Billy Manas - Kickass Recovery: From Your First Year Clean to the Life of Your Dreams

Contents

Praise for Kickass Recovery

Billy Manas thoughtfully draws from his own powerful story of addiction and recovery to extend encouragement, courage, and hope to others. He compassionately invites readers to remember the context in which addiction happens, and offers an empowering lens through which readers can recognize how the strengths they already possess will serve them well on their journey of recovery.

Holly Parker, PhD, author of When Reality Bites: How Denial Helps and What to Do When It Hurts

Billy Manas makes getting clean and sober a helluva lot cooler and more freeing than staying hot and messy any day!

Tania Katan, author of Creative Trespassing

Billy Manass debut book, Kickass Recovery, is an authentic and needed testament to the power of recovering out loud. His honest, empowering, and sincere story will surely lead readers to the conclusion that anyone can find purpose through overcoming pain and adversity.

Ryan Hampton, advocate and author of American Fix: Inside the Opioid Addiction Crisis and How to End It

What do you get when you marry powerful memoir with smart self-help? Kickass Recovery! You wont find a better book on how you can create a recovery program that really works than Kickass Recovery. Highly recommended!

Eric Maisel, coauthor of Creative Recovery: A Complete Addiction Treatment Program That Uses Your Natural Creativity

The secret to overcoming addiction is not getting off drugs but staying off drugs and getting a life. This book describes one mans journey to do just that. While Billy Manass story is unique and personal, the lessons are universal and can be shared. This book suggests that there is power in positive thinking and that life tends to be a self-fulfilling prophesy. But ultimately, it shows that if you want things in your life to turn out differently, you have to do them differently.

Walter Ling, MD, author of Mastering the Addicted Brain and professor emeritus of psychiatry, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA

Copyright 2020 by Billy Manas

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

The material in this book is intended for education. It is not meant to take the place of diagnosis and treatment by a qualified medical practitioner or therapist. No expressed or implied guarantee of the effects of the use of the recommendations can be given or liability taken.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

First printing, March 2020

ISBN 978-1-60868-650-6

Ebook ISBN 978-1-60868-651-3

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

10987654321

For Bella, Gloria, and River you guys are the light,
the moon, and the stars...

Contents

B illy Manas hits a high note with Kickass Recovery. For thirty years, I played drums for and partied with some of the biggest names in the rock world. When the bubble burst and I was thrust out of the spotlight, I was lost. My friends were gone, and my music had died. It wasnt easy to accept the fact that I was a drummer without a band, and before long, my best friend became a bottle.

As Billy says, recovery is great, but its easy to hide in the meetings. I found myself doing just that. Initially, going into bars or restaurants with friends whod be drinking was pretty much out of the question. I was faced with knowing I needed to learn how to get back to doing what I was born to do play the drums and do it as a sober person. It was quite an adjustment.

We all know how important recovery is especially these days, with drugs and alcohol running so rampant and a book like Kickass Recovery can take a lot of the mystery out of not only living sober but living the life of your dreams.

Your life is out there. Whether you want to drive a truck or be a musician or an artist or maybe just fall in love and start a family its all available to you if you know how to get it.

Through the grace of God, I now have a beautiful family, and my career as a musician continues to live on even today. The difference is, this time I am sober.

To the sober life and living free, Liberty DeVitto Drums, Billy Joel, 19742003

M y moment of clarity came when I was sitting on the stoop of a Hudson Valley bakery at about 7 AM. I was a hot mess high and drunk and the only thing that shone clearly through my haze was the undeniable fact that I was at the end of my rope. I had been going through an endless cycle of emergency-room visits followed by hospital admittances all summer. And as much as I wanted to believe it was simply a temporary illness, a voice inside me kept reminding me that it was not normal for a forty-year-olds endocrine system to be shutting down, as the doctors had explained it.

At that very moment, I watched a happy young family get out of their Volvo wagon to go enjoy an early breakfast in Rosendale. The mom was blonde and in perfect physical shape, the dad looked like he just stepped out of an L.L. Bean catalog, and the kids were cute. They radiated a feeling of positivity that Id only ever noticed from afar. As I watched them walk past me carefully leaving enough space so that they wouldnt catch whatever they thought I was infected with it occurred to me that my substance abuse shut me out of the life they were currently basking in. I was forty years old. I had never made more than $350 per week. I was alone. I was a puddle of various addictions. The road I was on had no exits, and I was getting really damn close to the end of it.

Today I have over nine years clean and my own little family that I take out to breakfast in my brand-new car. As I sit here writing this, I earn three times what I used to make. I have an awesome credit rating. And I am pursuing a career path I never would have allowed myself to imagine when I was sitting there on the stoop that day.

When I was an addict, it was a pretty common even daily experience to wake up with thirty-seven cents in my pocket. But somehow I could venture out and come back home three hours later with fifty dollars worth of drugs, enough ramen noodles to feed me for the day, a ten-dollar pack of cigarettes, and a cup of coffee all without breaking any laws (mostly). For addicts and alcoholics, the ability to scrape together an existence with little more than a few coins is a point of pride the thrill of surviving despite a lack of resources creates a secondary addiction. If you are reading this, you probably know what I mean. I know you have stories that would rival Jesuss trick with the loaves and fishes. I know youve got the skills. In this book, Im going to show you how to harness all those street smarts and that creativity to design a life beyond your wildest dreams.