A Standstill

I'm sad lately.  I'm in my room all the time.  I'm not sleeping the day away or even lacking productivity in my day, I just seem to want to be in my room.  It's safe.  It's comfortable.  For whatever reason, the rest of my house doesn't feel that way anymore.

I know they say not to compare yourself to others.  But we all know, even with our best efforts, it's hard not to sometimes.  In the time since I've started this blog I've found a few PTSD spouse forums and support groups.  And while I often feel comforted to know I'm not alone, I'm also painfully aware that we are not making progress.

We don't fight that much anymore.  Sitting here, right now, I can't even actually remember our last fight.  But that's because it's hard to fight when you don't talk.  I speak to my husband everyday.  I tell him what I cleaned.  I ask him to take the garbage out.  He tells me about his busy day at work.  And then he goes downstairs and watches TV and plays video games and I sit in our room watching TV and reading.

I know I have often spoken of the pain this life has.  It's painful to see him in pain, it's painful to have him always yelling and angry and telling me that I'm terrible.  But now we have nothing.  I never thought I would miss the pain.  I guess it's really just a different sort of pain now.  But it's almost like we both hit a point of not being able to cope with the inability to find a medium ground, so we both retreated to our corners.  It was some sort of unspoken agreement.

I fear this means our marriage is over.  I hate to say that.  I'm not leaving him.  He's not telling me he wants to leave.  But what kind of marriage do we have right now?  When we fought I was at least registering on his mental radar.  It wasn't an easy way to have a relationship, but what we have now is absent of that kind of burning pain because it's absent of any form of meaningful connection.

I see the people talking about the bad stuff, but also talking about the progress their spouse is making.  They talk about their life and the steps they are making that moves them forward, no matter how slowly.  And I see that we are not doing that.  We may not be living that constant battle of me against his PTSD, but we are not moving forward either.  He might be healing, but he is doing it without including me.  And I'm not any better because at some point I just stopped trying to be included.  I don't know when or why or how, but I see now that for weeks I have just not tried.

What kind of person does that make me?  What kind of wife?

I haven't given up on him.  Maybe I just hit a point where mentally I had to withdraw for a while.  I don't know.  But I'm sad and keeping to the only place in my life that feels even remotely comfortable or safe.