I Discovered I Had Been the Difficult Roommate

I had lived with four different people across three shared flats in my twenties in Bengaluru and had, by 27, assembled from those experiences a fairly settled account of myself as a considerate and easy flatmate who had been unlucky with the people I had ended up sharing with.

The first had been untidy beyond reasonable tolerance. The second had been passive-aggressive about communal space. The third had been economically inconsistent in a way that affected shared bills. In each case I had the receipts and the memories and the self-account of someone who had tried and been let down.

At 27, at a mutual friend's gathering, I ran into Preethi, who had been in the second flat and whom I had not seen in three years. We talked, as people do in those circumstances, about that period of our lives.

Something in what she said about her experience of the flat produced a specific dissonance that I found myself sitting with on the drive home. She had not been unkind or accusatory. She had simply described the experience of living with me in a way that did not match the account I had been holding.

In her account I had been inconsistent about communal cleaning in ways I had not registered because my threshold for what counted as clean was genuinely different from hers, which I had treated as her standard being unreasonably high rather than ours being different. I had been noise-inconsiderate in the mornings.

I had managed disagreements about the flat in a way she had experienced as avoidant. I spent a week being defensive about this and then stopped being defensive and started being curious.

The account of myself as an easy flatmate had been assembled from my own perspective and had not incorporated the perspective of the people who had been sharing space with me.

Both things could be true: those flats had had difficulties that were genuinely shared, and I had contributed to those difficulties in ways I had been successfully not seeing.