She Should Still Be Here

There are some losses that don't belong to our everyday lives, yet they settle quietly inside them anyway.

Last week, someone I met as a teenager, in the tight grip of eating disorder treatment, lost her fight with anorexia.

We didn't stay in each other's lives after we left hospital. We weren't the kind of friends who caught up for coffee or exchanged birthday messages. Instead, we became the quiet kind of acquaintances that social media creates. We'd watch each other's lives unfold through screens. The occasional photo. A milestone. A glimpse that said, I'm still here.

Until she wasn't.

There is something uniquely unsettling about grieving someone who existed on the edges of your life. Someone who knew a version of you that almost nobody else did. We met at a time when our worlds revolved around meal plans, weigh-ins, therapy sessions, and conversations that felt far too heavy for teenagers. She knew me in a season of survival.

As I've sat with the news, my heart keeps returning not only to her, but to the people who loved her most. I'm sending so much love to her family, who are now navigating a loss no family should ever have to endure. I hope they're surrounded by people who can carry even a fraction of the weight they're holding right now.

When you're young, adults spend so much time trying to protect you from the outside world. They worry about strangers, parties, dangerous places, and the choices you'll make.

But sometimes the most dangerous place isn't somewhere you can point to on a map.

Sometimes it's the battle inside your own mind.

Eating disorders are so often misunderstood. They're reduced to food, weight, or appearance, when they're really about pain. About control. About fear. About believing, somehow, that disappearing is easier than existing.

Recovery isn't linear. It isn't promised. Some people fight for years. Some for decades. And heartbreakingly, some lose that fight.

Her death has stayed with me all week. Not because we shared a lifetime together, but because we shared a chapter that shaped us both.

If you're reading this while carrying that same relentless voice inside your head, I hope you know it is lying. Your worth has never been measured by your body, your weight, or the space you occupy in this world.

You deserve to be here.

Today, I'm thinking of a girl who should still be here. And I'm holding her family especially close in my thoughts.