A couple of months ago I received a job opportunity in a new town, and I needed a place to stay while I started work and saved up some to get a new place in a new town. A friend of mine who lived there opened up her house to me (for $500 monthly rent). I came to find out that her rent for the whole house is $1,000. So I was paying half the rent really but barely getting use of my own room.

I have PTSD and major depression. Going back to work has been a major struggle. So I admit, I probably did not help out as much as I could have with household chores. But I REALLY tried to help out, even did her dirty dishes, wiped down the counters all the time...but I guess in her mind if she didn't see it happen then I didn't do anything. Granted, I didn't wash my bed sheets very often, but they're my bed sheets, why should she care? I ended up buying new bed sheets because she wanted the one pair she had for the spare bedroom to be able to put on the sofa in case she had a friend crash with us. I was like okay, I'll just buy a pair.

So granted, I wasn't perfect, but neither was she. She has numerous cats and the litterbox, which was in the front room, always smelled like cat poop. It was disgusting. The house was either excruciatingly hot or freezing cold. I was never allowed to touch the thermostat. Plus, she had, from the beginning, a very cold, negative demeanor. It's like the second she had to actually have a roommate (and she said it would be helping her out to have a roommate for a while, financially) she turned into this blob of negative energy. And with my PTSD and depression, I just ended up hiding in my room like all the time. Furthermore, she was downright mean to my service dog like all the time. Always yelling at him for no reason. She would call her cats in this high-pitched voice and when my dog would respond, she'd get mad...but what's he supposed to do? Dogs don't know English, just that she's calling in a high-pitched voice.

So things came to a head when I cooked some fish in the house and it ended up smelling the house up and we just had to wait for it to air out. I went to throw the fish in the outside garbage can (cause I don't want it to stink the house up, of course), and she yelled at me for throwing it in the outside garbage can and told me that I had to double bag it and freeze it and wait until garbage day and then I could throw it away. Okay, now I don't know what crazy garbage rule this is, but I've never heard of freezing garbage. I've put spoiled food in outside garbage all the time and not had a problem. I do not believe I deserved to be yelled at for this.

So the next day, before she got home from work, I packed some bags and went to stay at a motel. I had already signed the paperwork for a new apartment so I was going to be moving out in a week anyways, but I couldn't bare to be in her OCD, controlling presence any longer. I didn't tell her I was leaving either, because she never told me where she was going ever when she left the house or stayed at her boyfriend's overnight.

So when I go back Saturday to get some of my stuff, she asks if we can talk, and I say no, because I'm upset and don't want to talk right then, but she ignores that, and demands her key back (well, I paid rent for the whole month so that pissed me off), and I said well, I still need to come by Wednesday to pick up the rest of my stuff. And she said that I could make an appointment with her to come by and get my stuff. So I was like fine whatever, you can have your key back.

And she starts in on me, "for the last three months I have done nothing but clean up after you..." which is not true..."you haven't done any chores..." ********, I've done plenty of chores, I brought up cleaning up after her, to which she says that every time I washed dishes that she had to redo them after me because they weren't clean enough. Which she never TOLD me, so how would I know that I wasn't doing a good enough job? Then after basically calling me a filthy slob she yells at me about the door hanging crooked off the hinge, which it was when I moved in. And I said, it was like that when I moved in, and you know it because you told me about it. And she's like no, it's a lot worse now, you should've mentioned it to me. Well I assumed that since she told me about it when I moved in that she already knew about it, duh!

Anyways, I have to go Wednesday to pick up the rest of my stuff. I wish I didn't have to go alone but so far I don't have anyone to go with me.

I'm not at all claiming to have been a perfect roommate. I should've made more of an effort, but I have a feeling no matter how much an effort I made, that it wouldn't have been enough because she's OCD bat ***** crazy. I don't even know why I'm friends with her in the first place because she just has this constant negative energy about her. It's like she hates everyone and everything except her stupid smelly cats.

One of her cats ran away after I had been living there a few weeks and I spent weeks helping her look for that damn cat, all around town, but do I get any credit for that? Nope.

Part of me doesn't want to lose a friend and find a way to patch this up, and part of me is like, I have to let it be for a while. I really haven't voiced at all my opinion to her yet about how she was not the perfect roommate she thinks she was, because I was too upset when she confronted me on Saturday. Part of me wants to write her an email and tell her I'm sorry that she was disappointed in me but that she wasn't as perfect as she thought she was either. I don't know. She has no empathy, it seems like, and only sees things from her perspective, clearly.

Would love advice on how to deal with this.

Seesaw