My roommate is so difficult to live with right now. She’s a good deal younger than me and I’ve been really feeling the maturity difference lately. Yesterday evening she was out and I had the house to myself as I prepared to go to a potluck that my house group was putting together. I left and locked the door behind me and went to my outing. 45 minutes later my phone is blowing up with my roommate calling repeatedly but I couldn’t answer because I was in the middle of my house group dinner so I texted her back asking what was up. She had left to take her dog for a walk but decided to leave the door unlocked and keys at home and since I had left for my outing, she was now locked out of the house. And she was furious. She lashed out at me as though I had maliciously done this to her to wreck her evening. She was upset because she had somewhere to be but wouldn’t disclose where, and proceeded to blame me for her unfortunate circumstance. I gently tried to tell her that there’s no way I could have known that she had left without her keys, we both come and go all the time without filling the other one in about our plans. She demanded I text her every time I see the door unlocked before locking it but I told her I wasn’t going to do that because it’s up to her to lock up the house and have her keys on her whenever she leaves. She kept saying what I did was not cool and that she was very upset with me. I told her that I sympathized with her predicament but that I could not just leave to come let her back in, that I was unavailable to help her out. She lashed out again with sarcastic bitter texts. I remained very civil, even though my heart was racing, my ptsd and anxiety were triggered and I had no idea what environment I’d be coming back home to. Even though I chose to remain at my house group, it still ruined my evening.
Tonight I’ve been working on my sunroom, organizing it to be a peaceful refuge to relax into. I found this great second hand Papasan chair recently that is just glorious to curl up in. I brought in some of my plants from the living room downstairs, lit a candle and some incense. It’s a wonderful space. Right now it’s almost 12:30am and I have the windows open with the cool night breeze coming in and it’s just heavenly.
My roommate came home around 11pm and blatantly ignored me. She eventually sent me a picture over snapchat of my plate and cup in the sink with an angry caption about dealing with it. I texted her back saying that I would love to talk to her in person and that I was up in the sun room. She texted back a snide remark about the dishes and said hell no she would not come talk to me, she was still really upset with me about yesterday. Lots of capital letters. I explained again how I sympathized with her that it wasn’t ideal, but remained gently firm that I was not out to get her and maintained that I didn’t do anything yesterday to intentionally cause her distress.
I’ve noticed that my roommate is terrible with confrontation and talking about things. She sees herself as this great communicator when in reality she’s very poor at it, which makes it difficult to resolve problems. She won’t tell me how she feels and instead she stews, with tension emanating off of her, and she avoids me or pretends I don’t exist and when I finally have to confront her and ask her what is bothering her, or ask her for a moment to talk things through, she gets mean, like a cornered badger. Eventually she does settle down and find her words, but it’s always a battle. She’s passive aggressive and avoidant and that causes me distress. I need to talk things through. I’ve come to the point in my life that my home has to be my refuge, and I need it to be peaceful. If there’s anything that disrupts my peace and safety, I deal with it immediately. I owe it to myself and my mental health. I will not let my home be a place of fear and intimidation. Oh the joys of being a sensitive empath….I feel every single emotion that radiates off of my roommate whether it’s about me or not, whether it’s expressed or unexpressed, and that girl holds a great deal of tension.
And yet, somehow I can still have some grace and patience for her, which is really difficult right now, but some semblance of it is still there. I’m being extremely careful in how I communicate with her, that it’s clear and gentle but not letting her use me as a doormat. I know she’s going through things right now, but I’m not the person she opens up to about it, and that’s fine. She can’t be vulnerable for whatever reason. She’s quite self absorbed, not able to see past herself to notice how her actions affect those around her, and that’s difficult to deal with. I feel like she doesn’t respect my home as much as I wish she would. But that being said, even though in these moments of great frustration my thoughts often drift to “I wish she would just move out!”, I don’t actually want her to. And I’m careful to always keep those frustrated thoughts to myself. As far as roommates go she’s rather ideal, other than the passive pettiness and lashing out that’s going on right now, our schedules are very different and that often means I get the house to myself a lot which I love, and she’s also not all up in my business with my life. We’re not really friends, we just live together. She goes to my church but that’s pretty much it.
I’m very tired of being used as a punching bag for this particular situation though, and being put through the ringer, and then being avoided and ignored. I’ve had enough abuse in my life, I don’t need it to be disrupting my peaceful refuge that I’ve been working so hard on that is my home. I can’t make her talk to me though. I’ve extended the invitation many times and will continue to do so. I hope she gets to the point where she’ll just face her fears and sit down with me because then she’ll know that I’m not out to get her, and that this is actually a really easy situation to resolve and get past. But in the mean time I don’t know what to do, especially if she continues to treat me like garbage and nit pick and give me the cold shoulder.
This is also her first time living on her own away from home or without a sibling as a roommate.
I just had to get this out of my head. Any advice on what to do here?
My Life Bipolar 