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“Exactly. I mean, sometimes people did do things for me, but I didn’t want to be the person who is dependent on other people. I wanted to be the kind of person who could help people. And yet there I was, too scared to even get out of bed.”
She lay there thinking about it for a minute. She couldn’t believe that that had been a time in her life, although it felt like she had to keep focused on the positive, or that anxiety could come roaring back.
“So you started that day to make changes?”
“I had to research it first. I had the internet, and every spare second, I was researching how to handle anxiety without medication. I didn’t want to be on pills for the rest of my life. But that was what was going to happen if I went to the doctor. They were going to give me anxiety pills and tell me that I had to take them, and then I’d heard that eventually they became ineffective and you had to up your dosage. It scared me, the idea of being addicted to pills and unable to function without them. That was probably the one time that my anxiety actually helped me.” She laughed.
“You were too afraid to go on medication so you found a way to handle it without it?”
“Basically. So yeah, and then like you said, I figured out that I needed to focus on the positive. But not just that, I wanted to do it in a Christian way. In a way that acknowledged that God was in charge, which kind of makes me scared, because I want to be in charge, and I want to make things happen the way I want them to happen.”
“That is not the way life works.”
“Exactly, and it’s kind of scary to lift my fingers up and allow God to do it. So what I had to do was I had to memorize verses that said that God was good. That He only wanted good things for me. And when bad things happened, I had to understand that they were only bad because I was looking at them like they were bad. Like when I lost a client. I might get scared that I was going to lose my business or lose a hundred more clients and that was just going to be terrible, or I could look at it in the way that losing one client could spur me to figure out things that I could do better so I could attract more clients. And it turned out to be a good thing.”
“Because if you hadn’t lost the first client, you wouldn’t have been inspired to improve yourself?”
“Exactly. So the bad thing prompted good things. And I tried to shift my mindset where I wasn’t scared if my income went down or if Mom would lose the bed-and-breakfast. I would just say, God’s going to help me figure something else out. And then I would try to let it go. It wasn’t easy at first.”
“It’s so hard to change our thoughts.”
“It is. I kept a thankful journal though, and every night before I went to bed, I tried to write down at least five things that I was thankful for. I tried to make them different every day, so I wasn’t just thanking God for the same things. And then I tried to look around during the day to find those different things. It really did help me go from seeing all the bad things to looking at the good.”
“That’s a smart thing to do. When you know you’re going to have to find five new things to write down in the evening, it would prompt you to look a little closer at your life.”
“And there was so much to be thankful for.”
“And that helped you with your anxiety?”
“For the most part. I still don’t do very good in social situations, like the barn dance. I don’t mind working behind the scenes, but being at the front is not my favorite thing. But that could be more of a personality thing. I’m an introvert rather than an extrovert.”
“I think it’s perfectly normal for people to not want to draw a lot of attention to themselves at times. So I think you’re right about that.” He paused. “It must have taken a lot of nerve for you to go over and ask me to dance.”
“It did.” She laughed a little. It was almost to the point where it was funny now. “That was just my old anxiety kicking in probably. Making it so that the thing that I thought might happen—you would say no—happened, because I managed to totally mess everything up. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“I see. I wasn’t very sympathetic.”
“You didn’t know. And you really did get a phone call. At least I assume you did?”
“I did.” He didn’t say anything more, but his tone indicated that the phone call wasn’t a good thing, and she remembered that he mentioned that several times. That he had some bad news.
“So, I just told you my deep, dark secret,” she teased. “Are you going to tell me your bad news?” She said it lightly, maybe to make sure that he wasn’t taking her too seriously. She didn’t go into the fact that she wasn’t married because she’d been too anxious to even date for almost a decade.
Even now, the idea of going on a date wasn’t exactly relaxing. While she didn’t have the crippling anxiety that she had before, she just didn’t feel like she had the skills. Or maybe, case in point would be her inability to even make a simple request like asking someone to dance.
Regardless, she tried to spin that in her head the way she always did. God knew. Maybe He was just having her wait for the perfect man. If she hadn’t had her anxiety, she might have ended up with someone who wasn’t as good as the man God had for her. Maybe she wouldn’t have waited.
She didn’t know, and she wouldn’t know for sure until she got to heaven, if that was the type of thing they talked about in heaven. Regardless, the idea was to trust God and allow Him to dictate her life.
“I don’t want to pry. You don’t have to tell me.”
“Oh, well, it’s not that I don’t want to tell you. And you’re not prying. You just told me something that I’m guessing that a lot of people don’t know. I mean, I lived in Strawberry Sands. It’s a small town, and I didn’t know anything about your anxiety.”
“My family was really good about keeping it quiet. And just giving me the time and space I needed in order to figure out how to fix it. So yeah. Plus, after high school, you moved away and never really came back.”
“After my parents inherited the property in Blueberry Beach and sold it, they split the profit between themselves and my siblings and me. We all got a nice, hefty inheritance, my parents sold their house in Blueberry Beach and moved to Florida. Apparently, they like the winters down there better.”
She laughed at the humor in his voice. After all, if they were in Florida rather than in Strawberry Sands right now, he wouldn’t be trapped in a shack with a winter storm blowing all around them.
