Roommate Issues

This might be dumb to talk about but I’m gonna do it anyways cause I need some advice.

For the last 2-3 years, one of my best friends from grade school has been living with me in my 2 bedroom apartment. It started out pretty awesome, because we had very similar hobbies and cheaper rent of course. Well over the last year or so, because of the pandemic, we both went WFH. This was again, pretty great as we were both saving more money and all that.

I lived in this apartment for about a year and a half before he moved in, and I was financially doing okay keeping up with bills and what not. Figured it would be cool to have one of my best friends living with me, and it was, until maybe the last 6 months to a year.

This could sound dumb, but I have been noticing I am more introverted and stressed just by the sheer fact we are both home almost all the time, (I enjoy seeing my friends and socializing during the weekend and after work). Sometimes I just don’t feel like socializing until I am off work, and he is always in the living room/kitchen doing things as most of his job is very simple and he can walk away a lot of the time. For some reason I choose to avoid even leaving my room during my work shift just so I can have some privacy and me time.

Now I am figuring that I could be running into the basic fact that I am just around him now way too much, and it has started to kind of tear our relationship down a bit where we turn from best friends to just room mates.

But he has changed a lot since he moved in. We don’t do much stuff together anymore, (concerts, parties, hanging out with groups of friends). This is because of the pandemic I feel made his introversion more intense, now he is very stuck in his ways and refuses to hangout with a lot of my other friends. He goes to bed around 9-10 where as I don’t sleep till around 2-3, so I don’t ever have my friends over because he will get irritated that I am up talking with people while he is trying to sleep. He recently got Covid but recovered, but somehow has developed a long term sickness for eating a big variety of foods. We are both a bit of stoners, and he has quit that and drinking because it now makes him sick, (both of which we did together before).

So here’s the thing, now one of his friends that I can somewhat tolerate has had a falling out with his roomates, and decided that he needed to leave, (this happened about 2 months ago). My friend recently got an inheritance the begining of this year and decided that he wanted to live somewhere else, well because of the issue with his friend coming up, he wanted all 3 of us to look for an apartment thats newer and an extra bedroom.

It has for the last 2 months since he brought it up to me caused me massive amounts of stress and overthinking to the point where I have shut down several times. I already struggle with anxiety and OCD, and have been running it in my head several times during the day deciding if I want to move and save a few hundred dollars on rent, or just pay a little more to free up my 2nd bedroom for extra space. I don’t want to have to deal with looking for a place where the parking could be worse, or the neighbors and management are worse. Despite my apartment being old as hell, (built in the 70s), it’s in a great location and I have been pretty happy about living here. But I am also worrying that I won’t have people to fall back on in the random situation that I lost my job or something.

I just feel like I needed to get this out there and see what anyone had to say about it. I know I have to make a decision based on MY needs, but what would you do in a situation like this? I am very much an overthinker, however, this situation of looking for a new place to live has caused me a copious amount of stress and depressive symptoms.

TL;Dr: room mate that is/was my best friend wants to find another apartment with his friend and me, but I am torn in the middle of if I want to stay or move as I feel like I am kind of getting uprooted out of my comfortability.