Negative Accountability

​Many times other people don't like change. If you decide to change you will affect the other people in your life. Often when people see a person moving toward freedom they feel a sense of desperation. For example when I was a drinker my friends were all drinkers. They didn't want me to stop drinking. They often felt the need to be the audible voice of the struggle. The combination of the internal voice of struggle mixed with the audible voice of the "friend" is usually enough to keep change from happening.
Many times people united in the love of a substance or anything else will use negative accountability. My friends and I would agree to never change or sell out, we will stay true and never leave the precious struggle or each other. They agree if either one tries to change the other one will stop them. This mentality is not rooted in companionship but in the selfish desire to never be alone in struggle. If the people around you concur struggle and you do not you are left staring at your own weakness and loneliness. Then you must quickly find a replacement, someone who understands what you're going through. Someone who will never change and the cycle continues again. When people change they are often forced to move themselves away from their social world, friends family. The cost of freedom is great but so is the reward.

* At this point I see that we connect to others through shared behaviors or shared thoughts. I tend to connect through thoughts much more than action. I often think to myself that the big difference between me and other people is that others tend to think to lead to experience where I tend to experience to lead to thought. So similar but at the same time so different. Not better or worse just different, always trying to make sense of of it all.