Roommate from hell

When I went off to my first year of college, a 7 hour drive away from home, I had the bad luck of getting the roommate from hell. I actually had two roommates. One was nice. The other one, Monica, was nice...for about 5 minutes. She turned out to be a horrible evil bully who decided she hated me and stopped speaking to me, for no reason I could ever discern. I do remember that when my parents helped me move in, Monica, her parents, and her sister were all there, and her sister stared at me. Out and out STARED, as if I had a facial disfigurement. My dad said later he got the feeling the family had money, so maybe she was just a snob. But hello, we were all there at a state college! What the heck did she have to be snobby about!?  She finally drove me out of the room. The stress gave me shingles. Yes, shingles -- at age 18! At least I ended up in a room with a nicer bunch of people. But I was still shy, now with my confidence totally shaken, and I never recovered. I was so lonely, I ended up transferring to a different college after my freshman year. I really enjoyed the school I ended up graduating from...but I'm still angry about the whole thing.

And every few years or so, I go on a tear where I try to find her. I did that today, and I think I found her. She lives in New York City, which annoys me (that's MY city), and is a "lead technology recruiter" at "one of the fastest growing, privately-held business and technology firms in the United States" (barf). She must be earning a good salary, because she seems to have a not-often-updated Twitter account for work where she posted critically about how President Obama allegedly "doesn't think the wealthy are responsible for their own success." Of course a wealthy snob like her would write something like that.

BUT -- she does not seem to be married. Even on sites like WhitePages, which tells you other people who may be related to her, it's all females with her last name, and one male with her last name. I guess it's possible she did convince someone to marry her and made him change HIS name to hers. Or maybe she's a lesbian. Or perhaps she just never wanted to be in a relationship or get married. Nevertheless, I feel great schadenfreude at the possibility that even though she has a lucrative career, she may be very lonely. She certainly made me feel depressed and lonely at an extremely vulnerable time in my life.

Of course, the fact that I dwell on this every few years is not something I'm proud of. I'm certainly not hurting her...only myself. So I end up getting angry at myself for obsessing about this, and then I put it out of my mind for the next few years.

I'll tell you one thing, though. If something like that happened to me today, I'D be the one driving HER out of the room. I don't take sh*t like that anymore. It took me a while, but I did finally learn that I have to stand up for myself. We all do. Because if we don't, who will?