“Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.”

I sit at a table with several of my “friends” from school. At least, I thought they were my friends. A “friend”, in definition, to me, is someone who shares similar interests with you, has your back, and respects the person you are.

I’m sitting at a table, in a basement with, “my friends” at 2 in the morning. The basement is dirty, and we’re with these guys who I can’t remember their names, but they are rivaling the filth of the room. They are sifting a gram of coke. Carefully using a credit card, the grungier looking guy of the two sets up three narrow lines along a mirror he’s so carefully set up on the old wooden table. “Okay, go for it” he urges. I look to my “friend” as she takes a bump from the mirror.

How many times has someone you thought had your best interests at hand, put you in an uncomfortable situation? How many times have you been, “cool with it” in order to fit in, or to please them? A friend of mine recently told me the horrible truth behind some of her “friendships”.

It feels good to be accepted. It feels good to be “cool”. But how far have situations brought us to where we were no longer, “cool” with ourselves and with our own decisions. I can think of a time when all that mattered to me was being popular. I quickly found myself skipping school to get high with my friends. That’s all that mattered was staying high. I’d walk home from places that were foreign to me late at night, shoving my math homework to the bottom of my back pack in order to make room for the drugs I was saving for tomorrow. My parents would constantly confront me until they realized that what they were saying to me would never change the way I was acting. That year was the first year I had found a group to call my own. It was a place I belonged, and so I did everything I possibly could to please them. I’d wake up on my friends’ boyfriend’s couch, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling with several kids passed out around me. I became numb to it, the feeling of absurdity I should have felt from my actions became justifiable.

There comes a point when you see something, or here something that makes you realize that you are throwing your life away. I watched my group deteriorate, some going away to rehab, others moving away for unspeakable reasons. The day my, “best friend” did a line before our lunch plans, was the way I realized I needed to get out. What I had gotten myself into had gone too far. I looked at her as she snorted the last of the blow. I ate my lunch while she claimed to, “not be hungry” and that was the moment I decided to remove myself from a life which wasn’t being lived.

We are so susceptible to becoming everything around us. The people we choose to surround ourselves with can sometimes lead to our success or to our ultimate demise.

So now, I sit at a table with my friends, who I know inside and out, and finally, I feel safe.