izzybees
Fewer than 3 Posts
 Offline
What is your sexual orientation: Gay, lesb
Who in your life has "personality" issues: Friend
Posts: 2
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« on: January 25, 2017, 06:50:20 PM » |
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Hi everyone.
I just left a whirlwind of a roommate situation that I need to talk about with people who will understand. I only lived with this person for two months, and it ended so badly that I feel traumatized by the entire experience.
My friend and I are both members of an artistic community in our town, and we have a lot of the same friends and colleagues. She began dating another member of the community and started bringing him home fairly often. On one of these visits, they sat with me in the living room where I was trying to do some work on my laptop and proceeded to brag about how they were going to go to her room and have sex. It made me uncomfortable, but I ignored it. They went into my roommate's room, had sex, and then came back out.
At that point, my roommate suggested out of the blue that "all three of us should have sex sometime," and the guy agreed. I told them I wasn't interested because, as they knew, I have a boyfriend that I am in love with and I'm not interested in jeopardizing that. The suggestion would have bothered me even if I were single, though, and the entire exchange left me feeling pretty weird and violated, especially because after I said no they asked me not to tell my boyfriend that they'd asked me to have sex with them!
Later, on a day when I was flying back to our city after being out of town, I landed at the airport expecting to see my roommate there to greet me. My boyfriend was working that night and couldn't pick me up, so she and I had arranged ahead of time that she would pick me up. I sent her the flight details earlier in the day and she confirmed that she received them. When I landed and got to baggage claim, she wasn't there. I called and there was no answer. Finally, at the point when I was considering calling a cab, she called me and had obviously been sleeping. I expressed some frustration that she wasn't there and she dismissed my feelings and told me she'd be there in 15 minutes.
When she arrived, the guy from the previous scenario was with her. They talked about how tired they were and how I'd woken them up (after I had just spent 12 hours traveling after getting only 3 hours of sleep the night before and then having to wait for them). I expressed frustration again and was met with shrugs and told to get over it.
While I had been out of town, my roommate messaged me to tell me that her dog had been going out to the backyard, getting mud on her paws, and then crawling into my bed and getting mud all over it. She told me she'd wash my bedclothes before I came home. When we got back to the apartment from the airport, I went to my room and the covers and sheets had mud and dirt all over them. I had to strip my bed completely and wash everything before I could sleep. My things are now permanently stained.
I spent weeks cleaning up after my roommate, trying to establish boundaries and get her to take care of her share of the household chores to no avail. She went out of town for work for a week and told me that the aforementioned guy would be around to take her dog out for walks occasionally. I asked her to make it clear to him that he could walk her during the daytime but not in the evenings after I get home from work, as I didn't want to see him during my free time (he tends to want to hang out and talk to me while I'm trying to unwind). She said this was fine and she'd communicate that to him.
On one of the last days of her trip, there was an arson fire at my boyfriend's apartment building and he has now been displaced. He stayed at my place because the fire department shut down his building and I sent my roommate a text to let her know about it. She wrote me back saying that maybe the fire was a "sign" that my boyfriend and I should leave the city we live in and that "fire is cleansing." This really upset me because it was so removed from an empathic response, and meanwhile my boyfriend was traumatized from the experience because he was the one who had put out the fire. She didn't ask how we were doing. She launched into a bizarre lecture about how she thinks I should live my life, and it was all wrapped up in what seemed like faux "concern." It seemed insulting to me to say that "fire is cleansing" in response to my boyfriend becoming homeless (it's been almost two weeks since the fire now and his building is still shut down).
The evening after the fire, when I was in a heightened state of anxiety, I received a text from the guy my roommate has been seeing, telling me that he was on his way to give the dog a walk. I wrote back asking him to wait until the next day, as per our agreement regarding daytime walks, so that I could have an evening to myself. He immediately texted my roommate about it, who proceeded to send me a stream of texts telling me not to prevent this guy from coming over to take care of the dog (I'd already been taking care of her, feeding her, etc., so it wasn't necessary anyway) and that if I hadn't had any time to myself that week it wasn't either her or his problem. After the stress of the fire and all the boundary violations I'd experienced from her up to that point, I was at my wit's end and said some things to her that I never say to anyone (like "go ___ yourself". She seemed to feed off of the anger because it gave her the moral high ground, and I immediately regretted giving her that power.
She eventually relented when I told her I wouldn't allow the guy into the apartment if he showed up, and the next day, after I'd cooled down a little, I reminded her that asking him to come over in the evening without first consulting me was a direct violation of the one thing I had asked of her. She agreed with me and seemed surprisingly empathetic about it at the time, but I've noticed that this is a pattern with her. She'll violate a boundary, act self-righteous about it no matter how it makes me feel, and then the next day she'll act super understanding about it. This was something my boyfriend noticed and pointed out to me before I saw it myself: that after attacking me, she will act super soft and expect this to absolve herself of any responsibility for the prior transgressions. She has also engaged in a lot of "splitting" behaviors with me, where we'll have a big fight and she'll tell me I'm a "___ing dick" and then the next day she'll send me a bizarrely sweet message about how wonderful and special I am and how much she appreciates me. The super sweet messages confuse and upset me more than the mean ones do!
We had another incident whereby a man in our community, who has a history of harassing me, contacted her via email with some very twisted things he'd written about me and asked her to pass the email along to me. She did, along with a bunch of texts telling me to "prepare myself" and that the email was going to be very upsetting. Looking back, I think she felt some amount of glee over the whole thing, which makes me feel sick to think about. Her actions caused some drama in our arts community, and when people reacted strongly to the email he sent, my roommate started telling people to stop getting "hysterical" and to calm down, which confused me because the entire drama was created by her.
It's taken me a while to understand that she had a choice when she received that email: to deny my harasser access to me and thus protect me from having an incredibly stressful, traumatic experience, or to do the opposite. She chose to do the opposite and then chastised me for having the reaction to it that I did. Mystifying. I feel like I'm losing my mind after living with this person for only two months.
Any time when I have tried to tell her that her behavior hurts me or that I think she's being abusive, she replies with, "No, I'm not abusing you" or "I'm not hurting you." When I told her I didn't want that guy to come over in the evening, she said, "He isn't bothering you," which infuriated me because I was telling her that he was and she wasn't willing to listen.
On top of all that, she has major drug dependency problems. She smokes weed every single day and also does cocaine and LSD. I never know if I'm dealing with her, her personality disorder (which she only told me about during one of our recent arguments when she also told me she can't have roommates because of her "mood disorder". So I never know whether I'm dealing with her, her mood or personality disorders, or drugs. It's a rollercoaster of confusion. I wish she had been upfront with me about her inability to have roommates, or any of these issues, so that I could make a more informed decision about whether or not to live with her.
Things got so bad that my boyfriend and I are now staying with a friend until our next move. I'm just so upset that all of this blew up right around the time he lost his housing. It's unfair to him, but this person seems to thrive on causing drama for other people and then reveling in watching how they react to it.
Any commiseraton or insights would be really helpful. Thanks to those who read all of this!
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