Stretching It
In my junior year of college, I moved into an apartment with a girl I had known for awhile. She had always been a bit of a bitch, but I didn’t find out until later that she was also a crazy bitch.
In the two years we lived together, she had four imaginary abortions. I say this, because there were no abortion clinics in the entire conservative county where we lived, but she was telling profs and co-workers that she was having them done at the local hospital, and using it to solicit pity, sympathy and gifts from her unsuspecting victims. Her fabrications were often very outlandish, and involved not only herself but people she was supposedly close to. She told people her father used to dispose of bodies for the mob, and her mom owned a local chain of shoe stores – none of which was true. Whenever I expressed skepticism about her stories, she’d become very angry and pick fights with me. I was a psychology major, and it became clear to me that she most likely had some type of personality disorder.
The first semester of my senior year, she flunked out of school, despite having been given every possibility to redeem herself by the professors dumb enough to believe her lies and take pity. By then, I had distanced myself from her and spent as much time as possible out of the apartment. The following semester, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, which temporarily brought us closer together as I tried to help her cope with her mother’s illness. Three months after she was diagnosed, the mother went into the hospital with pneumonia and slipped into a coma. I went home for a few days because the stress of graduating on top of her mother’s illness was getting to me. The day I went to return to school, I couldn’t get ahold of my roommate and panicked, thinking her mom must have died. So I called her parents house, and her mother answered the phone, sounding remarkably well for a women who was supposedly dying of cancer and in a coma.
To cut a long and convoluted story short, I uncovered the lie my roommate had been telling myself and every one for three months. I moved out the next day. I think my roommate fabricated her mother’s illness specifically to keep me from graduating.
I know someone exactly like that & for a minute I thought it was the same person. But then I remembered that this girl, as opposed to having abortions, liked to lie about being raped every few months. The latest lie I heard about (right after having blocked her on every social networking site) was that she told her booty-call friend & told him she was pregnant, miscarried, & then cremated the fetus’ ashes & gave them to the poor guy who was dumb enough to believe it.
I give you mad props for being able to live with her. It takes a special kind of person (psychology majors unite!) to handle being around those kinds.
I knew a woman like that too! she would tell these stories and when you pressed her, there was no way to verify the details. For example:
- a college professor who was so in love with her that he went nuts and killed himself
-a crazy party of radical feminists who ate feces
- a riot and stabbing at a party which was crashed by bloods and crips. Her boyfriend was there but I have never seen anything about it since in the news
Everyone in her wacko stories was dead, or disappeared..so you could never find out the truth. WHen pressed she was very vague. She was basically a compulsive liar. God help her kids. Fortunately, she wasn’t my roommate!
OK, I knew someone like this, too, and yes, she was incredibly annoying, but it was also obvious that she was a pathological liar. As you said, you were a psych major and you recognized that she had a personality disorder, so surely you recognized that her lying had nothing to do with you. If she wanted to tell people that her mom ran a chain of shoe stores, that her dad worked for the mob, who cares? I’m sure her lies were irritating, especially when she was using them to manipulate professors, but again, none of this has anything to do with you. That’s why I find it so odd that you believe that her lie about her mom was crafted specifically to harm you. Maybe the “long and convoluted story” you cut short explains this, but nothing in the short version suggests that there was anything malicious behind this girl’s lies.
Believe me, I would have gone nuts if I’d had to live with the mythomaniac I used to know. I feel your pain. You lost me in the last paragraph, though. Unless you discovered that this woman was lying just for fun, I highly doubt that the cancer lie was designed to keep you from graduating. It sounds like it was designed to garner attention for the roommate herself.
well i can see how living with someone who is that disturbed can be a nightmare…even if it’s not about you personally.
It really irks me when people say “I’m a/an {insert major} so trust me/I know this”. No! I’ll trust you when you have that degree and don’t try and convince me just by the fact that you are working on a degree!
I guess its just a pet peeve of mine, but I really can’t stand it.
And I have to agree with Garter. It really sounds like you are making it about you when in fact this girl (as you supposedly know since you are a *gasp* psychology major) has a mental illness/disorder. So unless she is lying to you out of malice, she most likely just has a compulsive/pathological lying problem.
I also think it is very odd. And I also would have gone completely bonkers living with someone like that but I would hope that I would have the clarity to know that it wasn’t all about me.
i must be a heartless bitch, because if my compulsive-liar room-mates’s mother supposedly fell into a coma, I don’t think I’d be at all stressed.`
Didn’t you already know she was a liar before the dying-mother story?
Wow, I thought I might be the only person who knew someone like this, but apparently not. My pathological liar roommate told me she had a twin sister whom her father killed via a drunken car crash. Yeah, not so true. No sister. That was only the first in a long series of lies.
I agree with Lisa. Why would you even believe that her Mother was diagnosed with cancer? And if you had her Mother’s number, you should have called and confirmed right away before you let it stress you out.
But what if the mother story had actually been true? When you bring a third (and somewhat innocent) person into the lies, sometimes you have to give them the benefit of doubt to some extent. If she had jumped on her right away calling her a liar and her mother had ACTUALLY been sick with cancer it would’ve been real bad. What I would’ve done was to make sure her mother was sick and then confront her. You just never REALLY know.