The first year I went without the bottle was a solid year for me. I had just begun to find myself in a new era of life. I felt good hell I felt great. Sober life turned a good corner for me but for a bit I still felt like good ol Chad was lingering in the crowd. Cheering me along like everyone else but he wasn’t wearing my team colors. Juuust in case I wanted to go back to his team. For me and my short attention span it was “ok you did it.. now what? You don’t socialize anymore. You don’t talk to half of your friends anymore in fact you’ve managed to isolate yourself from almost everyone. Maybe making a cameo at a local watering spot to eat.

I stuck with it though. I didn’t have a detailed plan of action.

Just don’t get drunk asshole. You’ve gone this long. “One day at a time just like you tell everyone else.”

Fine

I made it to year two.

Year one and year two were completely different

If you’ve ever injured yourself especially in your 40s and 50s you know some injuries takes months even years to heal.

I’ll give you an example. Several years ago I had an operation on my left Achilles. I had a real bad case of Achilles tendon calcification. Calcium build up behind my Achilles was stretching the tendon bad enough to push it to the point of rupturing. I had been running my ass off training for a big time marathon and my Achilles wasn’t having it. I had to have it basically shaved down in outpatient surgery and my recovery time was about 2-3 months. I healed as expected from the surgery but my Achilles became very vulnerable to pain. You could poke me with your finger on that spot and I’d scream in pain. I was literally Achilles heel in physical form. I couldn’t prop my feet up on a ottoman even if it was padded. Just the left one. I had an employee at the steakhouse trying to have some fun give me a “flat tire” on the back of my shoe and I fell screaming in pain.

The operation fixed the issue but left a very painful scar. I had mobility. I could even run again. The nagging pain stayed for years. I wrote it off as just one of those things I’d have to deal with.

12 years later my right foot started doing the same damn thing. Surgery wasn’t an option for me. For one I didn’t have health insurance and I didn’t want to have both Achilles to have the same traumatic pain for the rest of my life. I researched every home remedies because I didn’t want my Achilles to burst obviously and decided to do my own thing about it until I was left with no other choice.

I stopped wearing my favorite shoes, Hokas. I bought a pair of crocs for work. Yes they are ugly but they didn’t touch my heels. I used to wear compression socks when I ran and the day after for recovery. I put them away. I also traded in my running for walking for a full calendar year.

In that one year my right ankle began to heal on its own. No meds I’m not a pill guy for personal reasons. I didn’t even take pain meds for my first Achilles operation. They aren’t my thing. With my addictive personality I was terrified.

After a year or so the bone spurs went away. The pain went away. And miraculously the pain and scar tissue damage in my left foot also went away. After 12 years of constant pain.

12 years I limped on that foot. Surgery fixed the issue at hand but left a ton of scar tissue in had to live with.

Let’s now make a another connection.

First year of sobriety for me was very similar. It was my own personal operation on my brain. To fix the swelling “Achilles” in my head. Because just like my Achilles it felt like was brain was going to explode. Sobriety took that swelling away but just like my left Achilles I had a lot of painful scar tissue to deal with.

I was fixed

But I had to give it the right remedy to let it heal and just like my ankle it would take more than just time.

That’s what I refer to as my reckoning. Getting sober is hard fucking work. It’s a daily workout in a rehab head space. You don’t always heal with rest. You also need proper rehabilitation for your mental health. Sobriety is just the awakening.

You’ve had your operation. Now it’s time to reckon with it.

My first year without my favorite toy was life changing. Physically I turned a new page. I looked good, I felt good. A lot of my familiar aches and pains were dissolving along with some age old inflammation.

My mental habits were better due to no brain fog, hangovers and chemical imbalances trying to chop away at my mental health but I was left dealing with a lot of emotional scars.

Alcohol controlled my emotions, filters, personality for a really long fucking time. Without it I started having to deal with all of these organically. Not one by one y’all my brain left the front door open for all to hang out at the same time and I have a really small house to host these activities. It gets crowded up there.

It was/is hard. Its the dark part of sobriety that no one likes to talk about. I no longer have that vodka insulation that helped me absorb years of repressed emotions.

They’re all there now. Can’t deal with them one by one emotions come in packs like hotdog buns. There always seem to be more buns that the dogs can fill up.

Year two was spent rehabbing my mental health. I acknowledged sobriety needed some assistance. I used the same determination I used to throw the vodka away to address my mental health.

