The Power of Influence

By Aryana St. Marthe
 
When I think about setbacks I think about the people I'm around because they are usually the ones I have to get away from.  This was and still is a challenge for me because I always tend to fall with the wrong crowd and be the only one in the group that's actually passing. Trying to find the right people for me in high school is harder than I thought it would be because looking for people that have the same mindset as me is a real struggle. My mindset is more focused on school and college and my friends are focused on boys and other things that I don't really care for. Losing close friends is something I didn’t think about until now because I always thought all of my friends are all going to graduate at the same time, we’re all going to the same college and we’re all still going to be friends. I soon started to realize that this future I saw was never going to happen with the people that I’m hanging around. 
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Hanging around people that did nothing but make my brain hurt is not very healthy for me because I stress myself out over things that I can't control. When they tell me a story about drama that’s happening or when they stop caring for school it stresses me out because I wish I can make them do whatever they need to do so we can all graduate together but, it’s hard to help someone when they don’t want to helped. When my friends aren’t doing what they need to do, I feel as if it’s up to me to make sure they do what they need to. I need to start realizing that that is not my job and they have to do this by themselves and I can only just sit there. 

Over this past year, I was the most stressed because I was losing friends and my closest friend was going through a lot and all that was stressing me out to the point where I wasn’t eating and being very depressed. My friend basically left and I felt like I didn't know what to do next. I was so hurt at the fact that she just left without talking about it to me or just thinking, she just left. At some point I felt kind of selfish because I wanted her to stay but with everything that she was going through she needed to leave and I had to support her. I tried to find a way to solve the problem because I didn’t want to feel down and in a funk because of this and because the ways I tried to problem solve didn’t work very well. So, I tried to be active to get my mind off it. I went on walks with my other friends and took up a new hobby of cooking. My new hobbies were mostly successful but I was still hurt.

I consider this a setback because I’m too busy stressing about my friends not coming to school and not passing instead worrying about myself and if I’m going to get my work done fast enough to get in on time to pass. I can’t focus on someone else and myself all at the same time, doing that puts too much pressure on me and it puts too much on my mind. As I attend college, I would make it a personal goal to try to find some friends that help me calm my mind instead of making it crazy. From this experience, I learned that you have to be around people that won’t drag you down and don’t have to stress about them all the time. I need to start being around people that pick me up and have the same values as me. I find friends that I can talk to about college, who encourage me, who will be at school every day and hopefully they care about them self to try to graduate and get good grades. These people are hard to find, that's why I keep making friends so I can find “the right ones.”