Choosing Yourself with Alex Lange

A man can spend years living a script he never wrote—until life refuses to let him ignore the truth. Alex opens the most personal chapter of his journey: a daughter’s DNET brain tumor, his own brain lesions, a marriage on the brink, and the institutional pressure to comply when his health and integrity said pause. What follows is a raw, unpolished account of making the hardest choice—choosing himself—so he could finally choose his family with clarity.

We walk through hospital hallways, cold ocean breaths, and the claustrophobia of uncertainty. A near-accident on a crowded bridge forces him to stop pushing his symptoms aside. Cold immersion becomes more than a challenge; it’s a nervous system reset that teaches presence under stress. Men’s work replaces isolation with honest mirrors and accountability. Sobriety clears the static. Journaling and meditation become daily anchors. When an exemption is denied and a career hangs in the balance, Alex refuses to outsource his conscience. Administrative separation isn’t just an ending; it’s a beginning. The family reorients around presence—selling the house, choosing RV life, and prioritizing health, connection, and honest communication.

Along the way, there are terrifying nights—like a 15-minute seizure during a COVID infection—and unexpected grace, as seizures later subside and an MRI notes involution. The deeper lesson surfaces: masculinity isn’t hollow stoicism; it’s responsibility rooted in truth. Lead your nervous system, then lead your family. Trade numbing for practices that build capacity. Let community hold you to your word. And when the system asks you to betray yourself, remember that self-leadership is the foundation for love, fatherhood, and legacy.

If this story moved you or gave you language for your own turning point, share it with a brother who needs it. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell us: What choice brought you back to yourself?

This episode was recorded in the beginning of 2024. I still wanted to release this to talk about my own journey leading into A Man's Journey. 

