How do I turn my focus away from my housemate who is getting on my last nerve?
Please note that:
I cannot move out, and housemate cannot move out for the foreseeable future. The issues behind that are a whole different Ask. Please no advice to "just move out." That isn't happening anytime soon.
Housemate has no vehicle of their own and never leaves the house for longer than an hour.
I do not have access to a therapist right now.
***
The issues:
Housemate and I have been getting into it over dishes. Not in the traditional way, that is, when people refuse to do them and argue as the moldering pile grows in the sink. This is about overzealous dishwashing. Thus, little battles for control are occurring over when the dishwasher gets run and whether dishes should be left full of water for hours prior to actually washing them - housemate's argument is that soaking them removes every last bit of debris. I find this last habit extremely annoying, because I get drenched whenever I go to move them, not to mention that if I leave them there for housemate to clean later, the entire counter and sink ends up taken over by soaking dishes, making it impossible to prepare food. So I just started dumping them, washing them, and putting them in the dishwasher. I thought, I was helping, both to keep the counter clean, and to enable housemate to focus on their work, which they have been doing, from home, straight through the pandemic. I have not been working and so am happy to do this chore, both to keep the counter clear and to help housemate. Instead of accepting that, now housemate interrupts their workday to come out, do their dishes, and put them away before I can touch them. They insist that if the dishes are not soaked, food bits remain behind, and according to their standards, I do not get rid of each and every last bit of food. Reader, we are talking very tiny particles here, not great big blotches of dried spaghetti sauce. Nonetheless I try harder to make sure none remain before putting items in the dishwasher. That still isn't good enough. So now we're back to either the dishes get left to soak on the counter again, or they interrupt their workday to wash them before I can get to them. I can live with the latter, but the former, the soaking, is driving me nuts. And here we get to the heart of this issue, which, as should be quite obvious, isn't about dishes at all.
This is where I need a therapist and don't have one, so here I am, asking internet strangers to help me gain a sense of perspective, because I hate being so fixated on this. I am convinced that they think I am stupid, unable to perform a task as simple as washing a dish. This feeling extends to anything I do around housemate - on some level, I believe they think I am very incompetent and unfeeling. My anger isn't about the dishes, it's about housemate thinking I am stupid. I know how irrational this sounds. Normally, I can tell myself that believing that they think I am stupid is a cognitive distortion, that I cannot read their mind, that really they have their own problems and that I am not being kind by being so angry about this. None of that is working now.
TL;DR, I am here looking for advice on how to turn my attention away from this person as long as I am still in quarantine. I want to be able to co-exist more or less peacefully with housemate until I can go back to work. I want to be able to not just control my anger, but not experience it, in regards to this situation, and others like it. I know this is not a simple Ask and there are not any simple answers. But any advice, or book recommendations, would be much appreciated. |
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