.

When those thoughts flood your mind, try to place them inside an imaginary box and turn up the volume of your own voice. Escape into one of your favorite songs. Music frees the spirit. Let it be your shield, your weapon, your declaration that you are still here.

Your psychologist asked me to tell our story. I resisted for a long time, because our story is both incredibly beautiful and unbearably painful.

But today I understand something I didn’t then: stories can be lifelines.

This letter exists to light a path for those who feel forgotten, defeated, invisible, humiliated and on the edge of surrender. It is also the first page of a book I am writing for you, for your sister and your brother, and for anyone who has ever believed they were too broken to begin again.

Because long before you were fighting for your life…I was fighting for mine.

Life once took everything from me. Yet it also walked beside me, step by step, when I rose again and fought.

For you. For your sister. For your brother. Never giving up.

You know me as your mother. But there was a time when I was simply a woman trying to survive.

There were three missing children, a dangerously unstable ex-husband, a brilliant man slowly losing his memories, and a mother who rose from the ashes again and again to protect her family.

This is the story of a phoenix who refuses to burn.

From the outside, for a while, life looked almost magical. An elevator ride in a Manhattan building could brighten my day when one of our rich and famous neighbors stepped in. For thirty seconds inside that New York bubble, I could escape painful memories. They saw only a smiling woman married to a wealthy entrepreneur living high above the city.

No one could imagine that just a few years earlier I had been lured to another country by a man who would try to erase me. That I had been starved, isolated, broken, and forced to give you up, my children, my flesh, my heart, my joy, in exchange for my life and a divorce. That I had spent years fighting a system that did not see me as equal, simply to hold my own children again.

Just when I was close to winning you back, you vanished abroad.

And then, when I had nothing left, a prince appeared.

Not from a fairy tale, but from the real world. A man of vision and brilliance, admired and respected, who offered protection when I had none. He promised to help me find my children. He promised safety. He promised that perhaps, after so much darkness, light could still exist.

For a time, I believed that miracle. But life is rarely that simple.

Just as hope returned, illness arrived. Just as love steadied me, it began to fade. The man who had become my shelter began to lose his memory, piece by piece.

And still, I kept rising.

Because survival is not one heroic moment. It is a decision made over and over again.

Some days survival means standing tall. Some days it means breathing. Some days it means writing a letter to your child and reminding her she is not alone, that she never was.

Like you, I have stood on the edge of despair.

Like you, I have felt invisible.

Like you, I have wondered if I would disappear.

But here is what I know now: we come from fire, but we do not stay in the ashes. We are not meant to burn quietly into ash. We are meant to rise from it.

That is why I am writing this letter to you. That is why I am telling our story. That is why I am writing the book I resisted for so long, so that one day, when you are stronger, and you will read the rest of this story, the whole story, you will understand with absolute certainty where we came from and why I never stopped believing we would find our way back.

So here we are…

You and me.

Side by side.

Writing our way toward the light.

I love you so much,

Mom