An Excerpt from Kickass Recovery:
From Your First Year Clean to the Life of Your Dreams,
by Billy Manas
I opened the notebook and began to plan a perfect life for myself with the premise that anything was possible — because that is exactly how I felt. My first idea was that I would take the hazmat endorsement test at the Department of Motor Vehicles, so I could be eligible for getting a higher-paying union trucking job. These jobs were the best because they paid hourly instead of by the mile. Not only that, but they offered time-and-a-half
overtime pay after eight hours on any given workday.
My second plan was to start writing and publishing articles in all my favorite online magazines. I knew that if I got enough of a readership, it would be easier to get a publishing deal for the book I wanted to write. I also wanted to get myself a great
life coach to help keep me on track and turn these goals into reality.
A part of me felt like I had no business making such far-reaching goals for myself. I was in my forties, unemployed, and paying child support on three kids. If I had thought about
those hurdles at the time, I would never have written those things in that notebook.
This proves what I am saying. A universal intelligence helped me find a path to what I needed to focus on. This stuff really does work.
It took a month before I had my hazmat endorsement. That test was not easy. Six weeks later, I landed that union job. Again, not easy. They rejected me the first time, but I called their corporate headquarters to find out why. That was a really good idea, because they had incorrect information on me, and when I corrected this, they invited me in for an interview.
There’s a really important lesson here. In the past, it would have been my style to think, You don’t want me? Yeah, well, I don’t want you, either. I believe that this is an endemic anthem for the addict. Had I taken that usual approach, nothing that is currently happening in my life would be happening. Chances are, you wouldn’t even be reading this book. Looking back, I was doing so many things that I normally wouldn’t be doing,
and getting such incredible results. The whole thing snowballed, in a good way. One good move — the notebook — led to another, which in turn led to another.
As all of this was happening, I was playing the movie The Secret on my laptop every night as I went to sleep. I realize this sounds like total insanity, but to this day, I am sure the ideas in that movie became embedded in my subconscious, and allowed me to believe that anything was possible.
Within six months of getting my first article accepted by the magazine Elephant Journal, I was writing for them regularly. Some of my articles were even going viral — a lot of them reaching 30,000 to 40,000 views. I was so excited to be alive that after a while, I was waking up hours before work to write and exercise and meditate. My health problems disappeared as if they had never even existed in the first place.
No one could ever convince me that our minds don’t control our bodies. Ironically, my union job supplies me with the greatest health insurance available, and I haven’t had to use it.
Let’s cut to the chase: I am sitting in my apartment — a bigger one now — writing this book because my literary agent helped me get a deal with a publisher. Every single thing I imagined for myself came true because I left that notebook open on my kitchen table and read that little essay every morning. I drank my coffee and let myself get emotionally attached to the dreams I’d planned for myself.
I managed to bounce back from getting fired and found a job that far exceeded the position I lost, and there was no reason in the world why I couldn’t accomplish everything else on that page. Now I have. All I needed to make it come true? An overwhelming sense of certainty that it would.
So, let’s summarize, shall we?
1. The law of attraction is as real as life on Earth.
2. The quality of our lives is directly in line with the quality of our thoughts.
3. If we can control our emotions, we can control our thoughts — and thereby control our lives.
So, now we are left with the very real question: How do we control our emotions? If you are in recovery, or even just know you need to be, then it’s clear that you already know how to control your emotions.
As a matter of fact, every single person in the back of an ambulance getting pumped full of Narcan tonight, every belligerent drunk getting beat up in a back alley, and every lonely person staring at a laptop and masturbating knows how to control their emotions.
The challenge with all these poor people is that their methods are either fatal or just plain awful. Hopefully, this all changes after we get into recovery and begin to live differently. Instead of using substances, alcohol, or porn, we learn to call our sponsor or a friend or read recovery literature.
Usually, any of these methods will work for us. However, it is also important that we learn how to change our state when none of these options are available. Personally speaking, there have been times when I’ve been faced with uncomfortable feelings and I couldn’t get to a meeting, no one was picking up the phone, and reading was out of the question. In these moments, we cannot afford to allow ourselves to be swallowed up by
negativity.
Here’s a four-step technique that will work:
1. Figure out exactly what you are feeling. If the first thing that pops into your mind is “pissed,” stop for a second. “Pissed” is an umbrella term for a lot of different feelings. You’ll want to isolate the exact feeling as best as you can. Did your boyfriend
say something to you that made you feel inferior or less than? Did your boss insult you and cause you to fear the loss of your job and your income? Get quiet for a second and figure out exactly how you feel.
2. Honor the emotion. Fear is not a useless emotion. It is a signal from our brain that informs us we need to be prepared for an upcoming challenge. Guilt isn’t useless, either. It is a message that we have violated something important inside ourselves. If you
take a second and think about why you are feeling what you are feeling, it will give you a great opportunity to get to the root cause. That will, in turn, make it that much easier to get past it.
3. Decide what you’d like to feel instead. You might be thinking, Happy, stupid! Expand on that a little. Do you want to go from anxiety to a state of calm? Do you want to stop feeling sad and feel joyous instead? It’s a good idea to focus on what it
is you are trying to accomplish. It’s obvious we’d all like to feel better. The real question is: Better how?
4. Take action. The final step is action. What the action should be depends on what the negative emotion is. If you felt rejected by your girlfriend, let her know how you feel. If you don’t have your rent and you are stuck in anxiety, go talk to your landlord and get it handled. These suggestions sound so obvious, but just because a thing seems obvious doesn’t mean we always pay attention to it. I know even I get overwhelmed sometimes and feel so paralyzed, I forget to do anything about the problem. That makes the issue fester and get worse.
Using this technique regularly will help you stay in a place of love, gratitude, and joy — and as I said, these emotions will keep your thoughts where they need to be in order to attract all the good things into your life.
Billy Manas, author of Kickass Recovery, is a regularly featured columnist for Elephant Journal, a contributor to Good Men Project and The Fix, a published poet, a working musician, a full-time truck driver and a dad to three daughters. His journey from Adderall-chewing, methadone-swilling, pot-smoking maniac to speaker/author with over nine years of sustained recovery is, as is so often the case, fraught with excitement and a few valuable anecdotes. These anecdotes have found their way into his many talks at jails, detoxes, rehabs, and his new “Kickass Recovery” workshop. www.BillyManas.com
Excerpted from the book Kickass Recovery. Copyright © 2020 by Billy Manas. Printed with permission from New World Library.