AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Looking back, maybe that was the best thing. If I had gone to college, I definitely wouldn’t have been saving my money, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that.”
“College takes money, and even though you feel like you work every waking second, you never really get ahead.”
“Yeah. I’ve heard that.”
“So then you just kind of outgrew your anxiety?”
“No. My boyfriend...cheated.”
Chapter 10
There. She said it. Eleanor hadn’t thought about it for a long time. He’d been cheating their entire relationship. She hadn’t ever noticed, since she hardly ever went out and didn’t talk to anyone she didn’t have to.
“Ugh.” Franklin sounded disgusted.
“Yeah.” It had been painful. So hard. It had wiped her out emotionally, which wasn’t hard in her already not-healthy state. “It took me a bit to get over that, and I suppose I never really trusted anyone outside of my family again.”
“That’s too bad. But that helped you get over your anxiety?”
“Some. I guess I got to the point where I was thinking about being scared that the bed-and-breakfast was going to fail, that something would happen to Mom, that something would happen to me and I couldn’t work... You name it, I worried about it. I just slowly realized how ungodly that all was. How I wasn’t really depending on God, I wasn’t trusting Him to have good things happen to me. To take care of me.”
“That’s basically what anxiety is. Being worried. And we’re commanded not to worry.”
“I was worrying all the time. About everything. I got myself so afraid that sometimes just getting out of bed in the morning produced a panic attack. I thought there was something wrong with me, something physical. You know? Like I needed more of whatever hormone was a happy hormone.”
“But there really isn’t such a thing.”
“Not really. I mean, I suppose there are chemical imbalances for some people, but biologically, our thoughts produce the chemicals that cause our moods. It wasn’t that my body couldn’t make the chemicals, it was that I wasn’t giving my body the ability to make them, or I was telling it to make the wrong chemicals, because my thoughts were so negative.”
“You didn’t figure that out on your own.” His voice rumbled against her back, and while he didn’t have his arm around her, his close proximity was not just keeping her warm, but it was comforting.
“No. One morning, as I was lying in bed after having a panic attack, I hadn’t even gotten up for the day, and I was scared to death, and I just couldn’t figure out what I was scared to death about. I hadn’t been able to eat, and I was getting worse because I was losing weight. I knew I had to do something, and I realized I had known for a while that it had to be me that did something. For a long time, I wanted someone else to come and just fix it for me, but that wasn’t going to happen. It had to be me fixing myself.”
“It’s a pretty big step whenever we realize that we’re in charge of our lives, under the authority of God of course, but we’re the ones who have to make the decisions to do the things. Other people aren’t going to do them for us.”
