When Anger Is Justified – Part 65: Arising Explosion: College Freshman Year – Section B

Arising Explosion – College Freshman Year – Section B

My Roommate

As time trailed on during my freshman year, I tried to make the best of a souring roommate situation. It was no secret around the campus how much my roommate hated me. My roommate despised me and proceeded to launch a smear campaign against me to have her room assignment changed with me.

When I first met my roommate, I had a sinking feeling that things would go downhill. I was not the roommate of her choice, and she was not the roommate of my choice either. Prior to school starting that semester, I had attended the second session of summer camp. The session was meant entirely for freshmen as a way of getting our feet wet prior to the start of campus life away from high school.

My original roommate was someone I had grown fond of over that initial week, and we hoped to be roommates when the new school year began. We had so much in common – similar personalities, similar dispositions, similar backgrounds, similar upbringings, and similar interests. We both got along so well together, and we were (are) both introverts. However, things did not work out as planned, and we were somehow matched with others to room with when the actual school year started.

So that is how I ended up with the roommate who absolutely despised me. Although she was nice in the beginning, it was all merely a courtship. Very soon afterwards, I encountered an extremely bossy and judgmental side of her. She hated my obvious quirks, and I hated her control. She could be likable, but everything had to be on her terms. As one can imagine, that is a problem for someone who longed for college to be a place of freedom away from narcissistically controlling parents.

Friction began almost immediately between my roommate and me because I refused to be controlled by her. She believed that it was her way or no way, and I was just not about living my life under those circumstances. She behaved as if she were entitled to telling me what to do about everything, and it was annoying. She had no room for other opinions but her own, and she loved to argue irrelevant points. She believed that my life best be ordered by her demands, and I was not going for that at all.

It was obvious to me that she possibly lived by her parents’ demands upon her and was projecting those demands upon me. One of my suitemates was the same way, and when she and my roommate would come together, my other suitemate and I would just stare holes into each other and sheepishly smile. It seemed that absolutely everything that I did elicited a response of ridicule and shaming from my roommate. She was extremely critical about every single thing I did.

If I wanted to sleep in on the weekend, I was lazy. Because I did not iron my bedsheets, I was untidy. When I did laundry and ironed a week’s worth of clothing in advance, I was wasting energy. When I would rather study alone than with her and the suitemates, I was weird, or worse, antisocial. If I did not want to eat certain foods, I was what she called a “fuddy-duddy”. I could not win with her at all. So I tried staying out of her way as much as possible.

My roommate reminded me so much of my father it was uncanny. Like my father, my roommate would create conflict where there was no conflict for the sake of having something to say to me. She even kept me awake at night with her complaining. She even did night raids of sneaking back on campus past curfew all hours of the night, and I would have to frequently help her climb back in through the windows.

She was a drama queen and madly in love with someone who frequently came to campus past curfew to see her. It was annoying to have to put up with conversations all times of the night when we had classes the next day. To her, I had no right to complain about anything since I lived, according to her, a dull life with no excitement anyway. She was consistently rude for what I felt was no reason, and I was growing a huge wad of anger over it despite voicing my thoughts to her about it.

One night, she snuck her boyfriend into our room, and that was the final straw for me.

My roommate: I thought you were my friend!

My roommate yelled in a loud whisper to me when I flicked on the light and demanded that her boyfriend leave.

Me: Only when it’s convenient for you, and right now, this is not convenient. Either he leaves or I do, and if I leave, I’m turning him in because my tuition pays for this room with you as my roommate – not him!

I was highly annoyed to the point of tears as her boyfriend laughed and told me to “get a life.” I felt that my boundaries had been violated by both my roommate and her boyfriend because they were both only a few feet from my own bed. Fortunately, I had on tacky pajamas that revealed absolutely nothing and left nothing to anyone’s imagination either, but still, I felt violated and disrespected.

Yet, I would not budge. I put on my bedroom slippers and my robe, and then grabbed my room key as a sign that I was not putting up with her. Enough was enough. My roommate’s boyfriend immediately jumped out of her bed to go into the bathroom where I could hear him tussling with clothing. Before he went inside, he looked at his girlfriend and said, “I thought she wouldn’t be a problem.”

My roommate: I hate you! If you get him in trouble, things won’t be good for you!

It was clear that my roommate was angry, but I did not feel she was justified in her anger. I felt she was selfish and disrespectful. She was breaking the rules and because I would not allow her to break the rules in the space that we shared, she was angry.

