On proximity, identity, and why your circle isn’t failing you by accident
There is a version of you that your closest people need you to remain.
Not the version you’re becoming. Not the version that started therapy, or read the book, or lay awake one Tuesday realising that the relationship you’ve been defending to everyone is the one that’s been dismantling you from the inside.
Not that version.
The version they already know. The one whose patterns are predictable, whose crises are familiar, whose particular brand of dysfunction slots neatly into theirs like a key into a lock that was never meant to open anything. Just to keep the door exactly where it is.
Jim Rohn said you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. The quote has been recycled so many times it’s become a motivational poster, a podcast opener, a thing people nod at and never actually do anything with.
But Rohn was describing something more precise than aspiration. He was describing a system. And systems don’t need your permission to operate. They just need your proximity.
The averaging isn’t passive. It isn’t that you simply absorb the habits of the people around you the way you pick up an accent after living somewhere long enough. It’s that your circle has a function, and often that function is homeostasis. Keeping things as they are. Not because the people in it are malicious, not because they sat down and decided to hold you back, but because your staying the same is what keeps the ecosystem stable.
Your growth is a destabilising event. Your healing threatens the organism. And organisms, when threatened, don’t deliberate. They react.
I didn’t understand this for years. I thought support was presence: the people who showed up, who answered the phone, who knew my history. I measured loyalty by duration. She’s been my friend since school. He’s family. They were there for me when no one else was. I confused longevity with alignment, and proximity with care, and familiarity with safety, and I built my entire life inside a circle that needed me to stay exactly where I was.
I called it my support system.
It was a five-person conspiracy to keep me recognisable. And I thanked them for it regularly.
When I finally looked at my five honestly, actually looked, the picture was devastating in its clarity. A best friend whose entire life was a rotating emergency, who leaned on my stability so she never had to find her own, and who vanished the first time I needed to lean back.
A family member who treated every boundary I set like a declaration of war. An ex who resurfaced every time his chaos got expensive, used me as a soft landing, and left again once he’d steadied himself. A colleague who deposited her emotional weight on my desk every morning like a delivery I hadn’t ordered. And a mentor whose guidance was structurally designed to keep me in the position of student, permanently learning, permanently not-yet-ready. The day I outgrew something she’d taught me and said so, she stopped returning my calls.
Five people. Every one of them needed me to stay exactly where I was. Not because they were evil. Because my stuckness served their ecosystem. My chaos-addicted friend needed company in her dysfunction. My boundary-resistant family member needed the system to stay enmeshed. My ex needed somewhere soft to fall. My colleague needed someone to carry what she refused to face. My mentor needed me beneath her so she never had to confront her own ceiling.
I loved them. Some of them loved me too. And the love and the damage coexisted so comfortably that I couldn’t see where one ended and the other began.
What I didn’t have language for, at the time, was why it felt so impossible to change while surrounded by people who said they loved me.
The science of social contagion offers part of the answer. Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, in their research on social networks, found that behaviours, emotions, and even health outcomes spread through networks with a precision that looks almost biological. If a close friend becomes obese, your own likelihood of obesity increases by forty-five percent. Not because you’re eating together, but because your perception of what’s normal shifts. Happiness, loneliness, smoking, divorce: all of them move through networks the way infection moves through populations. Not through persuasion. Through normalisation.
Your five don’t convince you that dysfunction is acceptable. They make dysfunction invisible. They create a reality in which the chaos, the codependency, the boundary violations, the emotional unavailability, the smallness, all of it becomes the water you swim in. You can’t see it as a problem because everyone around you is breathing the same air. Your circle doesn’t argue you into staying stuck. It simply makes stuckness the baseline from which you measure everything else.
And that’s the real trick, isn’t it? They don’t have to hold you down. They just have to make down feel like the middle.
This is why upgrading your circle feels so disorienting. It isn’t just a social change. It’s a perceptual one. When you start spending time with people who have what you want, women in healthy relationships, people with boundaries that actually hold, humans who choose themselves without performing a crisis first, the first thing you feel isn’t inspiration. It’s vertigo. Because their normal exposes your normal as something you’ve been surviving, not choosing. And that exposure is its own kind of grief.
Rohn told another story that I think about more than the famous one. He asks the audience: if I put sugar in my coffee, what happens? I’ll be fine. And if I put poison in it? I’ll be dead. Okay, but what if my enemy puts sugar in my coffee? Well, I’ll be fine. And what if my best friend, even accidentally, puts poison in it? I’ll be dead.
