A difficult time. Yolanda Hadid revealed that she experienced a Lyme disease relapse in the wake of her mother’s death in her first post after a nine-month social media hiatus.
“After the loss of my mother I really struggled with depression followed by a lyme relapse … the emotional stress and grief strongly effected [sic] my immune system,” the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alum, 58, wrote via Instagram on Sunday, July 31, while reflecting on the “social media detox” that she recently completed. “My phone addiction didn’t help either, it started to take so much time away from being present in my life. It’s so easy to get lost in other people’s stories while forgetting to live and love your own.”
Adding that she felt social media and texting have made it harder for people to connect with one another, Hadid continued, “I realized that we are slowly starting to lose the art of communication and it’s creating a deep loneliness within us.” Instead of spending “many hours of scrolling through social media until your eyes hurt,” the former model decided to take a break from social media in order to “focus on myself, my health journey and being present in this moment of my life.”
She continued: “Time has slowed down and feels a lot calmer, more time to just sit and actually read a book, time to reconnect with people, be creative and most importantly time with my family.”
In response to her post, her daughter, Bella Hadid — who has also been diagnosed with Lyme disease — shared a message of support for her mother and her journey. “We love you ❤️,” the supermodel, 25, wrote in the comments of her post.
Yolanda revealed in August 2019 that her mother, Ans van den Herik, had died at the age of 78 after multiple battles with cancer. “RIP my guardian angel Mama. Thank you for loving me the way the way [sic] that you did and for making me the woman that I am today,” she wrote via Instagram at the time, alongside several black-and-white photos of her late mother.
“I can not [sic] imagine this life without you but I pray that I will hear you whisper in the tallest trees and feel your love in the gentle breeze,” she continued. “When I miss you the most, our beautiful memories will hold you close … Our Love is eternal and you will always be with me and I will always be with you beyond the bounds of this realm.”
Yolanda has previously been open about her struggles with Lyme disease, confessing in a February 2021 interview with Vogue UK that there were times when she “wished to die” from the pain. “My decade-long journey was an absolute nightmare, but my diagnosis taught me a lot about life,” the mother of three said at the time. “My ‘new normal’ is much slower and more in tune with who I am.”
She continued, explaining that her symptoms — which included “severe fatigue, brain fog, memory loss, difficulty with word retrieval, anxiety [and] insomnia” — left her feeling depressed. “I can’t begin to describe the darkness, the pain and the hell I lived through every day. For some time, it didn’t even feel like living at all,” Yolanda noted. “This disease brought me to my knees. Many nights I wished to die and prayed I would just be free of the pain.”
Her role as a mother and her relationship with her children, Gigi, Bella and Anwar, gave her the strength to keep going. “If it weren’t for my children, I don’t think I would be here today,” the former Bravo personality said. “It’s so important we learn to listen to people, as many of us are suffering in silence. We should learn not to judge how somebody feels by the way they look on the outside. … Looking back, all those difficult times in my life were blessings in disguise.”