My Husband's Anxiety Left Him Starving — Then I Snapped, and Everything Fell Apart

We were broke, surviving on rice and solar lights. My husband could barely eat due to stress. I handled the bills, the meals — everything — until the day I couldn't anymore. One slip, one sentence, and the life we'd built on scraps started to unravel.

The solar-powered garden lights from the dollar store that Eli had rigged up cast a yellowish glow over our dinner table, doing nothing to make the rice and beans in our bowls look more appetizing.

I chewed without tasting, my mind half-focused on gas money math. A $75 urgent care visit earlier that month for a UTI I picked up had knocked our budget sideways.

Across from me, Eli picked at his food, barely touching it.

"You didn't eat lunch again, did you?" I asked, watching how loosely his T-shirt hung on his frame.

Eli shrugged, eyes not meeting mine. "Forgot. Then I wasn't hungry."

He tried to smile, but it didn't quite land.

"You need to eat," I said softly.

"I will. I am." He took a deliberate bite as if to prove it, then shut his eyes and swallowed as though it pained him to do so.

"Is the nausea bad?" I asked softly.

He sighed and went back to pushing beans around. "Another bill arrived today. That construction guy who said he needed someone to assist his electrician is suddenly unavailable every time I go to the site to see him…"

In other words, yes, the nausea was bad. Stress and anxiety had his belly in knots, but at least he was getting something into his body.

I glanced over at the bills piled up on the table near the front door, noting the new envelope on the top of the pile.

Electric, due in three days; rent, due in ten; student loan payment, already 15 days late; and now, whatever this new bill was for.

My paralegal studies degree hung on the wall above them, a two-year-old piece of paper that had yet to earn its keep.

"On the plus side, I got a busted laptop I think I can fix up," Eli said, breaking the silence. "It's not charging. The guy at the construction site was gonna throw it out. If I get it running, we could sell it for $200, maybe."

I nodded, hoping my smile looked encouraging. "That would be great."

That was Eli; always finding something to work with, always hopeful.

Even with his trade school dreams derailed by his mom's illness two years ago, he never stopped believing things would work out.

I loved that about him, even when I couldn't feel it myself.

He finally put down his fork, having eaten maybe a third of his dinner. I would wrap the rest up for his lunch tomorrow, which he would probably forget to take.

Once the dishes were done, I grabbed the bills, pulled out our budget notebook, and sank into the secondhand couch beside him.

The numbers hadn't magically improved since the last time I'd looked at them.

"We're going to make it," Eli said without looking up from the circuit board he was examining.

I nodded.

We always made it — but barely, and only because I tracked every penny, worked every shift I could get, and said no to every small pleasure.

Sometime later, I noticed Eli's breathing had slowed beside me.

He'd fallen asleep sitting up, exhausted from a day of hauling and fixing for people who paid him half what he was worth.

I gently guided his head to rest on my lap. He didn't wake, just shifted and mumbled something unintelligible.

How had we ended up here? Two years out of school, and this was our life: beans and rice under solar lights, counting pennies, and passing out from exhaustion.

Eli was able to fix that laptop, and we put it up for sale on Craigslist.

We only made $150 off it, which immediately went to paying the bills, but it helped.

The next day, I came home to chaos.

PC parts were spread across our living room floor like a tech crime scene.

Eli sat cross-legged in the middle, hands in his hair, staring at the disassembled desktop as if it had personally betrayed him.

"I thought I had it," he muttered when I walked in.

I set down my bag and coat, taking in the scene. "Another computer?"

He nodded miserably. "I told Mrs. Chen I could fix it."

"It was just the power supply…" he said. "It should've been simple. But then—" He gestured at the parts. "I think I fried the motherboard."

I sat down beside him, careful not to disturb the careful arrangement of screws and components. "Can you fix it?"

"Not without parts I can't afford." His voice was hollow. "She paid me half up front. Sixty bucks. I told her I'd have it done today."

"Sixty bucks?" My heart thumped at the thought of how much that money would help us. "There must be something you can do."

I gestured to the PC parts, but Eli shook his head. "She trusted me to fix something important, and I broke it worse."

"Oh, my God," I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes, fighting back tears of frustration.

And then I said something I shouldn't have.

I blame it on stress. Earlier that day, I'd received my third job rejection that week. Another law firm that wanted paralegal experience I couldn't get without someone giving me a chance.

The same story, over and over. Can't get experience without a job, can't get a job without experience.

Knowing that Eli had just lost us money… it broke something inside me.

"How could you do this? I'm so tired, Eli," I said, my voice breaking. "I hold everything together — the bills, the meals, your mood. We could've really used that $60… I can't keep doing it all."

The words hung in the air between us, sharp and painful.

It wasn't cruelty speaking; it was grief and burnout. But I saw the hurt bloom in his eyes all the same.

"I know," he said softly. "That's why I tried to fix it, that's why…"

He never finished his sentence. Eli got to his feet, then he walked out, closing the door quietly behind him.

I spent the evening crying beside the disassembled computer and a notebook filled with crossed-out job listings, wondering if I'd just broken the one good thing in my life.

Eli came home late that night. I pretended to be asleep as he crept into our bedroom, but I heard him pause beside the bed and felt him gently pull the blanket up over my shoulder.

