Anxiety: A feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease. Anxiety will take over your life, if you let it.
My roommate and I both have anxiety. Going into this living situation, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. Don’t get me wrong, I love my roommate. She’s my best friend, and I don’t know what I would do without her. With both of us having anxiety, I worried what that would mean for our friendship and our living situation. In the two months that we have been living together, we have had our share of ups and downs. I think that’s normal for roommates, but I believe that living with anxiety and living with a roommate with anxiety has a lot more ups and downs than the normal pair of roommates.
I worry about everything, and so does she.
Worrying about things is normal. Worrying about everything, constantly, is not normal. This means that while she may not worry about the bills, but I do. She worries about the cleanliness of the apartment, and I don’t necessarily worry about that. Our worries have clashed and not in the best way. We don’t sit around and always worry about things, but it’s always on our minds, and that’s the worst part of it. There never seems to be an “off” button.
There is fighting that usually stems from the worrying.
All roommates have their fair share of arguing and fighting, but sometimes I think it’s worse when it’s with a pair that has anxiety. My roommate and I are quite different. I worry all the time about making her unhappy and whether she's upset with me, which usually means that I don’t say when something is bothering me. I know this is unhealthy and that I should work harder at saying what’s on my mind. My roommate has no problem saying exactly what is on her mind. Our differences in personalities can clash.
We understand what we are both going through, so we help each other a lot.
Having someone who is going through the same things you are helps greatly. I have the best support system there is because I know I can count on my roommate for anything. It’s tough worrying about everything all at once and trying to live like nothing is wrong, when usually nothing is wrong. We just believe there are things to be worried about. This causes stress and sadness when we try to cover it up. Even though we stress and worry over things that are minimal in comparison to some things, we also know that we need a support system and that we need to be there for each other. We would drop anything, including anger at each other, to help the other.
We handle the stresses of life differently because we are dealing with anxiety at the same time.
We all live with different stressors. Being in college is probably the biggest stressor of them all. There is so much to deal with. During the school year, I’m sure our problems will be worse than they are now, but I know we will be able to work through them together.
