The first thing my roommate thought about me was “wow, this girl is a huge bitch.”

During my freshman year I was assigned a random roommate after I lost the battle with CHARMS and feeling too weird to room with any of the normal girls I encountered on the chat. It was a major source of anxiety for me because I was convinced, as many probably were, that anyone doing random instead of CHARMS was a serial killer or a person whose favorite band is Nickelback. Or worse, they would be just as insane as me.

We got our roommate assignments while I was off at camp the summer before my first year at Georgetown. My roommate promptly friended me on Facebook and sent me a message, which I apparently read and ignored (I do not recall this). The message remained as having been “read” but unanswered for the two weeks I was at camp.

So like I said, huge bitch.

I answered her once I got back from camp of course and everything was fine, but I'm pretty sure she still thought I was mean. I worried the whole drive to DC that she wouldn't like me, or that I wouldn't like her, or that she would end up being a mean and terrible person. My worries did not cease when I met her either, since she didn't hug me, which I—being from the Midwest—thought was a proper roommate greeting.

My mom also revealed to her (very smoothly) how much I had stalked her on Facebook, which only made our first encounter even worse. Then, I basically stole her cell phone for a whole day when I thought she forgot it in the room and brought it with me to give to her, when she actually hadn't even left yet.

Long story short, I never thought that the girl I embarrassed myself in front of for most of my first week at school would become such an important part of my life at Georgetown.

Or course it was awkward at first, like many college relationships. She talked a lot, and I was far too quiet. I was the weird girl who stared off into space and didn’t say anything and she was the one who couldn’t shut up, so for a while I thought our relationship was doomed to fail. However, one night when I was laying in my bed trying not to cry about how much I missed my mom, my roommate was across the way talking about something on and on and on without stopping for me to intervene at all. She just talked and talked and talked and I loved it. I listened to her talk for hours and I didn’t think about how much I missed my mom or about how worried I was that my life was about to change forever. It was nice to feel like I was forming a relationship with someone without having to say anything at all.

Of course our relationship changed, and obviously I starting talking more (though I doubt she would have noticed if I didn’t), and we have lived together for almost 3 years.

There’s something really great about getting to know someone on a level like that. It’s almost like having a long-lost sibling that you have reconnected with. Somehow, my roommate will always feel more like family to me than just another body that lives in my room. We yell at each other, we groan when the other lets their laundry overflow or hangs up an ugly picture, and we get annoyed when the other turns on the light at 2 am or has an extremely obnoxious alarm (a-hem).

At the end of a long day, I can almost always expect to send or receive a text that says “come home I miss you." When we are both still up at 2 am on a Wednesday I can always count on my roommate to say “yes” when I suggest we get cake from Epi and watch a bad Disney movie. She’s always there to listen to me complain about my problems no matter how stupid they are and I always have two closets to choose from if I just can’t find anything to wear.

I know there are a lot of freshman right now that are worried about what their roommate thinks of them, or what they will be like if they will ever get past that awkward party friends stage, or if they will even like them. So I just wanted to share this story to let you know that sometimes the thing you are most worried about is the thing you never had to worry about at all.