Y'know how Facebook does that thing, where it shows you stuff you posted on the same day years ago, giving you an option to share it as a memory?
Well, this morning when I logged in I was greeted with a post from four years ago, a lovely picture of a plate of scrambled eggs and toast with Vegemite, accompanied by a mug of coffee on the table on the back verandah at my old house. You know what, I'll just post the photo itself.
Now, and apparently back then I was living in my first share house. I am still living in a sharehouse now, four years later, and so much and yet so little has changed.
The people I lived with back then were incredibly nice, just lovely people. Really they were basically the best one could hope for when moving in with a bunch of total strangers, it should have been a great time. And I did enjoy it for a while, the house was beautiful, everyone was nice to me (apart from maybe one woman, kind of the boss of the house, expecting me to do dishes fairly regularly), it was in a great, scenic neighbourhood with a lot of character and there was a bus stop right across the street from which you could easily reach the city.
But before long-- well, I'm not actually sure just how long I lived there, I think it was a while so it didn't happen too quickly-- I started to develop an irrational dislike of these people. It soon upgraded to what honestly felt like hatred at times. I can't remember exactly what thoughts and feelings led to this, but at the base of it I think it was my anxiety, constantly keeping me on edge in a shared dwelling, perhaps added to by my impaired hearing.
I remember faintly hearing people moving about the house and feeling too shy to go see what they were up to and/or join them, which ended up becoming dislike. And if I heard someone laugh, I would jump to the illogical conclusion that they were talking about me, mocking me for whatever reason.
Living with people seems to be something I just can't cope with. I need space. When I live with someone there's constant anxiety that I might have to interact with my housemates, and whenever I leave my room and enter a common area it's like going into a warzone.
When I
am in my room I find myself compelled to be as quiet as possible, fearing to make any noise that might be heard outside, and the slightest sound
I hear from my housemates becomes massively loud and irritating to me.
It's almost as though my subconscious desperately tries to come up with reasons to hate whoever I'm living with, rather than just accepting that my fears and dislikes are irrational, hence the near-paranoia I described earlier.
I ended up leaving that house very abruptly, getting my mother (probably the root cause of my mental issues, truth be told) to come pick me up with my stuff as I somehow forced myself to go to the room of two of my housemates, a middle-aged couple who basically ran the house, and telling them I was leaving. Quite a scary thing to do, for me- far too confrontational.
Obviously I didn't really have a reason other than I couldn't cope with living with people, but they were as always extraordinarily accepting and understanding. I think they got the fact that I had anxiety issues around other people and they forgave that. And so, with a brief goodbye to my other housemate (who heard me carrying my stuff out to the car and came out to express surprise that I was leaving), I gave up and fled the situation for no real reason outside of my neurosis; a recurring theme in my life to be sure.
Since then, I've experienced this phenomenon on several other occasions.
Obviously my current housemates are far, far worse than those lovely people I lived with four years ago, but from what I remember I disliked those ones just as much as I do these ones for far less reason. And even when I lived in Melbourne until earlier this year, living with a couple of old friends from high school and earlier, I began to despise them for mostly-non-existent reasons as well. There
was one other housemate (later two) whom I had actual
reason to dislike, with his loud, braying voice piercing through the whole house as he blathered on at length about any inconsequential topic interspersed by a variety of annoying verbal tics, but I am more saddened by how living with my "friends" turned me against them for pretty much no reason.
The smallest inconvenience would inflate to a huge issue and a personal attack against me. I even started hating them simply because their lives were so much more successful, and they had so much more "gumption" than me, basically. They had far more friends than I did and generally seemed far better equipped to cope with the world.
...Great, so I can add
"jealousy" to the list of irrational feelings that make it impossible for me to live with people.
Hadn't really thought of that before. Anyway, this rant is running out of steam. I probably had more points I wanted to address about my failings in life, but I'm hungry now and have forgotten them.
Basically, social anxiety rules my life, destroys anything good in it and keeps everything I want out of reach forever.
...
Oh jeez, this has become a huge wall of text. I'm sorry, but well. I am Sad, and this is the Sad thread.
I would spoiler the whole mess, but that would mess up the spoiler around the image up there and generally wreck everything.
How about a Tl;dr? Tl;Dr: Yoink recounts his many failures in the realm of shared accommodation, which until such a day as he manages to somehow get his shit together and find profitable employment, is the only form of accommodation he is reasonably able to afford. This is rather upsetting for Yoink and for some reason he decided to have a big whine this morning.
What a lame jerk. 
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9494085 times)