Abby Connolly
Living peacefully with your first college roommate doesn’t always come naturally. And sometimes, it never happens.
One young woman recently had to suggest to her roommate to seek out a single dorm because of her mental health issues.
She’s 20, and her roommate is 18-years-old. For the last two months, they’ve been living together in a dorm for their first semester of college. They were moved into a very small dorm, and things were initially okay since they got along face-to-face. But unfortunately, as the semester progressed, her roommate started exhibiting strange behavior.
“She’s a very quiet person but is comfortable enough with me to share her history with mental health problems, and early on, I agreed that every Thursday, I’d avoid the dorm for an hour so she could attend a Zoom meeting with her therapist,” she explained.
“About a month in was when her mental health issues started affecting the way she took care of everything.”
For instance, they each have mini fridges in their dorm room, and she began to notice that anytime her roommate opened hers, it released a foul stench. While her roommate was in class, she looked inside her fridge and saw spoiled milk and rotting fruit in it.
When she asked her roommate what was going on, her roommate said she put an apple in there at the beginning of the semester and wanted to see “how long it would take for it to rot.” Although she was disgusted, she politely asked her roommate to throw it out, but her roommate said no.
Her roommate is a generally messy person, too. She leaves garbage and laundry piled up and often ignores messes, making their entire room smell bad. Plus, her sleep schedule is not great, and she tends to sleep from 7:00 p.m. all the way until almost noon the next day.
“[She] makes it really hard for me to be in there since that’s literally the only time I spend in the dorm,” she said.
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