It doesn’t matter who puts it there. It doesn’t matter whether they meant to. Poison is poison. And it doesn’t care about the intentions of the hand that poured it.
Be careful who you let speak into your life. Be even more careful who you let speak into your relationship.
The circle question becomes something else entirely when you’re inside a romantic relationship. Because your five don’t just influence who you are. They influence who you are with someone else.
There’s a concept I think about often. I think of it as the sacred perimeter of a relationship. The invisible boundary around the space where two people build their life together. Inside that perimeter is where the real decisions get made, where the values are negotiated, where the particular architecture of this partnership gets built. Not the one your mother had. Not the one your best friend thinks you should have. Not the one Instagram says is goals. Only two people belong inside that perimeter: you and your partner.
Some can stand at the edge. Those who’ve earned the right to be there, who’ve demonstrated they can speak into a situation without trying to steer it, who can offer what they see and then step back and trust you with what you do next. A good therapist does this. A trusted friend who’s built something healthy of their own does this. But earning that position at the edge isn’t automatic. It isn’t granted by closeness or by history. It’s granted by conduct.
I watched my ex’s circle destroy our relationship from the inside.
He didn’t do it alone, though he would’ve told you he was making his own decisions. His roommate, who was polyamorous and had never had a successful monogamous commitment in her life, had his ear every night. She didn’t understand what we were building because she’d never built anything like it, and her advice reflected that perfectly. Then there were people from his support group, individuals who were supposed to be in recovery but who were more blackout codependent than even he was, reinforcing every pattern he was trying to break. His mother, who had her own ideas about what his life should look like and wasn’t shy about expressing them. And his ex-girlfriend, who still wanted him back and had somehow maintained access that looked, from every angle, like a woman keeping the door cracked for her own return.
That was his five. That was the chorus of voices he invited inside our perimeter. And every single one of them was pouring something into his coffee.
None of them wanted a healthy, functioning, monogamous partnership to succeed, because none of them had one. Not out of malice. Out of limitation. You can’t advise someone toward something you’ve never experienced. You can’t guide someone to a place you’ve never been. And when every voice in a man’s ear belongs to someone who’s never built what you’re trying to build together, the relationship doesn’t stand a chance. Not because the love wasn’t real. Because the poison was consistent, and it didn’t matter that it came from people who thought they cared about him.
I also had a friend who tried something similar from my side. She had concerns about him. Some were legitimate. Some were projections of her own history with men who reminded her of the one I’d chosen. But the issue was never the content of her concerns. It was the posture. She didn’t share her perspective and step back. She tried to move inside the perimeter. Started issuing ultimatums. Him or me, essentially, though she’d never have used those words.
I remember sitting in her car outside my flat, and she said, “I just think you’re not seeing clearly.” And I felt it in my body: the specific exhaustion of being managed by someone who genuinely believes their interference is love. I said, “I hear you. But this is my decision to make.” And her face changed. Not into anger. Into something worse. The expression of someone who’s just realised they’ve lost control of a situation they believed they were running.
She left, and I didn’t stop her. Not because she was wrong about everything. But because she couldn’t stand at the edge. A person who can’t respect the perimeter of your relationship is telling you something important. Not about your relationship, but about their relationship to control.
For many women, the hardest version of this isn’t a friend. It’s family.
Parents who treat the perimeter as a suggestion. Mothers who experience their daughter’s partnership as a territory they’ve been unfairly exiled from. Fathers who believe that biological proximity grants permanent authority over their adult child’s choices. Siblings who weaponise the word “family” as though it were a skeleton key that opens every locked door in your life.
This is especially acute when you’re the one breaking generational patterns, when the relationship you’re trying to build looks nothing like the ones you grew up inside. When your mother’s marriage was built on deference and silence, your decision to build something equal and vocal can feel, to her, like an indictment. When your father’s authority was never questioned, your insistence on being treated as an adult can feel, to him, like betrayal. They’ll call it concern. They’ll call it love. They’ll call it we just want what’s best for you. What they rarely say, because they rarely know it, is: your choosing differently makes me question whether I chose wrong, and I can’t afford that question, so I need you to come back inside the pattern I understand.
Your family doesn’t get a seat inside the perimeter because they’re family. Nobody gets a seat inside the perimeter because of who they are. They get proximity because of how they behave. Whether they can offer what they see and then trust you to decide what to do with it. Whether they can tolerate the discomfort of watching you make choices they wouldn’t make, and love you anyway, without needing to override your autonomy to settle their own anxiety.