Me: Things already aren’t good for me.

After her boyfriend got himself together, she had the nerve to ask for my assistance in helping him to climb out of the window. I declined, of course. She did not want him to be caught, but I did not care. She was always breaking the rules. She threatened that if he was caught, she would lie and say that I helped her. I just glared at her while watching her help him climb out of the window.

Me: What makes you think I care? You’ve already talked trash about me anyway. Good luck on your way down (I said to her boyfriend turning away from both of them)!

It Gets Worse

My roommate did not respect me at all. She had no respect for my time, my sleep, my beliefs, my opinions, or my thoughts. She did not care about me at all. When I did hang out with her and our suitemates in the beginning, I somehow ended up being the brunt of all of her jokes. Her insults were relentless against me, and if I ever defended myself or talked back, then she would dramatically go deeply into me as if to strike me with a guttural blow of mean words.

Once when we went shopping at the mall, she wanted all of us (our suitemates and a few other girls that came with us) to do the usual runway catwalk through the mall to gain the attention of the young men hanging around. At the time, I was so naïve. I did not know that going to the mall was not necessarily about shopping around for items as much as it was for shopping around to get the attention of young men. There were no malls in my hometown area. Needless to say, on this particular “cat walk”, my roommate took to insulting me.

My roommate: I don’t even know why we bothered to bring her. (She spoke out but to no one in particular while glancing my way.) Whose going to talk to us when she’s bringing down our value? We all look like women except her. She still manages to look like a 12 year old.

My roommate laughed loudly when she said this as we passed by a group of young men and walked just beyond them. She then turned to me, pointed and said, “There’s a guy just for you.” When I responded that the guy was not my type and that I was not interested, she laughed and said, “You don’t really have any choices here. Looking like you do, you’d better take what you can get.”

I do not know why, but her comment was particularly stinging. It actually hurt me to the core. I marveled at how she could be so callous and cruel. I was quickly thrown back into a situation that reminded me of the mean girls I always avoided and dissociated from in middle and high school. My roommate was a mean girl and did not care about hurting my feelings. She found herself amusing and laughed at me.

I watched as a few of the other girls laughed too. The only one who did not laugh was the suitemate that I felt connected to, but even then, she could not look at me. I could see the look of guilt on her face though. Back then, I did not know the term narcissist, but I could think of some other class-less terms for my roommate. Looking back, however, I am not so sure she was a narcissist but was just rather more controlling, but she did have narcissistic character traits that were very troublesome.

My roommate thrived on publicly humiliating others for the sake of her own pleasure. For a time, I hated my freshman year and so much negativity was building upon it. I did not know it then, but a canon of anger was silently forming within me for an impending explosion. There were more situations that would exasperate this anger into full blown rage. I would never truly see it all coming my way until it was too late.

I never understood at the time what I had done to my roommate that made her so angry with me except that I would not bend to her will. My suitemates did not want to take sides, but they frequently allowed my roommate to vent to them. So, in essence, they had chosen her side in the end. It also did not help that the arrogant dormmate, whom I had frequent run-ins with until she was deployed, had also voiced her annoyance with my personality too. They would all frequently gather together to trash talk me and anyone else they did not like. It became a very lonely time for me.

However, the interesting thing is that the dorm representatives for the dormitory where we all stayed tried to remain neutral especially when my roommate went before them to lodge her complaints against me. She had insisted to them that I be removed from the room for being in what she called noncompliance, but the dorm reps could not find anything that would warrant my removal or the reasons for such harsh attacks of me by my roommate. The fact that I was an introvert who was more prone to wanting to have huge spurts of downtime away from people seemed to be my roommate’s greatest complaint.

My roommate complained that I did not want to spend much time with her or my suitemates, but together they were not very nice people. In the beginning when I would hang out with them, we were all getting to know each other. It was a given that my roommate had to be the one in charge. She was extremely bossy and mean. She believed that her upbringing had warranted her as being the superior of all of us, and she never wasted any time letting us know this.

My roommate wanted us to do basically everything together, and I needed free time alone. She had an extraverted personality, but I was (and still am) an introvert. Neither of the personalities is better than the other, but she did not see this as the case. In her eyes, there was something wrong with me. She simply did not believe I could go along to get along, and she was right. I could not. I did not want to be controlled, and for whatever reason, she believed she needed to control me. In fact, it seemed to be a part of her waking agenda!

