Unintentional Isolation

For whatever reason, I have lately been feeling more and more isolated from the world as a whole. I'm interacting with people, but I'm not connecting with them - any of them, including my husband. I've tried to rekindle my connection with people, but I've had no luck. I don't even know exactly how to describe how I'm feeling - I just feel separate, disconnected, isolated. Sometimes it seems like loneliness. Sometimes it feels like melancholy. Sometimes it feels like numbness. Sometimes it feels surreal, like I'm watching myself living my life but not really participating.

It would be easy to blame it on moving away from my friends, but I don't think that's what it is. I've actually spent a good deal of time with my friends over the past several months, and I talk to them every day. I've made new friends here, too. I talk to my family almost daily. In fact, I think it would be fair to say I'm talking to people more often now than I have in recent history - quite likely in an event to stop feeling so isolated. But, it doesn't help.

It's starting to affect my marriage. My husband's concerned because my usually vigorous sex drive has dropped to nearly nothing, and I'm often not really enjoying sex like I did a few months ago. I've also become distant from him and spend most of my time not really feeling any substantial feelings for him, which is very unusual for me because I'm usually the "overflowing heart," extremely affectionate type.

In part, I blame my husband's ongoing depression. I wish I didn't, because it seems incredibly selfish to focus on how his illness is affecting me. But, I can't deny that I do. By now, the behavioral cycles are abundantly clear. He goes for a few months with most things seeming fine and then, out of nowhere, he has a blow-up and seems to blame me for everything that's wrong in his life. And then, within either a few hours or, at most, a few days, regardless of what I do or don't say or do, he realizes what happened and apologizes. For awhile, it was emotionally exhausting to feel like I was being attacked when I didn't know what I'd done wrong, and to feel the need to defend myself, and to feel like my husband hated me. But eventually, I just stopped defending myself. It just made it worse, anyway. I pretty much learned to step out of the way and let his episode run its course and wait for it to be over. And, it still played out the exact same way...his anger, his blaming, and eventually his apology.

I read on depression support websites that you have to establish a certain level of emotional detachment from a depressed spouse to protect yourself and be able to support your spouse through it. But how do you turn that off? How do you detach yourself a little bit, and still continue to love your husband madly?

I feel helpless. I can do nothing to help him. Support really means nothing. He needs to take steps to help his depression, but he's not and I can't force him. I encourage him to take time away from the kids and I, but he won't. He constantly flip-flops between wanting a job and wanting to continue staying home, but never makes any decision, never takes any action. He knows he's burned out, but he won't do anything about it. He won't go anywhere, he won't do anything, he won't make any friends. And I can't fix it.

So, I don't know if his depression is why I'm feeling this way, but I do know that before I started feeling this way, I felt that his depression was really the only thing wrong in my life. I love him, I love my kids, I have a great job and great friends and make good money and everything is just fine. And my marriage is great, too - except for his depression.

And that pisses me off! I am totally against the "when X happens, everything will be fine" mentality, because I know that once X happens, Y inevitably happens and things continue to be rough. But the thing is, I *was* happy. Even with his depression, even through the struggles, I was happy. Deliriously, most of the time. But I lost it somewhere.

I do NOT want to believe that I'm depressed. I don't even want to consider it. It's not a matter of being afraid of weakness, because I've been depressed before, I've been on medication, I've dealt with all of that. I just don't think this is that.

My self-image is starting to go to pot, too, though. I eat when I'm upset. A lot. And I've gained back some weight. Not a ton, but enough that I feel like my belly is bigger. That's part of the reason I'm not enjoying sex as much - I don't feel very attractive.

I'm rambling on and on in the hope of discovering something new, some secret to what's going on in my head, but I just don't think that's going to happen. I've always thought I'm pretty self-aware, but this all has me at a loss. I guess that's just one more argument for why it probably is depression, but dammit. Dammit. I don't want to think that my husband's depression has thrown me into a depression, and it would be one crazy coincidence if it just so happened that I developed a chemical imbalance or something like that out of nowhere in the last few months.

I just want to feel alive again.