At sixteen I started realizing that was not the life. I started reading religious books. I stopped drinking, and I started practicing my religion.
Then the people I had grown up with went to work on me. They made fun of me, constantly. They applied the pressure a group applies to anyone who stops doing what the group does, which is not argument either. It is ridicule, and it is relentless, and at sixteen it is close to unbearable. They always put pressure to bring me back to their circle. Not once did anybody argue with me about religion or about drinking. That was never the instrument. The instrument was making me the joke in every room I walked into, until coming back was simply the cheaper option. That is the part worth hearing twice, because nobody was trying to hurt me. They were trying to retrieve me.
So the choice I had to make at that age was this. On one side were the friends I had known my whole childhood, drinking, smoking, in the clubs all day long, becoming useless. On the other side was me, wanting a different life and having no evidence yet that a different life existed. And what I realized is that maybe this is the cost. Maybe they are not my friends, and maybe I need to give up.
Sixteen years old, every friend I had pulling me back, and no proof at all that the other road went anywhere. What did I have to go on?
Nothing. No evidence, no example, and nobody in that town doing what I was about to do. What I had was a suspicion, and a willingness to act on it before it was confirmed, which is all anybody ever has at the start. So I made the call. I gave up entire my childhood friends. Not drifted, not saw them less. I isolated myself from them totally, and I was sixteen.
Today I look back at that and it is one of the best decisions I have ever made. It was also the loneliest year of my life, and I want both of those in the same sentence, because the people selling you this usually leave the second one out.