Straight to the point write up, I love it. You just said a lot of what I've been reflecting on lately.

How do I say no to some friends?. I've been having difficulty doing this because I'm scared of hurting them one way or the other but I'm wrong here because if I need to move forward in life I'll have do some certain things to change my life for the better

Say No to everything. Yeah you read it right. You have to say no to everything. And then clean the slate and then build on the top of that slate. This sort of approach is called starting from scratch. And it is not meant for all the type of people but this works for most of the people.

It's hard but it's exactly what most of us need to do. We just need to take a deep breath and start a fresh. It'll be very helpful later in the future