I Don’t Feel Fully Comfortable in My Own Home

When COVID hit, we all watched our lives change dramatically.

In more ways than one.

Three months ago, things changed even more for my household. A good friend of ours was in a crisis situation, making his housing set-up dangerous for his safety and mental health.

In the middle of this pandemic, we took our friend in to offer a safe place to land.

That same friend has struggled with alcoholism for over a decade, and upon arriving to us expressed a desire to turn his life around. Get sober, get his feet back under him, and finally live the life he’s always deserved.

He’s been sober for 7 months while with us. He’s been healing from an emotionally harmful living situation that caused years of trauma. He’s talking with an addiction therapist bi-weekly, and he’s applied to go back to school to get his high school diploma starting next semester.

Our friend is quite literally thriving in every way possible.

And that’s beyond amazing — more progress than we could have ever imagined!

I, however, am not thriving.

And that creates a lot of conflicting feelings as we navigate this new living situation.

No one promised this would be convenient or comfortable.

My husband and I knew that reality coming in.

It was no question for us to take our friend in — we show up for the people we love. We’ve done it a few times now with friends in tricky living transitions, so this was no different.

But we also knew the reality wasn’t going to be sunshine and rainbows. We didn’t have any rose-coloured glasses on when we went into this arrangement.

We were having an addict move in with us to recover towards sobriety. He has a lot of trauma to work through, and that brings with it its own brand of chaos.

And all the while, both my husband and I are working from home full-time. Under the same roof, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. During an already challenging, ever-changing pandemic lifestyle.

But at the end of the day, despite the realistic and reasonable struggles we could expect, our love and support for our friend wasn’t even a question.

We couldn’t fix him, or heal him, but we could offer a safe space for him to land and do the work for himself.

When your home and workplace are one-in-the-same, a constant extra presence weighs on a person.

I love our friend.

I am proud beyond words of his progress.

As someone who lives with diagnosed PTSD myself, I recognize better than most how gritty and complex the journey is to heal from significant trauma.

I simultaneously wish that he would leave the house every once in a while. Like going to hang out at a friend’s place for the evening, or going out for a walk, or something… anything.

All the love in the world for this dear friend of ours — but I’m also an introvert and a homebody, who loves her habits and requires time alone/space to recharge.

Add into that mix that I’m an empath? I feel the energy of others, and it affects my own energy.

The introvert in me is desperate for a full recharge, and feels like she can never get all of her energy back.

Even if we are on entire opposite sides of the house.

And that’s not in any way his fault.

It’s nothing he’s doing — he’s otherwise been a pleasure to live with, and a considerate roommate.

It’s just his presence — his being here, all the time.

And it’s in no way fair for me to hold that against him.

Missing the superficial things doesn’t mean my feelings take priority in this equation.

The things I miss most? Some are very valid.

The biggest one is having an extra adult presence equals extra energy in our home — that energy is palpable to me and it seeps through the floorboards. It takes emotional energy from me like a slow leak from a tap.

I also just feel overwhelmed because of this, with a consistent feeling of people overload.

Especially as someone who lives with diagnosed PTSD, that’s not a small matter, and can be a significant factor in the quality of my own healing journey.

As for the superficial things?

I miss walking around the house in the morning braless in my lacey housecoat as I prepare my morning tea.

I miss opening a bottle of wine and having a glass while making dinner (as we have removed all alcohol from our home in solidarity with our roommate’s sobriety). In all truth? I’d maybe do that only once a month anyways… but there’s something about not being able to do something when you want to that wears on you. I know a lot of people who have felt this same way during quarantine.

Bottom line? My desire to putter around my house braless in a housecoat, or having a glass of wine while cooking, does not take importance over our dear friend’s life-changing recovery.

Both of those things can exist in the same space and still have validity… but I’m sure all of us can agree that a monthly glass of white wine doesn’t trump someone finally successfully living in sobriety after 10 years of daily addiction.

As I said before, I knew this would be uncomfortable and inconvenient. How could it not?

That said, there are struggles I am having that are major concerns. Struggles that my husband and I discuss regularly, and are keeping an eye on. Because we both know that we can’t sacrifice one person’s mental health for the benefit of another who realistically has other housing options available.

Again, these opposite sentiments can both exist at once, without invalidating one another.

Final word.

I am a creature of habit — and the best thing about habits?

They can be changed and adapted.

That means I am intentionally trying to troubleshoot my way into a better daily habit routine that offers me the restoration I need to have a balanced lifestyle, while still making this living arrangement work.

We forecast our friend living with us for at least another year.

I’m not going to lie, that reality makes me a little nervous. Especially as we come into winter, when I enter hibernate-mode and go outside even less, I have no doubt it will be a bit of a struggle for me.

But I’m committed to doing all within my power to make this work, while keeping my own mental health top of mind.

This is the most selfless thing I have ever done in my life, and all the while I battle the strong desire to be selfish and cater to my own comfort. Life isn’t easy, healing isn’t pretty, but from my experience, it’s worth seeing through all of the bumps in the road.

A version of this article was originally published by the author on Medium.