Then he went back to the living room and slept on the couch.

The next few days were quiet... careful. We moved around each other like dancers following different music, connected but out of sync.

He took on extra handyman jobs, coming home later and later. I picked up another cleaning client and applied for jobs I was overqualified for, but would take anyway.

We were both exhausted, both pretending we weren't hurting.

Then, one Thursday afternoon, Mrs. Hernandez from downstairs called me while I was cleaning an office bathroom.

"Eli collapsed," she said without preamble. "I found him outside my apartment. He's in urgent care now."

I dropped my cleaning supplies and ran, not bothering to tell my supervisor I was leaving.

At the clinic, I found Eli sitting on an exam table, looking pale and embarrassed, with an IV in his arm.

"I'm fine," he said before I could speak. "Just got dizzy for a minute."

The doctor told a different story: stress, low blood sugar, exhaustion.

"When was the last time you ate a proper meal?" she asked him.

Eli looked away, not answering.

"He can't eat when he's stressed," I muttered. "It just… comes back up again."

We couldn't afford another bill, so urgent care gave him fluids and a warning. I gave them my last $20 and a fake smile.

At home, I helped him to bed despite his protests that he could walk fine.

"You scared me," I said, sitting beside him.

"I'm sorry." He looked at the ceiling, not at me. "For everything."

I took his hand. "Me too. For what I said the other night."

"You weren't wrong."

"I wasn't right either." I squeezed his fingers. "We're a team, Eli. I forgot that for a minute."

He finally looked at me, his eyes tired but clear. "I'm not very good at being part of this team sometimes."

"Neither am I."

That night, I made soup from what we had in the pantry and watched him eat every spoonful. Later, while he slept, I sat at the kitchen table and widened my job search, abandoning paralegal-only listings.

I applied to a remote admin position that didn't match my field exactly, but it wanted deadlines, paperwork, and someone who could keep a circus organized. I qualified.

It wasn't law, but it was something. Maybe even something I could be good at.

A week later, after an exhausting day of interviews and rejection emails, I climbed the stairs to our apartment.

When I opened the door, Eli wasn't inside. Instead, a note on the table read: "Fire escape. Now."

I smiled despite my fatigue.

I found Eli on the landing outside our bedroom window, a small picnic laid out: two simple sandwiches, a blanket, and some wildflowers in a coffee mug.

"They were kind of growing onto the sidewalk, so technically it's not theft," he grinned, gesturing to the flowers.

I sat down beside him, taking the sandwich he offered. "Thank you."

We ate in comfortable silence, watching the sunset paint the city in shades of orange and pink. For the first time in weeks, the knot in my chest loosened.

"I applied for a job last week," I said finally. "Not a paralegal position. An admin job for a consulting firm. Remote work."

Eli turned to look at me. "Yeah? How do you feel about that?"

I shrugged. "Like a sellout. Like I'm giving up on what I studied for."

He shook his head. "You already do more admin work running this apartment than most people do running offices."

He intertwined his fingers with mine. "We'll be okay, babe. Somehow."

And somehow, I believed him.

The email came on a Tuesday morning. "We are pleased to offer you the position of Administrative Coordinator..."

I read it three times before the words sank in. A real job. With benefits. Remote work. And a salary that, while not amazing, was more than we'd ever had.

Two weeks later, my first paycheck arrived.

We went grocery shopping — not just for rice and beans, but for fresh vegetables, meat, and spices.

Standing in the checkout line, the total made me flinch out of habit. But this time, I could pay it.

Back in the car, Eli looked at the bags in the backseat and suddenly started crying. I reached over and took his hand, my own eyes filling with tears.

"We can eat real food," he said, his voice thick.

"And next month," I told him, "we're getting you back into trade school. To finish what you started."

He looked at me, surprised. "Dani, we can't afford—"

"We can now. Or we will be able to. I did the math."

I drove us home, both of us occasionally glancing back at the grocery bags as if they might disappear.

That night, the solar lights came down, and the lamps came on. The apartment immediately felt less like a bunker and more like a home.

Six weeks after I started the new job, we sat down for a dinner of bread, roasted vegetables, and seasoned meat.

I watched Eli eat and felt tears spring to my eyes.

He'd already started putting on weight. His face was fuller, and his energy was returning. I even caught him snacking last weekend — something that would have been unthinkable just months ago.

"I used to count every grain of rice," I said, voice catching. "And now... it's good to see you eating and enjoying it."

Eli reached across the table and held my hand.

We weren't rich. We weren't stable, not yet. But we were here. And we were full.

Here's another story: Wyatt drops out of college to care for his dying grandpa, trading textbooks for late nights and tough choices. But when someone from his past knocks on the door, everything changes — and Wyatt's quiet sacrifice becomes the start of something he never saw coming.

This work is inspired by real events and people, but it has been fictionalized for creative purposes. Names, characters, and details have been changed to protect privacy and enhance the narrative. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

The author and publisher make no claims to the accuracy of events or the portrayal of characters and are not liable for any misinterpretation. This story is provided "as is," and any opinions expressed are those of the characters and do not reflect the views of the author or publisher.