Transcript

A Deeper Call to Come Home

SPEAKER_00 0:05

There comes a moment in every man's life when he realizes he's been living someone else's story, doing what he was told, carrying what he never questioned, surviving instead of living. But then something shifts. There's a deeper call. A whisper that says, Come home to yourself. Welcome to a man's journey podcast. This is a space for all men. Fathers, sons, leaders, dreamers, men who are rising, men who are healing, men who are ready for more. We go beneath the surface here. We talk about identity, grief, masculinity, legacy, and purpose. The real stuff that shapes us, breaks us, and makes us whole. We're not here to perform. We're here to remember, to reconnect, to live fully, authentically, and heart setting. I'm Alex Lang, a father, traveler, speaker, writer, and a man who's walked through the fire of loss, love, and transformation. And this podcast is an invitation for you to walk your own journey, not alone, but together. Let's begin. Welcome back to season three of a man's journey podcast. I first want to take a moment and just say thank you to the listeners that have been here along the ride. Last season, season two, was recorded in the beginning of 2024. Stored away, and I have recently just released them all. There's one podcast that you're going to listen to today that I recorded. I haven't even listened to myself. And uh I'm releasing to the world, but there's been so much that's happened since. So I just want to preface this episode that I recorded this episode about my own journey, my own story, what led me to a man's journey in the beginning of 2024. Those that have been following me know that within these last nine months, I lost a child. My youngest son, Liam, passed away from a rare uh congenital heart defect. And this time period has been challenging, but it has pushed me to step even deeper into my purpose. I've been able to give a TED talk, been on multiple podcasts, and now taking the step to follow my dream and live that. So I hope this podcast hits you well, that you understand the concept of a man's journey. And then I also want to just end with this season three, a few things are going to come up. I'm going to I am going to interview men that are dealing with grief, just like me. I'm introducing a project that I have started with my son and my nephew called A Man's Journey Next Generation. And I'm going to continue to interview men that are doing things in the realm of personal development, self-development work. It's always been an interest of mine, all things men, and we're going to talk about resiliency. We're going to talk about transforming pain into purpose. Enjoy the podcast. Today, we're going to do something that we haven't done yet. I have collected stories from men throughout the fatherhood community, throughout men's communities that are doing self-development work. And uh this podcast, it came from one of my most challenging times. And so when I ask a lot of men to jump on, we talk about their most challenging times. We talk about how they lived out of alignment, how they lived out of uh they lived disconnected to themselves. And so today I just want to share my own story. I want to dive into how this podcast came about and the challenges that I faced and uh how that's helped me and my passion and my purpose in the world. And so, for those that are that have been waiting for this, this is years in the making. A man's journey started in 2022. We're gonna kick it off with my story. We're gonna kick it off with how this all came about. So, here we go. So many times, 2021. I've I've referenced 2021 so many times, and that was the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. In 2021, at the very beginning, uh in February, my daughter was formally diagnosed with a brain tumor. And so Lenavelle, who was two at the time, she was born March 2028, 2020, uh, 18. And around nine to ten months old, we started to notice something weird was going on with her. She would make this scrunchy face, it would her lips would start to discolor just a little bit, not too much. She'd foam up at the mouth. And we had been, we had taken her to a doctor because we didn't know what was going on. And uh to fast forward just a little bit, uh, in in the following months, we've seen doctor after doctor. The pediatrician said that it was acid reflux, that we shouldn't worry much about it because she's eating and she's growing, and she's like she's a like a normal uh one-year-old at the time. And so we just kept monitoring and monitoring and monitoring, and it and it sl it progressively gotten worse. And to the point where we took her back and said, hey, she's not doing well. Uh, we need to figure something out. And my wife and I decided that we would get, uh I forgot what they call it, but they stick a camera down the throat to look at the lining of her uh esophagus. And before we did that, the doctor to my wife at the time had talked about this doesn't sound like acid reflux, this sounds like seizures. And that was the first time that we ever had heard that in the process. And so we we followed through with the procedure, and then the next day I had shown my chiropractor a video of her having a at the time it was an episode, but it came to be a seizure. And my chiropractor, who his wife was a doctor who they knew, neuro uh neurologist, told me I needed to go to the ER immediately. I needed to take my wife and my kid and my daughter to the ER because those were seizures. So February 7th of 2021, uh, we went to the emergency room. My my daughter was, they they put all these wires attached to her head, screaming, crying, poked and prodded. And after a week of being in the hospital, uh they diagnosed her after an MRI with a golf ball-sized D net brain tumor. And as I sit here and I talk to you, I remember the day vividly we were supposed to go home. They'll say, hey, we're doing this MRI, you should be home early this morning. 9 a.m. came in, and a bunch of doctors came into the room. It's like something you see off a movie. And the woman at the time, uh, they I don't want to say misdiagnosed her, but they used the wrong terminology. They said that she had, she's, they said she had a brain tumor and that it was cancerous, and they didn't know much more about it. And and my wife and I were sitting there in shock. Like I was, I I remember just being numb and feeling like I was in a movie, like feeling like this was not real. And we both just started breaking down crying. And uh that that next day the doctor came in and she apologized because it's not a cancerous tumor. D nets are uh not cancerous, and so I got hit with that in two thousand twenty-one. The weeks following, I felt lost, I felt confused, I felt upset at why me? Why did I have to deal with this? Why did I have to be the one that had a child that that had an ailment? And my wife had shown me an episode of Goop Lab. She had shown me an episode of uh Wim Hof, who was on Goop Lab at the time, and he shared his own story, and he he shared the uh importance how cold immersion had played in his life. And and so I watched that episode mind-blown, uh, absolutely mind-blown. And uh I was I was struggling, I had a lot of stress, I had a lot of anxiety. I was trying to navigate what all of this meant, be a father, provide for the family, and also like try to try to figure out how to deal with all of it. And I hadn't yet to this point dove into my own internal work. And as you uh all have heard by now, uh my my childhood, which is episode one, we talked, we talked about my childhood, and so I still had not processed that at this moment. And uh I just decided to jump into it. So I did there was a 20-day cold shower challenge that Wim Hof had. I modified that to do 28 days. So I did seven days a week in my shower first of all first off. And I started with 30 seconds, went to a minute, went to a minute 30, went to two minutes, two minutes 30, um uh three minutes. I had I done that progression over uh the course of 27 days. And on the 28th day, I went into the ocean in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The water was 34 degrees, and I did 12 minutes. And so that kicked off my cold immersion journey because that helped me to start to breathe through the challenging times. When emotions came up, when sadness came up, when when challenging moments in my life as a father, as a man came up, that taught me how to breathe. And so the cold was something that helped me through the next following months as I navigated, tried to figure out just how to continue to