Being born into Hollywood royalty isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Tallulah Willis, the youngest of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis’ three daughters, opened up about her struggle with depression in the February issue of Teen Vogue.
“I haven’t felt OK with who I am since I was 11 years old,” she told the magazine.
In the piece, an “as told to” interview, the 20-year-old reveals that her troubles started when she moved from her childhood home in Idaho to Hollywood.
“I spent my early childhood on our ranch in Idaho, I hadn’t processed the full extent of my family’s fame until I moved to Los Angeles and started third grade,” she said. “Then, suddenly, I didn’t think I deserved what I had grown up with, and I remember thinking I couldn’t have problems, so I kept everything bottled up inside.”
Willis’ problems really took off when she was 13 and read the negative comments about her looks online. But rather than be angered at those cyberbullies, she turned on herself.
“In that moment, a switch flipped. It wasn’t about the anonymous cyberbullies — I became my own worst critic,” she said.
These problems continued as she hit puberty and developed an eating disorder and started to party too much. Previously, Willis has said her weight dropped down to 95 pounds after reading tabloid stories about herself.
By college, her depression had become overwhelming, and it wasn’t until middle sister Scout stepped in that she saw she needed to make a change:
In college the depression became overwhelming. I didn’t sleep or want to talk to anyone, nothing seemed to have a point, the world lost its color, and food lost its taste. I was so removed from my body and from my mind that it was like I was living in a cardboard replica of what life should be. Not even so much because I was doing drugs but because I was so sad and so unhappy. Finally my sister Scout forced me to see what I was doing. There wasn’t a huge, horrible moment, but I knew I needed to go take care of myself.
Last year, Willis checked herself into an inpatient treatment center, which has helped her start to come to terms with who she is.
“It’s not night and day — it’s not like now I completely love myself and I have no problems,” she said. “That isn’t how it works. But there are the starting points of that, and that’s really exciting. I’m growing every day and breaking old patterns.”