Word Vomit

I have some things that I need to get out in a bit of a rambling manner.

When my husband came home he was told he had PTSD (both times).  He told me this, then immediately took it back and insisted we live life like everything was ok.  He then barely spoke to me for two years.  When I finally got fed up, I told him he had to admit what was going on and deal with it.  

He entered treatment a few weeks ago... 

He doesn't know I started this blog.  I will tell him, but I need to a place to speak about what we are going through honestly.  I can't keep telling the world I'm ok.  I can't live in his paranoid world that everyone I will ever meet has the potential to know every single person in our life and will share our secret.  I can't sit around the house, crying over stupid things because I'm carrying the burden of this secret life.  

I can't tell my family, they are sort of jerks anyway.  I can't tell our friends.  No one.  I've been forbidden.  Even before he admitted this was the issue, I wasn't allowed to discuss the problems in our life.  

But I am grieving the loss of my husband as I am starting to realize that the man I married is never coming back.  I'm struggling to learn about the man who is in my life now.  That is a tough thing to do.  How do you look at the same face, but tell yourself it's a different person?

I don't know.  

I have no idea how to begin over again.  I struggle to remind myself that I can't hold him to the same standards I used to because that was someone else.  We are living a completely different life now.  And how would I explain that to the people in my life?  I can't.  I can't even begin to explain the frustration I feel everyday, the deep resentment and anger I feel towards to the world.  I'm mad that others are happy and moving forward after the deployment and we are stuck.  We've been stuck for two years in the same place having the same battles, fighting the same fights, screaming the same things.  I'm so angry that others are happy and laughing when I haven't laughed in so long.  

It's hard to look at someone who looks so familiar and not be angry.  Angry that he isn't the same, angry and frustrated that he doesn't listen, that he ignores me, frustrated that no matter how hard I try I will never have that other man back.  

I'm grieving the loss of a man I loved, while trying to love him for the stranger he is now.  I'm battling every day to not compare him to the other man, to not hold him to the same standards.   It's a fight everyday to hold us together, when our life feels so fractured.