Moving on...

Guilty by association. To some, the phrase may mean nothing at all. To others, it may imply criminal activity. For me, it meant voluntarily giving up my best friends and turning my whole life around.
Everyone has that friend or group of friends with whom they grew up. Naturally, I was not any different. Growing up, by best friends provided me years of good times. Reminiscing, my memories remind of clips straight out of the film Stand By Me. For those who are unfamiliar, Stand By Me focuses on the lives and adventures of the friendship of four young boys, from tree-houses to troublemaking.
As far back as I can remember, all the way up until my junior year in highschool, I had the best of times with who I thought the best friends I could ever have. We did everything together, building forts, swimming in the river, sleepovers and birthday parties. These were boys with whom I walked to school for ten years straight. We knew each other inside and out.
My circle of friends and I has always been considered the “bad kids,” or the troublemakers of our grade in school. We were popular because we were defiant, and we were defiant because it was fun. We were always the ones clowning around, and the first to be sent to the principal’s office every day. Substitute teachers feared us- we were the ones who played the ‘name switch’ game on them, which sure was a blast. Outside of school however, our antics were becoming a bit more serious and we began shaping our lives to come.
My friends and I would gladly participate in ‘mischief night,’ on every night other than the night before Halloween- because that’s when the police are expecting it, of course! Our means of mischief eventually grew from harmless toilet paper to more risky acts, such as blowing up port-a-johns in the highschool baseball fields. We also too
Our risky behavior was not limited to mischiefing, however. Before we knew it, we were stealing seemingly harmless cigarettes from our parents and ‘experimenting.’ Subsequently, we became smokers. The experimentation didn’t stop there, at the same time, we were drinking alcohol whenever we could get our hands on it. By the time we made it to highschool, we were experimenting with drugs. The only peer pressure that existed seemed to be only between the four of us, we did whatever the other did, no questions asked.
Little by little, all of this risky behavior started to catch up with us. Our minor acts of mischief were becoming more criminal, and soon, we were getting caught by the police every other time…and charged. It got to a point where we couldn’t walk down the street together without being monitored by the local police. They would literally creep down the road as we walked and watched our every move. Our daily prank phone calls eventually led to serious harassment charges, and our mischievous acts led to a slew of criminal charges.
One by one, each of began to feel the wrath of our actions and our lifestyles. By freshman year, we were all on juvenile probation. By sophomore year, two of them were in and out of drug rehab. By junior year, one of them dropped out of highschool, while the others were failing miserably. My antics in school were getting me suspended every other day while the closest of my friends had begun doing cocaine, and eventually started stealing money from my family and I in order to nurse his habit. While there were many other things that led up to my breakout, this was the last straw.
I always felt I was the strongest of the group, and in retrospect, I was right. I was the only one who didn’t actually have to do what they were doing, regardless, I did anyway. At some point during my junior year I took a step back and looked at our lives. We were all bringing each other down. I realized, if anything, my association with these boys was masking my true potential, and that they weren’t going anywhere in life but down- and I did not want to be a part of it anymore.
It was time for me to clean house. I needed to get out of the ‘bad crowd,’ and establish a better reputation, both in school and my town. I realized that the only way I was going to grow was if I completely disassociated myself from my friends. Not surprisingly, this was an extremely difficult task. It’s really hard to give up your friends voluntarily, on your own terms. At the time, I was resented by them. Now, as I’ve made it to my senior year in college, they finally understand why I had to do it.
So I did it. I stopped spending time with them, took classes without them, and ultimately gave up all of my friends. I started to focus on the good things I could do with myself and my time. In school, I became the first student to schedule an entire period for the purpose of assisting severely mentally and physically handicapped in my schools special services classroom. While it was not actually my intent, this helped people to associate me with good things rather than that ‘bad kid.’ I put more time into my schoolwork, took up extracurricular activities, and picked up a girlfriend whom encouraged my positive personal growth. It became much easier to forget about my old friends when I began dating her, because I was able see what a true friend really is.
Being guilty by association nearly ruined me. Looking at my old friends today, it is easy for me to see how my decision to leave them behind was necessary for me to be where I am today. I was the only one of them to go to college. Heck, I am the only one who left town. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that those guys will be ‘townies’ for life. My association and negative reputation was difficult to redeem, but not impossible. After all is said and done, I have become a success story for the administrators at my highschool- the same administrators who insisted I should just drop out of school because I was going nowhere. In any case, cleaning house and moving on from any sort of a relationship is a terribly difficult thing to do, but sometimes we find it necessary. In my case it was necessary in order for me to erase the negative associations and become an asset to society.