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Living with my sister as an adult is the only living situation that has ever made sense to me and has been the best living experience. She is the best roommate I’ve ever had. And now I’m fearful of living with anyone else.
My sister was born when I was 2, so before I moved to college we had 16 years in training of living together by growing up together. When you’ve known someone their entire life, you know them the best. Â
During my years of elementary I resented whenever she’d try to interject herself into my play dates, during puberty all I did was banish her from my room in horomonal rage, and in high school I was so busy with school and dance and the little social time I could carve out for my friends; that I barely saw her. But during lockdown I was unemployed and out of school so the only socialization I could garner, other than with my parents, was with my little sister.
We smoked a lot of weed together in 2020, and that changed things. Now she tries to kick me out of her bedroom when I want to pester her with my daily musings and she just wants to chill.
I’ve had many roommates before moving into an apartment with my sister almost two years ago. Most of those living situations and relationships combusted over: lack of communication, miscommunication, or poor communication. None of these has ever, or will ever cause my relationship with my sister to end, because she is my sister so naturally we say everything to each other with the utmost candor and bluntness and anything left unsaid is just mutually understood.
Normal roommate arguments that sometimes lead to catastrophic arguments or ends of friendships are resolved within 10 seconds to 5 minutes with my sister. If we have a fight and she slams her door, within the hour she will be DMing me IG reels from her room. When we clean each other’s hair from the shower drain it’s less irritating knowing it’s the same DNA.
It’s nice having an adult relationship with your sister because now you can talk about adult things: your fuck ass situationships, break ups, how mid the sex was, fears of the future and the present, etc. and you can watch the same music videos you watched as kids but in your own living room, on your own TV. You play the same old wii games on your old wii but in your apartment. The same games that you once played for entire full day periods as kids. She keeps me up to date on everything celebrity news-oriented because she’s on Twitter all day and I’m not, but she knows I appreciate being in the loop and knowing what’s of cultural relevance on any given day.
You can judge each others life choices loudly and bluntly because you’re sisters and that’s what you’re supposed to do. And it doesn’t turn into long term resentment because you’re still sisters:
She’s only 20: and she still makes brutal drinking mistakes me and my friends used to make–and some I’ve never made– so I’ve earned the right to judge her in an older sister way.
And I’m only 22: so every date/situationship/sexual encounter I made in last year were all brutal in their own way… and she has earned the right to judge because she’s a lesbian. And my younger sister. I appreciate the judgement. She doesn’t understand why I entertain men undeserving of me and tells me to my face. and if I’m with a girl… she has harshly told me that I am not a lesbian because “I think and talk about men too much.”
On the occasions she’s heard me cry or panic or spiral, she is actually concerned for my well-being, rather than how my mood state will affect her living situation. She knows when to text our mom because she knows she doesn’t always know how to help. I had a heart to heart with her and brought her wine the week of her break up.
It’s comforting to live with someone who understands you and knows you completely and won’t let you not washing your dinner plate every-time kill a whole relationship.
And I will admit, sometimes my little sister takes care of me and takes care of things here, more than I do of her and for her; which makes me feel guilty as an older sibling… but being taken care of by family also makes me feel at home in a city that I’m not even sure I can earnestly call home yet. But in this apartment, I live with my family, and clichè as it is: home is where the family is, where the heart is– and all these years later I’m back to sharing a bathroom with my sister who is my heart, and that does make it home.
Mar 12, 2024
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i have noticed that people look down on people with roommates above a certain age. i live alone, and i've lived alone for a while, at an age where it would have been more appropriate (for a lack of a better term) to have roommates. now when i tell people i'm leaving my apartment to move in with my best friend, they're confused and want to know if i've thought it through. YES, i have, SHUT up.
i have a tendency to live as a shut-in, hermit-style, out of laziness and anxiety, and everything starts to get really scary after a day or two of working from home and not going outside. i know it'll change when i live with my best friend when i can just go downstairs to have coffee together, to hang out, to go to her room and talk and laugh.
i'm not made to live alone, i realize that after being certain i have to for years. i think it's just that the people i have lived with never gave me the space i need sometimes. i've grown, my friend knows me through and through. this time is different.
May 14, 2025
I spent a lot of time this past year contemplating moving out from my apartment that I share with my best friend. We have lived with each other since 2018, and have seen each other in every high and low and stuck together like glue regardless. However, over the past two years, we began to bicker a lot, stopped spending time with each other, and it just felt like there was too much resentment built up between us to continue living in the same space together. Long story short, we both ended up going through a lot of life changes and events in the last year. This all ended up putting things into perspective for the two of us.
