You can not pick your relatives, but you can pick your friends.

As the old adage goes, 'You can not pick your relatives, but you can pick your friends.' That is good news because too often friends reveal themselves over time not to be friends. Friends can be wonderful assets in life but they can also become toxic.

Friendship often unfolds like flower. As a flower blooms, sun, rain, wind, and pets can greatly alter its progress. Similarly, positive first impressions, shared activities and experiences might contribute to the launch of a hopeful friendship, but the nature of that friendship can change significantly as we get to know each other better due to the many changes in social context and life experience typical of the friendship journey.

It takes time for friendship to develop. We don't show our true colors during the early stages of friendship. Rather they are revealed over time and especially under stress or when the fortunes rise and fall among the parties involved. Toxic friends typically can’t accept or support our successes. Their insecurities may manifest in efforts to sabotage our efforts for success and happiness in life. While on the surface, these friends they may say all the right, supportive things, they are really hoping and praying for our failure. As they say, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Yet sometimes we really do need to remind ourselves that we can pick our friends—and unpick them, too.

If we are lucky and chose well, there is nothing like #friendship. Friendship is the communion of unlikely souls and it is a good thing to have. We are who we are, because our friendships keep on growing — because there are always new people slipping into our lives, new voices, new stories, new faces we look for, new homes that open up to us. . . . at the end of the day, friendships are mirrors that provide proof that we do exist. Friendship is not all about big gestures and #ecstatic moments. It is also the littlest things; the humanity that happens between people when we find ourselves way out of context and someone reaches out and pulls us in. The height and #depth of friendship ties us with deep bonds of intimacy to others.

Throughout our lives, friends enclose us, like pairs of parentheses. They shift our boundaries, crater our terrain. They fume through the cracks of our tentative houses, and parts of them always remain. . . . Friendship asks and wants, hollows and fills, ages with us and us through it, cradles us, finally, like family. In friendship, there are #give and #takes; there are #expectations, and sweet #surprises.

Life is like a long journey and during its course; we will be accompanied by fellow travelers who sometimes spend a great deal of time with us, and sometimes not so much. These companions are sometimes welcome, and sometimes not. Some turn out to be wonderful fellow travelers, and some don’t. But if we are thoughtful, savvy, and mindful of how friends can be wonderful assets or toxic ones, we can make better decisions about who to befriend and who not to.

When dealing with toxic friends who really don’t have our best interests in mind, we might need to say goodbye as we continue and complete our journey of life