Dear younger Erin,
Recently I saw a picture of you that shocked me. It was the Class of 2013 year group photo. You were 17 and desperately ill. And you look it.
You look absent and unimaginably sad, staring downward away from the camera. Pale and haunting. It’s almost comical how tragic it looks – I laughed about it, of course. But the truth is heavier than that.
I remember that day, one of the few I do from that year. You came off medical leave (essentially bed rest for your fragile physical state due to anorexia) just for photo day. People asked you why you were sick and you didn’t know what to say. Didn’t have a lie prepared yet. Later, your therapist told you to say you had a heart problem which, she said, wasn’t really a lie given how damaged your body was. You were anxious and exhausted.
I don’t remember many specifics from the haze of that year and the years that followed. But I remember how awful you felt about yourself. And still I was taken aback to see that so clearly reflected in a photo. Though you were physically unwell, it was the mental state that was so clear. All the things you thought (and mostly) were unseeable, now so blatantly obvious.
A few weeks after seeing that photo, I saw some more photos of you, even younger. You were 10, 12, 15. In these photos, you were swimming, you were in the backyard, getting lifted out of a boat. You were smiling. Happy and joyful in those short moments.
At this point, you weren’t “sick” like you would be later, but you were on your way. Sick in a different, quieter way. I remember, even then, how you felt. Anxious, sad, alone, insecure. Broken in some unfixable unrelatable way.
I could see, in those photos, that you were just a kid. And I was hurting, thinking about how much you hated how you looked and who you were. You were young and gangly and so naive and filled with a hate so mature it’s survived until today.
I’m sorry you felt that. I’m sorry it went on so much longer than you had the capacity to imagine.
Thank you for staying alive. For fighting. For doing whatever ugly, necessary thing it took to survive. For still doing it now, even though it is misguided sometimes. Even when it’s not needed, I am still grateful for the fight in you. That relentless, ugly hope. It has kept us alive.
I owe it all to you.
❤️🥹