With everything I have endured in the last few months, I have learned so much about how we all need to surround ourselves with positivity, whether that be positive people, places or things.

We are setting out to build our lives and our futures, and we cannot be surrounded by things that prevent us from following our dreams.

I have had several people in my life that I was extremely close to. However, I had to do an evaluation in which I realized that some of these people did not belong in my life.

Personally for me, I cannot be surrounded by people who are in addictive addiction. I can love them from afar, and hope to God that they get the help that they need, but I cannot have them too close to me.

This may sound mean to say, but if I am working on my sobriety, I cannot make any progress if I am tempted by people who are not in a good place.

For all of us, we want to go through life and do the things that make us happy, but we cannot let others who are so negative shift us off of our path.

I personally believe that we have to be selfish at times in our lives.

We may have that one friend who tells us we are “stupid” for having this job or doing the things we do.

We cannot worry about how they feel. We have to do what makes us happy.

I know how hard it is to make these decisions, and I know that even though we have people in our lives we are close to, we have to sometimes cut them out or distance ourselves from them.

After all, we are not living our lives for them; we are doing what we want to do.

If people really cared about us, they would respect our decisions and be positive and supportive.

Those people who constantly nag on us for the decisions we make, sadly, are not true friends or people we need in our lives.

At the end of the day, we have to follow our hearts and decide who and what we want in our lives.

Andrew Paisley is a senior journalism major. He can be reached at 581-2812 or at abpaisley@eiu.edu.