When I decided to go off to an out of state college, I knew that I was going to be stuck rooming with a complete stranger. The thought terrified me. I had never shared a room in my life, and now I was going to be forced to coexist with some rando in a tiny space? My anxiety was at an all time peak in the months before school began. To make it even worse, the roommate I was originally assigned to who had seemed friendly over text informed me that she wouldn't be living with me after all...
... Two weeks before I was set to move in.
My new roommate was assigned to me just days before I left for school, so there was no time to get to know her. However, I tried to ease my fears by telling myself that it couldn't be nearly as bad as my anxiety riddled brain was building it up to be. Even if my new roommate wasn't exactly gonna be my best friend, that didn't mean she was gonna be my worst nightmare.
I moved in first and had a peaceful few days by myself. The day before classes were set to start, I came back into my room after visiting a friend I had made a floor above me and walked in to see my new roommate sitting in her desk chair and scrolling on her phone while her parents unpacked her things. Her parents were quick to introduce themselves to me and ask about where I was from, what I was studying, all the stuff that adults ask college students.
When I tried to introduce myself to my roommate, my reception was my lukewarm at best. She glanced up from her phone and looked at me with a blank expression, not even bothering to respond. If anything, she looked slightly annoyed with me. I gave her the benefit of the doubt and thought I was just getting in the way of her - or her parents - unpacking. So I went back up to my friend's room to wait it out.
People always say that first impressions are lasting impressions, and that was very true in this case. However, I tried to ignore our awkward first meeting and remain hopeful that we would at least be able to coexist peacefully.
The first red flag for me was when I saw her bed.
After she set all her things up, I took a look around and saw a big, dirty, torn up Winnie the Pooh plushie laying on her comforter next to an equally as old looking plastic baby doll.
Odd decor, I thought, but what wasn't on my side of the room wasn't my business.
When it came time to go to bed on our first night as roommates, we encountered our first real problem. She had brought a TV with her when she moved in, which was fine by me. It wasn't fine, however, when she insisted on keeping it on throughout the night.
I politely told her that I had a class at 8:30am and I couldn't sleep with the bright light of the flatscreen and an obnoxious laugh track playing every 10 seconds. To me, it seemed like a reasonable request. To her, it was outrageous that I would even suggest it.
She insisted that she always fell asleep to noise and she wasn't planning on changing that. When I suggested that she use headphones to fall asleep to something on her phone, she turned it around on me and said I should just put in headphones if I didn't want to hear the TV.
My overly polite self eventually backed down and let her keep the TV on, but when I could tell she was asleep, I would sneak out of bed and turn it off. Then she would wake up at some point in the night and turn it back on. Then I would wake up and turn it back off. This back and forth went on for the entire semester.
If this was the only thing that happened, I could have lived with it. But that was just the start of our issues with each other.
Roommates share stuff. It's inevitable. I never had any issues with lending anybody food or laundry detergent if they just asked me.
My roommate took "sharing is caring" to another level. Every time I bought food, she would end up eating half of it, if not more. If I bought myself a 12 pack of soda, she would ask if she could have some once and then assume I was okay with her taking 6 more. She once even asked me if she could take my school ID to use a meal swipe; not because she didn't have any at all, but because she ran out of swipes for the week at ONE eatery on campus.
One day she asked me if she could borrow a sweatshirt. I was hesitant because I value my clothes more than life itself, but it was cold outside and all her warm clothes were in the laundry, so I reluctantly handed over one of my precious sweatshirts. She wore it that day.
And the day after that.
And the day after that.
She probably had my sweatshirt for about a week without giving it back. On the rare occasions when she wasn't wearing it, I couldn't find it in our room. Eventually, I spotted it in her laundry hamper while she was at class one day. My sweatshirt in her hamper. I snatched it back and never let her borrow my clothes again.
There were a million other little things she did that bothered me. She would exclusively talk on speakerphone while I was in the room, even if it was an extremely private conversation. She played really bad country music on full blast from her portable speaker and refused to turn it down, even when our suitemates complained. She would whip out her phone and start facetiming someone at 3am when I was trying to sleep. But this was all minor compared to what happened next.
It didn't take me long to realize just how unhinged she was.
She would rant to me about things that made sense when she began talking, but by the end of her rant, she was just spouting nonsense. One time she started to tell me how much she liked a certain flavor of juice, and by the end of the conversation she was telling me that the FDA was involved in a conspiracy and didn't want us to know the real ingredients of Naked Juice.
