Getting to Know You

One of my housemates and I had a conversation the other day.

It's very refreshing, getting older. Roommate confrontations begin to look more like Companionship Inventory and less like sibling violence. Companionship Inventory, for the uninitiated, is a phrase from LDS mission life. When you serve a full-time LDS mission, you are asked to work constantly. Each hour should be accounted for in some productive capacity. Missionaries are also assigned a companion that must be with them all the time. When the companionship is struggling (often) or is new (every six weeks or so), the work suffers, so the missionary leaders created a solution: Companionship Inventory time, or time to spend as needed in repairing or strengthening the relationship between companions. A missionary is given one CI hour per week, if necessary. Some companionships don't ever take the time because they don't have any trouble getting along, but if there is discord for whatever reason, it's best to talk it out as soon as possible and get back to work. Communication, as a strategy, certainly improves on the "bottle it up until you explode" pattern often practiced by teenagers and young people. These communications are a controlled explosion to bleed off tension. Although, when I got along with my companion really well, we would sometimes use our assigned CI time to have an ice-cream and chat about our families. Sometimes it's just a break. It doesn't have to be emotional catharsis.

Saturday night was, though. Catharsis, I mean, for one of us at least. Several months ago I realized that although I had wished to be friends with my roommates when I moved in, it wasn't going to happen. They had no desire to relate to me, and all my efforts to be friends were casually repulsed. So I gave up, and tried to adapt to loneliness. Oh, we're friendly enough. I have gotten us into the habit of a cheerful greeting and exchanging a few sentences of smalltalk when we use the kitchen. But we're not friends. I can feel their distaste.

Actually, they're friends with each-other. It's just that none of them are friends with me. I often see the pattern. There's always one person in the house who just does her thing. In this house, I'm that girl.

Amid Jerr's tearful and heartfelt confession of passive-aggressive antagonism, and back-handed complaints that I don't clean the bathroom often though (a legitimate concern, if couched in absurd rhetoric), she said she has tried, but doesn't understand me. That had already become obvious. The thought screaming in my head, though, was "when did you ever TRY!?" Aloud, all I said was "I told you so."

The time to express such concerns passed quickly. Jerrilynn suffered a bad car accident Sunday morning, and is in a world of trauma, pain, and expert problem-solving. Our conversation is nearly forgotten. The aftermath is simply this: I am trying to be a better roommate, because self-improvement is high on my list of priorities. Also, Jerrilynn pops her head into my room more often to chat about her latest car drama, and I smile and listen. I even enjoy listening, because I am that kind of person. Because I am the one who answered the phone when she needed a ride to the medical center, and I am the one who offered her my Sunday morning.

But we are not friends, and she is no closer to understanding me, despite my verbal self-explanations. I understand her stories about car insurance; car insurance is (should be) universal. I understand her stories about finding God, about talking to boys (less so, but I'm very interested), about her favorite television show. She gave me an odd look and expressed bitterness the last time I tried to tell her a story about riding the bus. She thinks I'm juvenile, lazy, and waste too much time. She would curl up into an insecure, defensive porcupine if I tried talking about my PhD program. Her brain can't even wrap itself around the idea that I FORGET things, because the things I forget are so high on her priority list, and nearly non-existent on mine. It only gets more parental from there.

This is my subsequent theory.
The key to understanding somebody - ANYBODY (including God) - is to spend time with them doing something they enjoy. Listen to them, and respond sympathetically. If you can't or don't do that, then complaining that you don't understand is just really. . .ill-thought-out. Like taking a bunch of anatomy classes and then complaining that you can't solve an algebra problem.