Powerful Lessons Learned: A Letter to My Daughter

Sweet Girl, you light up our days. Seeing you makes me so much more aware of the difficult place I placed my mother in when I struggled with an eating disorder. I can’t imagine the fear, powerlessness, even frustration, that must have run rampant in her mind. I pray that this letter, Sweet Daughter, reveals to you the powerful lessons that I have learned.

Although my choices caused pain and strained relationships for a time, I need you to know that I would not change what I have experienced. The choices that I made and the hardships endured have shaped me into who I am today. I want to share the lessons that I have learned and instill in you the truths that I now know.

Enough

The first lesson that I want to share with you is that you are enough. Not too little and not too much. You are exactly enough as you are, regardless of how you might feel about yourself on any given day. Your emotions and thoughts are constantly shifting, however, your worth is never-changing. You are worthy of love and accepted because you are YOU. Do not compare yourself to anyone else or attempt to measure your worth using some earthly, man-made scale. You are enough because you are a child of God. You don’t need to worry about performing or being “good enough”. This is sometimes hard for us to understand, but trust that you are enough and that this can never change.

More Than A Body

During my days in the darkness of an eating disorder, I struggled with thinking that I was only my physical body. I thought that my worth and value as a person came from how I looked (or how I thought I looked that day). But, Sweet Girl, this is far from the truth!! Your body is important and incredibly designed, but it is not your source of value. No matter what your body looks like or what it can do, you are valued. Your life is much more than a body. Your body is simply a vessel in which you live. Yes, caring for your physical body is important, but it is not the measure of your value.

Food is Fuel

In the same way that your worth is not measured by your physical appearance, it is not measured by the food you eat. For so long, I struggled with the idea that my worth came from how my body looked and what I ate. But what I was missing was the fact that food is not “good” or “bad”. Food is fuel, nourishment and life-giving. You don’t need to ever fear any foods. There are no labels or a point system on which our food choices are rated each day. Focus on eating to nourish your body, fueling it for the amazing things it can do, and enjoying the things you eat.

Not All-Knowing

This is possibly the most difficult lesson to learn, but it is the most powerful lesson and the key to learning the others. You, Sweet Daughter, do not know everything. In fact, you hardly know anything. Until I was able to grasp the fact that I was not the expert and perhaps I did not know best, only then was I able to grasp the other lessons. This lesson takes humility and acceptance that we don’t have all of the answers. Ironically, when we are young we think we have all of the answers. However, this is the time when we really know the least. Only as we age do we begin to see that maybe, just maybe, someone else did know better than us.