So the whole diet thing has been going out the window. I try to make sure that healthy is my only option when I snack. I go for a 30 minute walk every night just to make sure I get at least that much exercise in a day. I try to think more positively. Basically anything I can do to try to lose weight and get healthy. There’s just one problem…my roommate. For the last month my commitment to eating better, eating at appropriate times and exercising has been wavering.
Don’t get me wrong, I love her to death. She’s been my friend for almost 4 years. We’ve seen each other at our best and at our worst. Lately its been getting harder to.
She’s been having problems adjusting since day one, but I had already anticipated that. I had already taken into consideration that she’s never lived on her own and that she carries a lot of baggage before I even asked her to move in. I wasn’t sure what I was getting into, but I had a clear idea. We’ve had our arguments. we fight, we scream, we swear, but my feelings regarding our friendship never changed because at the end of the day the fights didn’t matter. Inevitably we talked things out and then we made each other laugh.
For almost a month now, she’s been escalating. She’s become increasingly more argumentative with everyone, including the neighbors. Depressed. Needy. She’s been snapping at the drop of a hat and easily defensive, even in quiet and civil conversations. Crying and whining all the time.
Her depression has gotten so bad most of the time, I don’t even want to leave my room except cook or get ready for work. I can’t even sit down and watch TV, knit or read in the livingroom without her immediately dropping whatever it is she’s doing and coming to sit near me and just talks non stop about the same shit everyday. Everytime I give her the same tough love pep talk. She’ll have a moment of clarity and then a few hours later she’s back into this black hole.
I watched as she did the same thing to a mutual friend of ours who ended up lying saying that he had to go do something just to get away from her. He thinks she’s just trying to get attention, but with depression it is never a good idea to assume. She’s been doing it to my boyfriend too. Yeah, I think he gets some sort of enjoyment out of it, analyzing people, but we haven’t been dating that long, and I’m really uncomfortable with her dumping all of that shit on him EVERYTIME and the WHOLE TIME he is over. He goes to work and school. Like everyone else, he’s got shit on his plate. Seriously, let the man relax. Sheesh.
I try as nice as I can to ask her for space. Its automatically interpreted as her being a burden or that I don’t want to be there for her. She has been doing that with everyone. Being black and white. Assuming that just because someone needs space means that they hate her and that she screwed up. I am not sure if she actually feels that way or if its a guilt trip…either way she always ends up making me feel like shit when I try to ask her to leave me alone.
She’s got this idea that doctors are only in it for the money. That they don’t really care about her. I tried explaining that mental health is rarely a lucrative career path. They aren’t in it for the money. Sometimes I think it’s this belief that makes her so dependent on friends for therapy and why she beats herself up every time she loses a friend. She thinks that because someone is nice to her and says “I love you” means they’re looking out for her best interests more than a professional.
I wish she could understand that I do love her. I want to be there for her. I want to be a good, supportive friend…but, she’s not the only one who deals with a mental illness and there’s only so much I can do for her. Some days she’s emotionally taxing and on more than one occasion I found myself going into a depression because of it. Occasionally, I just need my space, whether to be by myself or with someone else. I wish I knew how to ask her that without feeling guilty after.
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