the company you keep

I had a very interesting mini conversation with a colleague of mine the other day. We’d been casually moseying along when she uttered a confession that she had been leery of getting to know me in the past because of a specific individual that exists in my life in the friend capacity. When she said that to me, I really couldn’t be mad, because I had been wondering the very same thing about my own interactions with many people that I deem to be my friends. In fact, as I have been doing this self analysis, I’ve wondered this one thing: Why have I made the conscious decision to befriend and stay true to certain individuals whose characters do not warrant the type of friendship that I am willing to extend? Furthermore, why would I keep myself in the company of individuals that would lead others to come to conclusions about me that truly do not depict or match who I really am?

I’ve always been a “different” type of person. I feel like I came out of my mother’s womb bucking the system. If someone told me to go left, I’d always want to know why I shouldn’t go right. When people told me to leave certain folk alone, I’d become intrigued with getting to know them. So, I’ve cultivated a plethora of individuals that many people might consider to be unsavory. Sometimes, people are correct about those individuals, but sometimes they are wrong about them. The sad truth though, is that most times they are right. 

I’m not perfect in any stretch of my imagination. I do things I shouldn’t. I’ve said things that I didn’t mean. I’ve gone places I shouldn’t have. And I think that many of us have done the same. But, at the end of the day, I’ve learned that it doesn’t benefit me to be in the company of people who will ultimately make other individuals’ opinions of me jaded. When I was young, I guess it wouldn’t have mattered. If I had a friend that was a hoe, she would have just been that. But now, if I had a friend with what the world considers to be negative character traits, I have to be careful of my affiliation with them. 

There is something to be said about wanting to be contrary to society. At some point in time, going against the system no longer poses any benefit to you; instead, you spend your life trying to get people to see you for who you are and not for who your friends are. When people say that “we are the company that we keep”, we need to recognize that there is a lot of truth to that. If we don’t want to be pigeon holed into a group, we need to distance ourselves from it. No one said that something like this is easy though. 

Think about what you want in life. Then, think about the people that surround you as you move towards reaching those goals. Are those people barriers in your journey? Does your affiliation to them put you in a compromising position? Take some time to really think about whether your association is truly worth it in the end. In the meantime, understand that you may miss out of many opportunities because of the people you call your “friends”

Comments

[Hostess]

Hey girl!!

I have been having a similar internal dialog. I came to a sad ass truth. For me, I kept certain people around because by comparison, I looked better. So what Sally's a whore. I'm not and look how shiny my halo is when I stand beside her. Also, someone recently wrote on my blog that you will date/marry the type of guys you hang with. This caused me to, for the second time in my life, take a long hard look a some of my make associates. The internal dialog and the comment on my blog made me fade some people out of my life.