There was a basketball player at our school who was considered to be one of the "stars" of the team. Not only was he a good player, but he was hot and all the girls wanted him. The only problem? He had a girlfriend.
This didn't stop my roommate.
She was an athlete so a lot of her friends were too, and sometimes she would hang out in groups he was in. Every single time she saw him, she would come back to our room and talk about him for hours. She was sure the "glances" they exchanged was flirting, and he soon going to break up with his girlfriend and date her. Her feelings for him went back and forth. Sometimes she claimed she was angry at him because he was "messing around" with her while he had a girlfriend, and then other times she was planning out their future together.
I wasn't dumb enough to think that this guy who all the girls in school wanted was going to break up with his girlfriend for her. But by the way she spoke about him, I assumed they were good friends; at least acquaintances.
One day I was talking to one of the girls who lived across from us. Like me, she had too many interactions with my roommate and wasn't her biggest fan, but the two of us had become pretty close. I was complaining about how my roommate had made me listen to a rap song she wrote (yes, she wrote a rap song) about this guy and how he was stringing her along. My friend looked confused.
"He rarely even talks to her," she said "He thinks she's weird."
I think that was the moment when I started to become a little afraid of my roommate.
I rarely ever got alone time in the room because she seemed to be there more often than not. To me, it seemed like she was never in class. When I woke up at 8, she was still in bed. When I got back at 11, she was still in bed. When I came back from lunch, she was still in bed. When she wasn't in bed, she was watching TV or playing Sims on her laptop. I started to wonder if she was even a student or just a random homeless person who wandered onto campus and decided to set up shop in my room.
One day, around lunch time, I asked her if she had class anytime soon since afternoon classes are the most popular.
"Oh yeah, I have psych 101," she said. "But I don't understand it so I'm not going to it anymore."
When I asked if she had withdrew from the class, she said she hadn't gotten around to it yet. The withdrawal period had already ended, something we had gotten at least 10 emails about in the days leading up to it.
Not only that, but I'm a psych major. I had gotten a 5 on my AP psych test in high school so I was already past psych 101. She knew this. I was baffled by the fact that she didn't think of just asking me to help her, but I was even more baffled to realize she had decided she "didn't understand it" after one week of class.
One day during finals week, she stormed into our room, grumbling about how "unreasonable" her professor was. By this point I was beyond caring about her and her antics, but I still felt compelled to ask her what was wrong.
I'm way too polite.
She ranted to me about how her psych 101 professor was failing her.
Well duh, I thought.
She went on to tell me how shocked she was that she was failing this class that she only attended for one week out of the semester. She had gone to the professor and asked if she could make up the work she missed (as in, an entire semester's worth of work) but the professor told her it was too late because the final was that week. Instead of recognizing the fact that her habitual class skipping was what lead to her failing, she blamed the professor.
I was too drained by studying for my own finals to explain to her everything wrong with her logic, so I just nodded and said "yeah" and "totally" at the right times until she let me get back to my work.
Despite all this, I told myself I could just deal with it all until the next year. Then one of my friends, coincidentally the same one I was visiting on the day my roommate moved in, told me that her roommate was dropping out and she wanted me to move in with her. I jumped at the chance and filled out the room change request as soon as the form opened for the next semester.
At this point, I was still a little scared of my current roommate, so my new roommate and I decided to wait until we knew she would be gone to collect all my stuff and move. It sounds kinda insensitive to dip out without telling the person you're living with, but she was so unpredictable and quick to anger that I was honestly scared me moving out would set her off.
My new roomie and I managed to move my things out pretty quickly. We ripped my posters off the wall, hauled my comforter and mattress pad off the bed, and gathered all the supplies in my desk into a bag. We were in the middle of shoving all my clothes into a laundry basket when my soon-to-be-ex-roommate walked in.
Oops.
It was a really awkward confrontation, but I managed to talk my way out of it by telling her the problem wasn't her (it was), but the room itself. We lived on the first floor, basically the basement, and our room had already flooded once. She bought it and I was able to escape without her losing her shit on me.
My new roommate and suitemate ended up being my best friends and made my 2nd semester exponentially better than the 1st. Switching rooms was one of the best decisions I've ever made.
If you're in a living situation that makes you feel uncomfortable, don't hesitate to request a room change. College is supposed to be the best years of your life and a toxic roommate can make it the worst.
All my anxieties about having a randomly selected roommate came true, but it's not all that bad. At least I got some good stories out of it.
