This is part of Josie's writing workshop, based on her writing prompt: Write a letter to your 16-year-old self, inspired by NotSupermum's recent post.
It's the first time I've taken part, but I've decided to take the plunge and tackle a difficult topic.
Dear Rosie,
If you knew what lay ahead and where this will lead, you would not be doing it.
At sixteen you should be out enjoying life, making new friends, forming relationships and making the most of your carefree years. You should be starting to work out how you fit into the world and the role you want to play it it. You should be planning your future.
Instead you are slowly destroying yourself.
You deserve better than to be sitting at home, huddled next to a fire wearing three layers of clothing to combat the cold. You should be eating not starving, yet for some reason you don't feel you deserve to. You do; no-one deserves to exist in that state.
This has been going on for one year too long. I know you don't necessarily want to be thin; I know this is a way of trying to control a life you feel you have no control over, but there has to be a better way, a more constructive way than this.
If you continue along this self-destructive path then you'll be in hospital by the time you are seventeen and that is where you will spend your eighteenth birthday. It will be the first of many admissions and a life of revolving hospital doors.
And it will be grim.
It will drive you to the point of sheer despair and leave everyone around you feeling desperate.
It will be touch and go at times.
You deserve better than that.
You will recover and you'll go on to have a gorgeous little girl. Life will get better.
But if you continue down this path, then in twenty years' time you'll be looking back and mourning those lost years and thinking - it could have been so different.
Read the rest of the workshop entries by visiting Sleep is for the Weak.
