My parents are high school sweethearts. The other morning, my dad accidentally sent me a text meant to go to my mom, and it looked like a text a teenager girl would get all giddy about. It said I love you and to have a great day. Not one heart emoji, but two.

 

What do you do if you grow up in the picture-perfect family? They give you cabinets full of food, phones at an earlier age than you need them, and a Christmas tree full of presents. If you need money to go out with friends, they give it to you, and if you win an award at school, they praise you.

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They’ve done so much for me and my siblings, but why is it they can do all of that but not have my back when, halfway through high school, I was going through a mental health crisis?

 

It sucks because if you’re me, you can’t get mad at them or tell them they’re being bad parents. They’re trying. They think fixing you is them doing the right thing. In real life, not everyone is good at everything, and I think they’re a good example of that.

 

The first time I starved myself, I didn’t tell my parents. The second time, I didn’t tell them. And so on. They didn’t find out until the knowledge was given to them without my consent. Think high school, concerned friends, and a counselor’s office in the middle of the cafeteria. I think you get the picture.

 

When the counselor called my mom and dad, only then, when they saw that my life was on the line, did they decide to throw me into therapy. If I asked them to go to therapy now even though I’m made up of more than bone, they’d automatically assume I’m back to square one again. Because no way would I be going to therapy if I was okay . . . They would never word it like this, but to them therapy is where crazy people go; they don’t see that therapy can benefit someone who has their whole life figured out already. Which so isn’t me, by the way.

 

Here’s the thing though: I don’t want to be the villain that is ungrateful for what her parents have done for her. Because they have done a lot of good things.

 

Even though my mom says she’s proud of me for where I am, and proud of me for writing about my struggles, I think it’s fair for me to feel like her response isn’t enough. My mom and I have never been close. We never talked about boys or drama or normal life things, let alone depression. When I see her, I fill her up with empty details resembling small talk like what grade I got on a test, instead of telling her the reason I got the bad grade was because I was scared to show myself to my peers; and that I couldn’t get myself to show up to take it in the first place. I hate that she doesn’t know the real me, and even more than that, I hate that she thinks she knows the real me.

 

And she’ll probably never know me, unless she reads something I wrote. She takes my sister out of state every weekend for soccer and talks about it all the time, yet doesn’t even know that I recently wrote an entire dystopian novel challenging the appearance ideal; she doesn’t know that I wrote something I never would’ve been able to write had I not gone through the “taboo” mental illness known as anorexia. She connects with my sister’s athletics because that’s her thing, and she thinks she’s trying to get to know my thing, when in reality she’s ignoring me all together.

 

She continues to try to be a part of my life though. Even if in a million years she’ll never understand or want to talk about eating disorders like I do, at least she’s trying, right? That’s something?

 

I just realized I’ve always assumed my brother and sister have never struggled with any form of mental illness. They never mention it. They’re always smiling. But they thought the same thing of me. I hate to think about it, but I feel like my parents’ lack of self-disclosure trickled down to us because all I know about my sister is she likes to dibble a ball down a field. What if, wanting my whole family to understand me all this time, what if I’m a hypocrite? What if I’m not trying enough for them?

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I went from bragging about skipping meals, and boasting about running off the few meals I did have, to running when I want and eating in public with no problem. I want to confront my parents and be like, “Look what I got through on my own!” Because I did. I put in the work out of a deep, internal desire to get better, and I did it without them.