One day, after a particularly tough series of unfortunate events in both of our personal lives, we sat down in the living room and finally opened up about all of the things that had been causing tension in our friendship. Both of us were crying the whole time, because it really sucks having to talk about each other's bad choices and shortfalls, but it was a necessary pain in the end. We both came out of the conversation feeling like a load had been taken off our shoulders. Everything that needed to be said had been put out in the open. We both went on through the following months doing our best to work on what we needed to, so that we could continue coexisting in the same space. With time, the resentment we held against the other faded, and we slowly became friends again. Putting in the work was well worth it.
Communication is incredibly important in every aspect of your life. It needs to be prioritized, regardless of how scary it is. We are all human, and all of us fall short. If you never bring up your concerns, you can't expect a person to ever change their behavior.
Feb 17, 2025
I was isolated growing up.
Isolated in the regular run-of-the-mill homeschooled way. Growing up in rural Canada where everything is a minimum of a 30 minute drive away. Groceries, entertainment, activites, friends - and nothing in between but wheat and sloughs and cows.
Born to people who were not only the youngest child in each of their families, deeply introverted, and whose external social situations also put them in the way of easy ridicule.
It was the sixties, man.
My experience of the world for the first 18 years of my life was through my mother's eyes, primarily. My beliefs were filtered through her opinions, and my actions were dictated by her whims.
On top of that when I was 13 my family moved overseas to facilitate my dad's job. Moved, not to a town, or a an expat compound... but to a vacation village, which we inhabited September - May until I was 18.
We went back to Canada in the summers, dooming me to a cycle of social deprivation and catchup, never getting ahead or making meaningful connections.
None of this is stuff I really tell anyone, anymore. At 26 it's all far enough away that it doesn't come up in my current self synopsis when meeting new friends.
As my world expands, and I meet and love more and more people I'm so aware of how the more people that you meet and interact with the more you have a sense of your own place in the world.
Every time I have a new romance I learn what love is out there for me. Each new experience changes my views on past experiences. What I like and what I don't. The kind of love I can accept, how I want to be treated.
Every time I make a new friend I learn that there really are all kinds of people in the world, and that growing up it's not that there was something wrong with me, it's just that I didn't necessarily vibe with the 10 people I interacted with.
Nov 15, 2024
Top Recs from @gabz
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women who run with wolves, women who run with rats.
the true ultimate bonding activity for you and the girls. because you’ll never forget how they sheltered you when you were low.
one of the most liberating rituals I perform in New York is popping a squat in between parked cars or a dark corner and letting it all go…. wild wild women we are deemed to be.
they may look down upon us because perhaps it isn’t “polite”. But when you’re bursting at the seams, why must we settle for discomfort? What’s a girl to do? We are not graced with simplicity to turn to the wall– subtly concealed without judgement. Our anatomy binds us to the confines of bearing it all in a squat. With added complexity given the outfit of choice. And always the obstacle of not splattering our cute shoes. but id only be telling you a falsehood if I said peeing outdoors isn’t so enjoyable whether it be in the middle of a forest or the city street. Even when all odds may be stacked against you.
Only God can judge me. But God is a woman anyway.
Feb 13, 2024
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It’s okay. it’s not for validation, it’s for performance art. Linda Montano said living life itself is her lifelong performance because she declared that it was. Trisha Paytas has carried on that performance practice. So I’m hot on instagram when the spirit compels me to be. But in like a durationally artistic way and for my future lifelong archive, to show my granddaughters that I was also young and fertile once and my boobs were decently sized and semi perky. They should know. That I was that girl once before I was grey and a bit wrinkled and more bitter than I am currently; for traditional reasons.
Mar 14, 2024
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I’m post-grad, unemployed, no direction, sick with a stomach flu or something, went on 3 back to back trips so like I spent a lot of money, clearly have lots of time to write and recommend and ponder and not be ridden with confusion and anxiety these days.
So yes, of course here I am. Back at last to Perfectly Imperfect. You’ve caught me red-handed. Crawling back as I’m glued to my couch currently on a nocturnal sleep schedule due to perhaps a combination of my illness and my body remaining in a time zone opposite to the one I must adjust back to.
Hope someone out there missed me. The bitch is back.
Jul 28, 2024