3/17

in some ways, i don't think one's age should matter anymore. shouldn't a person's experiences, his or her lifestyle, his dreams and aspirations; shouldn't all that matter more than when a piece of paper (well, your mum & dad as well) says you first appeared in this world?
the reason why i say that is because up until thursday, i lived in a flat of six twenty-year olds. don't get me wrong, i like twenty-year olds. heck, i am one! i think we're still not completely ruined by the realities of society, but we're not quite as exuberant and ignorant as teenagers sometimes are. as an american twenty-year old, i'm on the brink of deciding my future. so i really don't think that there's anything wrong with being twenty!
however, i felt worlds apart from my flatmates. not in terms of my personal habits and lifestyle, i could deal with that. i knew that most of my flatmates were totally into partying, getting high, etc. lots of university students are, and i am used to that. what did bother me, however, was the fact that they had little or no respect for my concerns and bothers. sure, some people did care, but as i described to my boyfriend on the phone last week, in there "i feel like i'm suffocating."
what really hurt me in that flat wasn't the fact that tomii continuously smoked pot in the kitchen (despite it being a non-smoking flat), or that katy liked to listen to her music so loud it made my bed vibrate, or even that people left dirty dishes piled up in the sink for weeks on end. what hurt was that if i asked tomii to close the door to the kitchen, he would, but he wouldn't make a habit out of it. when i asked katy to turn down her music, she might be inclined to slightly lower the bass, but her typical response was "it's not that loud." when i chose to do my own dishes but leave those of my flatmates in the sink, i was branded as "wrong." that's what hurt.
it's also why i realised that i had to leave the flat. when john visited, he saw my flatmates walking all over me while all i simply wanted to do was live, and he told me so. i went to housing to request to be moved. in the process, i had to tell them that tomii smoked frequently in the kitchen, but i certainly didn't complain behind his back: i'd spoken with him on many occasion about it. it's just that i realised that in order for me to even live, i was going to have to leave the flat.
in the process of waiting for a room to open up, the thing that really annoyed me was when one flatmate told me how i had no right to complain about the smoking without telling her, how i should just deal with it. how i'm always the one who doesn't clean up after others, how i should just accept that i will have to clean up their stuff. how i'm in europe now, and everyone smokes. how everyone in the flat got on well until i came along. even though i knew i was about to move out, it didn't matter. having someone bitch to you doesn't help. i've always felt this girl was a bitch; her telling me all this just proved it.
and it also proved that i should listen to my instincts. i never slept well in that flat, and i was contemplating moving out from the first day. now i'm getting eleven hours of sleep per night, and my flatmates respect me.
maybe it's just that we have similar habits. we're in a non-smoking flat, so no one smokes. you're expected to clean up after yourselves, not after others all of the time. nobody here listens to music at the expense of others.
or maybe it's just that they're all in their late-20s, and have lived on their own for a long time. long enough to know that you have to be considerate of others if you're to live with them. that not everybody will get along, but if you're living together, at least attempting to is a necessity.
i don't hold any grudges against the girl who found it necessary to scream at me; i pity her. since beginning college three years ago, i've realised that you have to do what's best for you. if you have a problem with someone else, you do what's necessary to fix it. but you can't scream at someone because you think that their habits are "wrong." my habits were different from my flatmates', but that's why i decided to move out. i was the one who decided i couldn't live there with people who didn't respect me.
but maybe it just means that i've grown up. i think it's good that everyone has their own individual lives, and i would never ruin that. but i've had more experiences on my own than my flatmates ever had, and i'm more independent. i'm also more willing to respect the lives of others, however annoying they may be. that's why i tried to live in that flat for two months. it's also ]why it sucks to be stereotyped as simply being twenty years old. because twenty is just a number, and a number certainly can't tell the story of kirsten.