Reinvent your life - focus on your friends.
Have you ever felt guilty for not visiting a friend in the hospital?
Have you been 'that' person who was drunk and disorderly at your best friend's birthday party?
Let's turn it around. Do you have a friend that has embarrassed you on your birthday? Once the whisky bottle was empty, he decided to go for a swim, naked, in your Koi pond while twenty of your work colleagues looked at him in disgust. You know, 'that', friend.
Embarrassing as these types of scenarios can be, it is only a true friendship that can withstand these horrific tests of your true BFF status with Johnny or Susan. If either of them is willing to drag your drunk, passed-out body out of the Koi pond, away from the crowd, and into a warm bed, surely then they are good friends. On the flip side, they would be better friends if they give you a good mouthful of anger the next morning and let you know that you were embarrassed by them, even better. It's called tough love, and sometimes some friends need to hear the truth from a friend to wake them up and call them to order.
For some friends, they need to be dragged out of the koi-pond on more than one occasion before they get the message. Some friends never get the message.
The question is, on which side of the fence are you sitting? Are you the one that needs the wake-up call or are you the one continuously needing to forgive your friend and drag him or her out of the Koi pond? Either way, people can change, and people can decide to reinvent themselves. Maybe you are the friend caught up in a vicious cycle of drugs, gangs, and the occult. However, today might be the day that you decide: NO MORE. You need a new life; you need a new start! To break free from your old self-destructive life, you will need to detach yourself from it, and that also includes the company you kept while caught up in that life.
If you try to come clean but every night you are surrounded by addicts it will be no good. Move out of that drug house and into clean healthy surroundings full of people that represent what you want to become.
Inside Weather
If you are the friend that is trying your utmost best to stay on the straight and narrow, but on weekends you choose to surround yourself with binge drinkers, drug users, and pleasure seekers, then you need to rethink your friendship circle.
We cannot choose our family, but we can choose our friends. Don't be careless here. A good friend is worth more than gold. Good friends are those people that know everything about you and still like you. They still call you on your birthday and, if it happens, drag you out of the Koi pond.
One of the building blocks to reinvent yourself is to take a closer look at your friends. Are they adding value to your life? Better yet, are you adding value to their life? Start hanging out with the crowd that inspires you.
On the one side of the fence, you need to leave the 'gang' and start a new life, or you will get influenced by them and find it very difficult to start fresh. However, on the other side of the fence, you will need to make a choice. Keep dragging Johnny out of the Koi pond or cut him loose to save yourself from swimming with him.