I’m was sober but my brain was still a trainwreck.

My emotions were spiking in a manic matter. I was like a hot and cold faucet one extreme or the other.

I was/am a sober person but still needed to work on being a better person and also assess multiple mental health issues. Sobriety is a nice stitch up to that open wound but I don’t want to deal with scar tissue for another decade.

Retraining your brain on how to think and deal with things is harder than training for a marathon.

I use early morning meditation and yoga for my mental flexibility. Stretching before my long mental run.

I journal my reps, mental workouts, my gains and my losses. Some days I’ll do things way out of my comfort zone to push myself. It may be just eating something different from one of my go to eateries, changing my walking routes, driving 5mph slower than normal all day, hiking or camping in a new spot or even building a charcuterie box completely backwards. I do this deliberately to let my brain know we are going outside of our box all day. Brace yourself.

I’m a creature of habit. I assign myself a strict schedule. I eat at certain times, I go to bed same time every night, I drink probably the same amount of ounces of coffee every morning and won’t touch caffeine after noon. These are good habits but at the same time they keep me in my safety zone. Remove even one and it fucks up my whole day. I also employ these methods when I camp. My site is set up by a specific time and if my campfire isn’t going by 6:30 I start to sweat. I probably had it set up and ready to go hours before. Setting up my campfire is the very first thing I do when I arrive.

Again these habits are healthy but they are concealing the fact that I have to be in absolute control of my environment or it goes to my head. Over the last two plus years of my reckoning I’ve applied these habits into my folder of “needs work”

I have several of these folders they aren’t imperative but when you file them altogether they become a great deal.

Control freak -file one

Withholding my emotions -file two

Anger management -file three

Procrastination for fear of anxieties – four

Mountains of bitterness over the years -five

and about a hundred more. Many I don’t share they’re my own to reckon with but I’m sure you get the illustration.

I don’t reckon with all at the same time it’s insurmountable. I pick and choose a couple of files and work on them individually. With this I apply manifestation.

Sometimes I feel manifestation gets a bad rap because it’s misunderstood. You aren’t rubbing a genie bottle and poof a wish comes true.

Nor are you wishing with your hand stretched out and eyes squinted with superpower concentration waiting for a winning lottery ticket to magically appear.

That isn’t manifestation. You’re trying to conjure up a pipe dream.

Manifesting is creating a vision. A physically or for me a spiritually one that I put on my horizon to chase and achieve. Just like training for that marathon 12 years ago I envisioned a goal in mind and then created a plan, training regiment, focus and end game to reach that result. There will be always be some hiccups and fuck ups along the way. Keep that goal on your horizon the whole time. Somedays it may seem distant than others but if you stay on course and apply yourself it can be attained.

I wanted to have my own restaurant when I was 35 years old. I didn’t open up Southern until I was 42.

For seven years I trained myself for restaurant propriety. I started photocopying P&Ls and breaking them down. I threw myself back in the kitchen and absorbed every single aspect of BOH operations from recipes, procedures, equipment and then started manifesting my own ideas. I created multiple concepts in my head, wrote several down. If I went out to eat I absorbed every little detail I could find that I found paramount to having a successful operation. I would eat in larger foodie cities and with a notebook and journal.

We walked through two dozen spaces over 4 years. I kept that brick and mortar on my horizon for a long ducking time. I never strayed from it. I was hell bent and obsessed because that’s what my manifestation needed. I worked my ass off to get to that level and it paid off.

I built the vision in my head

I put in on my horizon and never detoured.

I manifested Southern Culture.

I use this as an example of my reckoning. I’m doing the same exact thing.

I put a shit load of mental health goals on my horizon. Goals to fix this noggin and most of its toxicity. I set these goals not only to fix myself but to bring me back home to my family.

Let’s be honest the two are the same. I can’t have mental happiness without the love of my family.

I can’t have the full support and love of my family without my mental happiness. Or at least putting in some goddamn effort.

I created a new manifestation with a new horizon. For me it’s the ultimate horizon. Every thing else is just life fodder.

Ok I’m gonna try to tie all of this together.

I used my Achilles injury as an example of a procedure I had done to fix an issue with my ankle. I used sobriety to do the same with my brain. The operation fixed the immediate issue but I was left with years of scar tissue and constant pain as a result. I just figured it was the norm until I took it upon myself to reckon with the pain and through patience and perseverance I healed it. It took a long fucking time but as a write this I’m sitting here with my right foot propped over left foot on a wooden coffee table. It’s been well over a decade since I’ve been able to do without pain. I can literally bang my heal on the table without wincing in pain.