However, because I stood in a headstrong stance against her, everything about my personality was a major affront to her own very domineering personality. In the end, I believe that was the major problem for her and some of the others. It was not that I was so introverted, but it was more that I was aloof to her and their demands. I did not allow her to dictate her plans over me. I did not allow any of my dormmates or campus-mates to dictate their plans over me. I resisted my roommate and others at every measure. I tried to remain true to myself.

The Showdown

My roommate frequently provoked arguments with me especially in front of others to not only have an audience for her dramatic displays but also to have witnesses that could attest to the fact that I was everything she claimed me to be. She could not stand the fact that I would tune her out and not react. I guess having years of practice with domineering parents and wading my way through the murky waters of dissociation from traumatic issues had afforded me this skill. I could always manage to make sure I was physically present anywhere but be frequently absent minded via dissociation.

Behaving indifferently without a shred of emotion was my go-to expression to show my roommate and anyone else that I could care less. Because of my indifference, my roommate absolutely hated me even more. One night she came into the room and packed her bags in such a dramatic way while I was working on an assignment as if I should have been moved to stop her. Yet, I did not flinch. I simply continued with what I was doing while watching her from the corner of my eyes. If she really wanted help with packing, all she had to do was ask me, and I would have happily helped her.

My roommate was loud about it all – flinging clothing and other objects out of her assigned dresser drawer, out of her closet, and out of the bathroom. She was attempting to illicit a response from me, but I remained silent and on task. I knew these games quite well. She mirrored a lot of the behavior that I thought I was escaping from at home. While in a fit, she mumbled obscenities, and as her voice grew louder, I could tell that she was incredibly angry. Even still, I remained silent. I remained seated, and I remained calm.

Then finally, she screamed at me in almost a shrill-like voice. I had no choice but to turn to look at her. She yelled so loudly that my suitemates entered into the bathroom we all shared to see the commotion.

My roommate: I’m so sick of you and your [insert explicative word here]! You make me so sick! I hate you so much right now. You make my skin crawl just looking at you.

I did not react, but I did look at her. I could tell she was furious with me, but I was truly clueless as to why she was as angry as she was at me. Her anger seemed to be a bit of exaggeration. What had I done?

My suitemates stood in the doorway from our shared bathroom looking on. I could hear stirrings within the hallway too. It was obvious that my roommate wanted a crowd around even if they were having to eavesdrop at our door.

My roommate: Nobody likes you. You’re antisocial as [insert explicative word here]! You have no more than a few words to ever say about anything. What the [insert explicative word here] is wrong with you?

I stared. There was not anything I could really say. There was really nothing I wanted to say. If I had told her what was wrong with me, would she really have listened? She had not attempted to listen to me about anything before … Ever. So it was pointless for me to say anything in that moment. I stared at her.

I watched her mouth move as she talked. I looked at her facial expressions and the expressions of her body. I was almost certain she may have been acting and thought humorously that she might have wanted to consider changing her major. One thing was certain, though … my simply staring at her without a response to her was very maddening for her. She gritted her teeth and her eyes pulsated waiting for me to respond … to say something … to do anything.

My roommate: I’m doing all I can not to lunge for you right now. You act so dumb and stupid. You act like the cat stole your tongue. You say nothing and sit there like a stoned statue. You act like you have no thoughts of your own. What are you programmed?

I still did not respond. I just looked at her body language. She was a bully. She had always been a bully from the moment I met her. She was tall and had a dominant figure. Had she lunged at me, I would have likely been hurt. Physically, I was tiny – no match for her at all. Defending myself would have rendered me useless, but as I sat there and continued to stare at her without a reaction, I realized in that moment I was far more powerful. My silent indifference angered her and pressured her on to say more. She was livid.

My roommate: I’m moving out of this dump! I’m leaving you. You have turned my freshman experience into something horrible, and I want to get away from you. I have no freedom. You control people with your silence. You are no fun! I hate you. We all hate you! Everybody hates you! You need to get some help. I can see why your family never contacts you … hardly calls you. You are not normal. They probably can’t stand to be around you as much as all of us!

She had gone for the jugular. She wanted me to hurt. My silent indifference had caused her a great amount of anger and she could only lash out against me regarding my family – a family whom she knew nothing about except that I had one and they did not call regularly. I always believed that they were giving me space. I was not a baby, and I did not need to be on the phone with my parents every second of the week. They called enough, and that was fine with me, but my roommate wanted to make it seem as if I were some reject even though at times I felt as if I was a reject.

