The first time I had roommates in a private housing setting was in college when two other roommates and I decided that we were paying too much for living on campus in New Haven. Right after we signed the lease, one of my roommates finally heard back from financial aid, and was given a chance to study abroad in North Africa. I was surprised but happy for her, but I was quickly focused on enduring my living situation, because the other roommate began using a subletter mess with me, a game that did not end until the subletter left. Most of the time, I enjoyed not being at home or keeping to my room to avoid dealing with their bullying. At that time, I learned that communal living is not a problem for me, but it will reveal the nature of anyone who I thought I knew under more casual circumstances.
Another roommate was 420 friendly, which I could not care less about, but I was very cautious about putting my name on any shared paperwork because this individual complained all the time, hoping that someone else would relieve her of all financial responsibilities. My previous website had failed to provide income, so I was vulnerable when I moved into her place, and already I was required to pay $352 to maintain the electricity–which was not under her name. During the majority of the experience, this roommate constantly complained and insulted everyone around her, and retreated into self-loathing when called on her behavior. The final straw was when she began refusing to pay bills to coerce me into signing contracts with my name on the bills, even though I had provided the money. Shortly after I left to avoid being further extorted, she was evicted based on her inability to lure anyone else into cohabitation.
When I became flat broke after racial justice consulting, a friend provided resources that I shared with a colleague that I met during an activist project. Instead of being grateful for the help, she proved that she had only been using everyone’s sympathy to gain undeserved resources for herself, and began trying to insult me so that my self esteem would be low enough to keep me under her control. Sometimes, she would “accidentally” forget that I could be locked in my bedroom, and I had to beg her for release. She finally realized that she could be legally liable when it happened on the morning of my mother’s funeral, and she never “forgot” again.
That did not stop the financial extortion, and I continued to receive a bombardment of abusive texts that ended with demands for money. Once she realized that I was not swayed by her nonsense, she resorted to stalking at home and refusing to let me have quiet enjoyment without surveillance. Later, when I had escaped and refused to contact her ever again, she sent creepy gifts from fake addresses to the home of my grieving father, until I told him to return them. I caught her working at my same place of employment, where she tried to badmouth and stalk me again, which I thoroughly ignored. When she was finally seen as the problem she was to everyone around her, she tried to regain the friendship, but I refused to engage with her, forcing her to find another target.
Ironically, I escaped the stalker and was manipulated into another attempted coercion into joint bills, this time through cellphone service. Despite not contributing much to a household, this roommate thought that people would include them on legally binding documents and continue to pay after they wreaked havoc in the lives of others. We had originally been working together, but I contacted our supervisor, who also saw the truth, and was able to disengage from this individual. They tried all sorts of methods to reconnect the household they destroyed, hoping that they still had wells to tap from all of us, but out of three roommates, only one likely stayed in contact. They also had a nasty habit of preying on Black women, which is another reason why I stayed away from them afterwards.
Earlier this year, I had a friend of 15 years who I begged for a place to stay after failing to secure a job in my new location, and she swore that she was unbothered by the prospect, especially since we would each have our own bedrooms and bathrooms. In the beginning of the week and a half, everything was respectful and we barely saw each other. By the end of the week, she was internally justifying eavesdropping on conversations and demanding validation for feelings as a result. Then, she thought that she would demand my presence at a hostile location which I had already warned her was off-limits for me. Finally, she realized that her attempts to control me were not working, and kicked me out to find shelter where she would not be reminded that she did not have the right to control other adults. I only agreed to see her one other time since.
The first night I moved into the shared housing, someone offered to carry my luggage to my room. The housemate made me uncomfortable, but I could not say why, so I continued to be cordial until that individual started harassing me about my job while interfering loudly once I acquired employment. This individual made a point of forcing his existence on everyone around, and the majority of us just got used to it. The final straw came once he started harassing another housemate on imagined theft, but refused to clarify confusion. The household unanimously asked the manager to get this housemate out, and after moving over a couple of units, he left at the beginning of August. People who need too much attention and start harming others will destroy a household of 10 or more people.
During the next month, there was a new roommate who started off giving three different names, so nobody knew who he really was. Within a week, he was smoking in the bathroom, using other people’s belongings, and stealing food from others even though other housemates helped people get free food. One particularly disgusting afternoon, this housemate decided to boil pasta in wine, and the entire house smelled until another housemate made a point of making bread. When he was finally called out on taking other people’s things and acting like he lacked common sense, he retaliated by breaking the sink so that the household was forced to wash dishes in the adjacent bathroom. Half the household blew up the owners’ phones, and he was forced to move for the second time in two weeks–into the unit with one of the property managers. Only after he left did another housemate tell me that this creep had been dropping cigarette ash into my soap dish when I put my soap out to dry.
Well, I forgot that as the empire becomes more comfortable with its bigotry, my attempts at advocacy will be seen as “uppity” and “rude,” and that was exactly what happened after the final roommate got moved. Despite everyone blowing up the manager’s phone, none of us heard anything until after the weekend, when the manager finally revealed being aware of the entire situation. Everyone was disgusted and when someone reached out after the kitchen was destroyed despite my sending a detailed email, I initially refused to respond. Afterwards, the property manager whined to one of my white housemates about how “rude” I was for not engaging with someone who ignored me. Only in the empire can someone racially profile someone after being held accountable for disengagement.
Truth: people with too much confidence and too little impulse control are running around unchecked on the planet creating abusive atmospheres. Communal living actually exposes such people instead of letting them hide behind their own financial bubbles. Even after all these terrible experiences, it is important to learn how to live with other without causing much of a disturbance. Living with family allows familiarity to breed bad habits, but living with strangers requires that people either get their acts together, or be forced to be confronted with the truth of who they actually are. Single living is not environmentally sustainable, so people will share, and this will shape society into either a more tolerant or violent socioecosystem.
Chasing A Dying Empire 