“Dear Jen,

We’re no longer happy being roommates with you. This arrangement isn’t working for us, so we want you to find another place to live and we'll give you until the end of the month to move out.”

Yours,

Matt & Beth

To be honest I should have seen this coming. 👀

Fresh out of college and landing a spacious, sun-drenched, Edwardian flat in SF, with drama-free roommates? Just too good to be true.

Still, I froze.

Didn’t I get a say? I pay ⅓ of the rent. I have rights, goddammit!

Stunned silence morphed into cold rage as I crumpled the note.

If this were a Hollywood flick, right now you’d be in a flashback to three months prior when I’d helped Beth tell our ex-roommate Paul she wanted him to move out.

See - should’ve known. 🙄

Honestly... Paul was fine. He wasn’t a total dreamboat of a housemate. (Is anyone?) But whatever problem Beth had passively-aggressively griped about since I moved in… I didn’t see it.

⚡️Newsflash: 45-minute showers are really only a problem at 8.30 am, Beth.

Apparently, I was now the blindsided offender.

After a few therapy sessions and 20 years’ distance from the backstabbing, passive-aggressive fakery opportunity for growth… I learned two important lessons that I still refer to today.

Both useful for handling ‘tricky people’… in business and in life:

Lesson #1:

Be more discerning about who you call a friend. (And if you feel pressured to ‘go along’ with them because you want them to like you, reassess the relationship.) It was time to listen to my gut more and speak up rather than keeping quiet and seething silently.

Lesson #2:

What other people think of you doesn’t define who you are. You get to decide who you become based on how you respond and grow from these experiences. It’s about the meaning you give it.

That’s why it’s important to have hard conversations early.

Because the earlier you have them, the easier they are.

And you know what happens when you ignore the warning signs… one of you ends up blindsided or bubbling with concealed rage.

Freewriting in those pivotal moments can absolutely help by letting those emotions spill on the page. As writer Joan Didion said, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking.”

For me, I write to understand what I’m feeling. When I have challenges like the one with Beth, my head is so muddled I need to sort through a range of emotions to get the core of what I’m really feeling.

Then I can have a conversation about it.