But, despite all of the obvious blows the roommate landed upon my psyche, I did not have the desire to speak. I remained silent. I stared at her as a coated wave of burning fire circled around my face. My suitemates moved into the room to calm her down. She was hyperventilating, but it seemed a bit exaggerated and over the top to me. She deserved an Academy Award for the worst actress because her behavior was obviously fake.

Because of all the commotion within the room, the hallway was stirring with the pitter-patter of feet, and soon there was a knock on the door by the dorm representatives. One of my suitemates opened the door to allow them in. They had come to see what the commotion was all about because “we” were disturbing other people on the hall.

A dorm rep: You all are being so loud.

Me: I haven’t said a word. So, it’s not “we”. It’s her.

There was a silence that flooded the room when I spoke. I took a deep breath and sighed.

A dorm rep: What’s going on? What’s happened?

My roommate: I’m moving out! I can’t take her anymore.

It was obvious that my roommate meant she could not take me anymore and that I was the problem, but even the dorm reps were both puzzled.

A dorm rep: She seems fine and calm (directing her body towards me). Why are you so out of control? Do you realize how loud you are? (now directing her body back towards my roommate)

My roommate: She makes me this way! If you had to live with her, you’d see why.

A dorm rep: We cannot blame others for our actions. Take responsibility here. You are the one creating the disturbance. No one should be allowed to have that much control over your behavior.

How in the world was my roommate the victim when she was actually the aggressor? I was puzzled, but it was a crafty part of her continued smear campaign against me to make herself appear as the victim. She was the one causing all of the drama while appearing to be forced to discard me because of her obvious need to control and my obvious refusal to comply with her control.

I really did not care that my roommate was packing her things to leave. I was ready for her to go. I contained my composure enough to appear indifferent while secretly longing for a room to myself so I could finally have some peace. I was counting down time within my head. I was feeling on edge that she might have been teasing me and would change her mind later. I desperately wanted a break from her once and for all.

A dorm rep: Well, since you’ve decided to leave, it’s your choice, but it’s not necessary to make the entire dorm aware of your choice. You’re being far too loud.

Then both the dorm reps turned to me.

A dorm rep: Are you okay with all this?

Me: Sure.

My roommate: Oh wow! A word! She speaks! That’s the only thing she’s said this entire time!

My roommate obviously did not hear me when the dorm reps entered the room, but okay.

A dorm rep: Then clearly, we know who’s causing the problem here. Make sure you turn in your keys before you leave the dorm (now turning to my roommate who was visibly confused).

My roommate had just told on herself for creating the obvious and unnecessary drama. Yet, she called me dumb and stupid. That figures. Her look remained in a puzzling state because the dorm reps had not sided with her at all. They had sided with me. It was so in her face, and she was not happy about it.

When the dorm reps left the room, my suitemates also left the room after saying their goodbyes to my roommate. Despite their seemingly not taking sides during this confrontation, they had because they never said anything to me the entire time.

Another knock sounded at the door, and once opened, there appeared my roommate’s friend – her new roommate who had come to help her move her things. Together, she and my roommate made two to three trips without my roommate ever uttering another word to me. On her last round, I took that opportunity to finally voice myself. Inside of myself, however, I felt crushed … wounded even because I never would have intended for things to end this way.

Me: I’m sorry I couldn’t be the roommate you desired.

My roommate looked at me with contempt. Then she looked at her friend. They both laughed. “Can you believe her?” my roommate (now former roommate) said to her friend. Then she got the last of her things, slammed the door and left. I breathed a sigh of relief. She was gone. I had a room to myself, but as much as this ordeal had felt freeing, it had also heaved a great deal of emotional pain upon me. Inwardly I felt hurt. I hurt badly.

It felt like someone had pulled back a piece of my skin from a scab. I felt raw and opened, and so I sat at my desk allowing a stream of tears to roll down my cheeks. I watched as the tears fell into droplets onto the page of my history book. One tear drop landed on the word antiquity. That moment was the beginning of a transition into an abyss of depression for me. The most obvious emotion that I had not felt in a long time was now arising. I was angry, but I did not even know it. I had been angry for a long time, but it had been masked by feelings of numbness.

Stay tuned for what happened next.