What's the Point in All This Screaming? No One's Listening Anyway

"I don't need to pay a therapist to give me crap. I have a roommate that does it for free."

I am not a particularly hard person to live with. I get loud sometimes when I am on the phone, but I don't throw wild parties or blast my music at 3 a.m. (or ever). I am clean and I clean up after myself, but I am not ridiculously anal retentive about cleanliness (which my past roommates can attest to for better or for worse and which is remarkable considering how many things I am anal retentive about). I am relatively tolerant of others, and I am unlikely to tell someone that something they are doing bothers me unless it really bothers me because I recognize that living with other people means making compromises.

I know this because I have lived with lots of people. I have had fantastic roommates (all of my former roommates who read this blog fall into that category) and less fantastic roommates. But none of them ever blew up and yelled at me. And I never yelled at any of them (snapped once or twice, yes, but never yelled). And here's the thing: I don't yell at people. I cannot remember the last time I yelled at someone who I wasn't related to (and family is its own can of worms) before I lived here.

But I have been trying. I have been trying so hard. I have not blogged any rants about the roommates lately because I made a conscious decision that it is really hard to try to get along with people while you complain about them publicly (even if my public is quite small). I can count on one hand the number of comments I have made to my roommates in the recent past about things that bother me in the apartment. I have cleaned up disgusting messes that did not belong to me rather than ask the messer-upper to clean them up because I consciously decided that shalom bayit was worth those things.

Oh, I complained to friends more than I should have, and I am sure I did things that were annoying to my roommates that I didn't even realize. But I have been trying. I have been trying with all my might to make the best of a bad situation. Trying. Trying. Trying. And I am done.