Blood isn’t a backstage pass to your life.
And here’s where the circle and the perimeter meet. The people you surround yourself with will either respect the boundaries of your relationship or attempt to dismantle them, and which one they do isn’t random. It’s a direct function of what they need from you and what they’ve never built for themselves.
If your five are people who’ve never examined their own relational patterns, they’ll project those patterns onto yours. The friend who’s addicted to drama will tell you your healthy relationship is boring. The family member who’s never tolerated a boundary will tell you yours are cold. The woman who left every relationship at the first sign of difficulty will tell you that staying is settling. The person whose life is organised around crisis will be genuinely unsettled by your peace, because your peace asks a question about their chaos that they’re not ready to answer.
Your circle will either protect the perimeter of your relationship or try to breach it. And this is why choosing your five isn’t a self-help exercise.
It’s one of the most consequential decisions you’ll make.
Not just for your own growth, but for the survival of every intimate relationship you try to build.
I rebuilt my circle from almost nothing. And I want to be honest about what that felt like, because the motivational version of this story, the one with the sunrise and the journal and the hot girl walk into a better life, skips the part that matters.
It sucked.
It was lonely. Not poetically lonely, not “beautiful solitude” lonely. Lonely in the way that makes you pick up your phone at nine on a Saturday night and realise there’s no one to call. Lonely in the way that makes you question whether you were wrong to let anyone go. Lonely in the way that whispers, late at night, that maybe the dysfunction was better than the emptiness, because at least the dysfunction was populated.
There’s a gap, a real, physical, temporal gap, between releasing the circle that kept you recognisable and building the circle that can hold who you’re becoming. In that gap, you’ve got no one to reflect you back to yourself. Maybe you’re formless. Maybe you’re between identities. The old version of you has been vacated but the new version hasn’t fully moved in, and you’re living in the unfurnished space between them, and it’s deeply uncomfortable.
Stay in it.
Because what happens on the other side of that gap, slowly, without fanfare, without a montage, is that you start to encounter people who don’t need you to be small. Women who’ve built the things you’re trying to build, who can look at your life without needing to rearrange it, who can celebrate your growth without experiencing it as a threat. People whose presence makes you feel more yourself, not less. People who’ve earned the right to stand at the edge of your perimeter and offer what they see, because they’ve built something worth listening from.
These people won’t feel familiar at first. They’ll feel foreign, slightly intimidating, like a room where everyone seems to know something you don’t. That discomfort isn’t a sign that you don’t belong there. It’s a sign that your nervous system is recalibrating. It learned, inside your old circle, what “normal” felt like, and normal felt like chaos, like codependency, like being needed in a way that was indistinguishable from being used. The new circle doesn’t feel normal because it isn’t. It’s healthy. And health, when you’ve been surviving dysfunction for long enough, can feel like its own kind of crisis.
I think about Rohn’s line differently now. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. It’s true, but it’s also incomplete. Because the average isn’t just about habits or ambition or mindset. It’s about what your nervous system learns to tolerate. What it begins to accept as the baseline. What it stops questioning because everyone around you has stopped questioning it too.
Your five teach your body what love looks like, what friendship feels like, what respect sounds like, what boundaries are for. And if your five have taught your body that love is chaos, that friendship is emotional labour without reciprocity, that boundaries are selfish, and that respect is something you earn by being useful, then that’s the average you’re living inside. Not because you chose it. Because you absorbed it. Because proximity isn’t just destiny. It’s curriculum.
So the question isn’t just who are your five. The question is: what are they teaching your body to expect? And are you okay with the lesson?
And if the answer unsettles you, if you feel something shift in your chest reading this, some quiet recognition that the people you’ve called your circle have been, without malice but without mercy, holding you in a shape you’ve been trying to leave, then the next question is simpler and harder than any audit or checklist.
What would it mean to let yourself be unknown for a while? To release the people who keep you recognisable, and to stand in the gap long enough to discover who you are without them?
The loneliness is real. It is also temporary.
What it makes room for is not.
Choose all,
xoxo Viktoria
P.S. If you’re scared to let people go because “they’ve been there for me” or “that’s just how family is” or “she means well,” remember the coffee. It doesn’t matter who pours it. It doesn’t matter whether they meant to. Sugar is sugar. Poison is poison. And your body doesn’t care about the intentions of the hand that holds the cup.