Sobriety was my operation. I still have a lot of scar tissue/trauma to reckon with.

It’s gonna take a shit load of time. I have been mentally preparing myself for every step.

Year one was just focusing on my vodka bottle. It was tough and after the first year was under my belt I felt like I won a trophy but not the game. Winning season but didn’t make the playoffs.

The second year I dealt with emotional spikes, still had big bouts of depression and anxiety was going through the roof. I was sober but just like my operation I thought it would be the end all to my suffering. It fixed a big, fat troubling issue that had been addressed but I had scar tissue to deal with and that’s when I put my reckoning into overdrive.

Fix your shortcomings Gangwer was what I wrote down. I’m not talking about habits like picking your nose in public, driving too slow in the left hand lane or forgetting to wash your hands after you piss.

These were much deeper, imbedded into my brain. Bad mental habits, outbursts, disorders etc that I had hoped sobriety would’ve fixed. It didn’t but what it did was open my vision to a new horizon. A new manifestation/ path to focus on.

Just being a better fucking person.

It takes more than sobriety and I feel like some of you need to hear that as much as I did.

I’m present but my inner dialogue needed to change too. My internal thoughts still bordered on bitterness, jealousy, bullish thoughts. Not publicly I was hyper aware when I went sober how I personally came across to people on social situations. I took myself away from these events for quite some time. I felt awkward and still do. After two plus years I’m just now going back out in public places that I have more than 10 people on a city block.

Sober you can still be two different people in your head. After my first year of sobriety I’ve been working on combining the two. It’s not as easy at it sounds. There are a lot of clergy out there that preach and then go home to being someone else. I refuse to preach until I become the person that exemplifies the truthfulness that come from my mouth.

It’s harder than it sounds.

I take these files in my head and I choose one randomly and reckon with it. Manifest a solution and set it on my horizon.

It’s hard with some. I try to focus and it’s like trying to read a online article with a thousand different pop ups ads trying to take you away to another article at hand. Tiny little x’s to poke at until the article has been completed. But I don’t stray until I do and then it’s on to the next.

I’ve taken to opening up my mental health to my wife. All of it. If I have an emotional outburst I’ll come back into the room after my mind has acclimated and explain my thought process step by step to my wife.

What was on my mind

The build up beforehand

And all the little snakes that tripped me up in between.

If my brain was a hose it would be one of the old ones that lie in the side of the yard in crimpled angles. You turn the hose on and you get all these tight little blockages that don’t allow the water to pass through. My wife is the one that straightens that hose so I can water my garden.

A year ago I didn’t do this. I’d turn off the faucet because there wasn’t enough water coming out of the hose to makes a difference. My garden would dry up

Growth

Manifestation

New horizons

That’s just an example and if I applied all the other files into examples well we’d be here a long goddamn time.

It works. The manifestation.

After the second year of sobriety and reckoning my mind changed. My thinking has evolved. Just the last three months I’ve dissolved a bucket of scar tissue. Writing it out has been a key. Journaled manifestation.

I get bouts of anxiety at night. I turn them into those pop up ads but the X’s are larger and easier to see. I’m like Tom Cruise in Minority Report with that giant virtual reality screen, wearing my virtual gloves and goggles, swiping bad anxiety tabs with better ones. I’m literally doing this in my mind. Bad thought pops up at 3am and I’m like “nope, get the fuck out of here” and I swipe for a new tab or I close the laptop down.

It works for me. To each their own

Your thinking can change overtime. You can reprogram your motion of thoughts through patience, mindfulness and consistency. I’m not 100% and never will be but I’m better. My inner dialogue has been much more positive and is still progressing.

Actions express your priorities much louder than words and inspirational fb quotes.

If my mind is not sharing what my outside words are saying then I’m a failure as far as influencing positivity and intentions. It took awhile to manage those thoughts.

Sincerity is not a job or obligation it’s an existence.

It’s my manifesto of manifestation.

This is my path to my growth. My mental gym workouts. They are paramount to my mental health and they work as long as I keep them on my horizon.

I’m not good at showing others how to follow this honestly I feel like it’s all unique in each individual’s mind how to manifest.

For me it works and I’m cozy with the progress.