There are some people in the world that you just don’t get along with, which is totally acceptable. Yet, when it’s the person living right next door to you, it makes life the slightest bit harder.
I met my roommate via RoomSurf, a social media platform designed to match you up with someone perfect to live with. Think of it like Tinder for finding your freshman year bestie. We began talking in November of last year and secured each other as roommates shortly after. Everything was perfect. Conversation flowed better than any of my friends I talked to at home, our interests were similar, and we even had the same birthday. It was like the college gods blessed us with the miracle of finding each other. Everything was great.
Yet as we all know, people can change a lot in a year. I did a lot of developing senior year, and so did she. What was a perfect match-made in roommate heaven, turned into the dynamic duo headed straight toward hell. But don’t let me get ahead of myself, we haven’t reached the fiery pits just yet.
I noticed small things at first in the way she texted me, but I get paranoid easily and decided to ignore them to give her the benefit of the doubt. But when it came closer and closer to move in, I noticed her true personality shine through. Again, not a huge deal, and I probably exaggerated the severity of the situation by reading too deep into it, but the past is in the past.
After a few disagreements on room organizational aspects and general views on social situations, I began to get weary of choosing someone so early. But I wanted to try a new thing where I don’t judge a book by it’s cover; so I tried my hardest to stop jumping to conclusions over everything she said that I disagreed with.
Once we finally met and moved in with each other, it didn’t take long for my nervous impressions to resurface. When I say that we have a conflict in interests, that’s an understatement. She quickly became a bad influence on me and I lost sight of myself for a hot second. Luckily I quickly bounced back from that and thought about what I wanted from my college experience. My goal of college was to avoid drama, yet in the nicest way possible, she is the most dramatic person I have ever met. (I mean she wants to be a musical theater major so honestly I don’t know why I didn’t see it coming.) I don’t have a problem with that, except that unnecessary drama follows her everywhere and I am tired of getting wrapped up in it.
I knew going into the roommate search process that I wasn’t planning on finding my best friend. I just wanted someone who shared my taste in decorations and my clean-freak tendencies. She treats people she knows as either her best friend or her mortal enemy. There is no in between and that gray area I was looking for ceased to exist. Our friendship was toxic, but as long as we could coexist under the same roof without killing each other, we’d be able to survive freshman year, right?
Unfortunately, I didn’t understand the weight of that statement, and we still struggle with the whole coexisting thing. I can’t cut ties like I normally am able to do with the broken friendships in my life. I can’t communicate with her because she refuses to take the blame for anything. And I can’t live peacefully in my apartment without the constant annoyance of something we disagree on coming to mind.
It’s not that she’s a bad person, it’s just that she is the complete opposite of someone I would want to be friends with, yet by default, we are always stuck hanging out together because of the shared common space. Her messy lifestyle, both mentally and physically, throws me for a loop because I have never met anyone who acts the way she does in everyday situations. The way she acts and treats others is one that I left high school to avoid. But here I am, stuck in the midst of petty fights and selfish remarks because she’s too immature to realize that the world doesn’t revolve around her.
I wish I never met her and got introduced to all the crazy antics that follow her around. At this point I can never “un-meet” her, which leaves me as an unhappy friend, or a pathetic enemy.
It sucks that I am now part of a statistic for incoming freshmen looking at roommate horror stories, but if I learned anything from my living situation, it’s how to treat people in the future. No one deserves to be taken advantage of the way I have been these past three months. No one deserves to be peer pressured into doing things they are uncomfortable with. No one deserves to be kept up until 3 a.m. for five nights in a row because Step Brothers was playing on full volume just to spite me. No one deserves to have to clean up after someone else’s parties because the host was too busy puking all night. No one deserves to live in a petri dish because their roommates are too lazy to rinse a dish off. No one deserves to live the way I have lived since August, and no one should stand idly by if they are in the same situation.
Roommates can either make or break your freshman year. Just remember that it’s a temporary problem that won’t affect your future. Talk it out with your RA or other campus supervisors to make sure that you are handling the situation appropriately. Don’t let someone else’s bad attitude ruin your good one. Look forward to rooming with your friends next year, and make the most of a sucky situation by treating yo self.
As for me, I’ll be doing my best to minimize conflict for the rest of the school year. Unfortunately, I won’t have the luxury of erasing this bad experience from my memory, but I will be able to look back on it and make myself stronger as a person. After all, someone needs to be the bigger person, and it sure as hell won’t be her.