push forward. Which leads me to the middle of 2021. Uh, as I mentioned, when Linavelle was diagnosed, I had already begun experiencing some symptoms, uh, some whooshing symptoms, and my eyes would water and uh I wouldn't black out, but I would have to close my eyes and take a minute. And I had a I had a hard time being in the moment, but I rem I remember pushing it off because I needed to be there for my wife, I needed to be there for my kids, and I didn't have time for that. So I kept pushing it off and pushing it off and pushing it off until it was it was June of 2021. I was driving to work at the time. My ship, I was in the Navy, my ship was in the yards, and I had to drive. I lived in Virginia Beach, I had to make a 20 to 25 minute drive to the shipyard in Portsmouth. And there's this bridge uh right before the Elizabeth Tunnel. There's this bridge that I would I would drive over every single day, and it'd be 5 a.m. and traffic's bad. And I was going over the bridge, and I remember turning my turn signal on to shift lanes, and I went to go look over my shoulder to shift lanes, and an episode hit me. I started watering, whooshing, and I just remember bearing the car violently to the right side towards the edge and pressing the brake as hard as I can. Car stopped, people honking, blaring, and I just had to breathe through it. I had to figure out what's going on. And after the the 30 to a minute, I 30 seconds to a minute, I continued on to work. But this time it was different. This time it was different because I I asked myself in that moment, what if I would have crashed off the bridge? What if I would have would have ended up dying in that situation? Well, how would my family be able to rely on me? My wife at the time, four kids, would have been a single mom. I was the provider in the house, didn't have any financial stability in the sense of like something was set up if I went out. Yeah, I had life insurance. I get it. But what would have happened if something more severe would have happened to me? And so I went to work. I told my my chain of command, I said, hey, look, this just happened. I need to, I need to go see medical. So I went to medical and I set up an appointment. Uh fortunately, the next day I was able to get into the uh ears, nose, and tea, ears, nose, and throat doctor. And they did an observation and I had an episode on the table with her. She saw it. And she was like, we need to get you an MRI and a CAT scan, CAT scan ASAP. So I went through that process uh the same day. I got the CAT scan. A couple weeks later, I got an intensive MRI because on the CAT scan, CAT scan, excuse me, there was an abnormal finding. No one told me what it was. They just said there were some abnormal findings, so we need to do an MRI. And so I did the MRI. And uh I remember calling the doctor because no one had called me. No one let like sent me a message in the Navy, and unfortunately, uh in the military, especially in the Norfolk area, where there's thousands, hundreds of thousands of sailors, like the care, you know, it was like three weeks to an appointment, and because doctors had so many patients, you you may not always get the the response time that you would like. So I remember calling the woman back and saying, hey, no one ever told me what was going on. I'm sitting here wondering why these episodes are still having happening. What's what what what is the MRI show? And I was I was on my ship and she was like, Are you well, are you sitting down? And I'm like, Well, what why why are you asking me? She's like, I need you to sit down. And I sat down, I was in my birthing where where sailors sleep at. And she said, they found three tumor-like uh tumors in your your corpus colossal. They don't know if they're cancerous, they don't know, but they're they're little masses, very, very small, but they're there. So I just I was deflated immediately. I was like, man, seriously. And the doctor had said that they're not cancerous, they don't look cancerous. We don't know. Matter of fact, we don't even know if we'll ever find out if they're cancerous, because if we go in, we could do more harm in getting a biopsy than if we just leave them alone. But the way that they look in the pictures, they don't look cancerous. But we do want to get an extra picture, an extra MRI, because we want to get a better understanding. So I went back, went back for another MRI, and it it so happens, it turns out, that I have five. So I had three in my corpus callosum, have had, I don't know, we'll get into that a little bit later, but three in my corpus callosum, which is the front part of the brain, and two in my cerebellum. And uh so I started to do with the neurologist, I was then referenced to a neurologist, started to do testing to see what it was all about. I I did a seizure testing to see if what the symptoms were were seizures. I did um some other testing um to see if it was meningitis. They started, they put me on medical hold, they started testing me for everything because they didn't know what they were. They were hartomeus lesions, and that's about all they knew. So I remember doing a MS for multiple sclerosis. I remember doing a test for that and having the markers for it, but not having active MS. I remember going through headache, a bunch of uh neurocognition tests, and all of this was happening. Remember, I said 2021. All of this was happening in the rollout of the COVID vaccine and mandates and things of that nature. So I just get hit with this big news. Someone's telling me that I have five non-cancerous phartomeus lesions uh that are that uh that they don't know anything about. There's not a formal diagnosis, and I'm sitting here with people telling me that I have to take a COVID vaccine because it's not gonna affect what's going on internally. Push the brakes. Say that again? I remember the I remember the neurologist saying this is not gonna affect anything that you got going on. And I sat there and I had a hard time believing that. I really did. And my whole life up to that one point, I just done what I was told. I just followed blindly. Right? They they in the military, there's this saying uh the old school military, don't just ask why, just do it. Do it because I told you to do so. And my father was a big, just do it because I told you to do so. And so that point there, I had a decision to make. I had a choice to make, which I want to get off for a second and and go back to. I remember when I first joined the military. I joined in 2009, and my dad had sat me and my sisters down. One of my sisters was already in the military for a couple years, the other one was about to go in, just like me. And he was like, look, a couple things. Take the take the military like a career and not a job. I want you to really focus on building it as a career and not a job. That's one mistake that I made. And then number two is that make sure that you document everything. Not telling you to stop doing work, but document everything that you can. And I took the second to reality because I had a lot of things that I was going through and I never quit the work that I was doing, but I always went to medical to make sure that I documented when things had happened to me. But I never prioritized my health because I didn't want to miss the mission or miss ship's movement or you know, get pushed back in my career because I had I had taken it as a career and I leaned head on. I made chief in seven years, and and that was a big piece to me. Like the mission was first, everybody else was first. And so coming back to 2021, I get hit with this news. It was time for me to make a decision for myself. It was a time for me to put myself first. And that was the start of what you see today. My whole life leading up to that moment, I had put others first before myself. I didn't even know what I wanted. I was following what others wanted for me so I could fit in. So I felt safe, so I belonged. So this time, July 2021 came around and I got hit with this, with this. I went home. My marriage was, I knew it was already falling apart. Like we had already gone through so many things up to that point. And I knew where my wife stood. She wasn't taking the vaccine, our kids weren't taking the vaccine, but the ball was in my court. I had a choice to make. And so I sat with it. And I sat with it, and I sat with it. Unfortunately, I didn't have a decision to make. I did not have to make the decision right away because they had not put a hard line in the sand in the military until October, November of that year. And so I was like, you know what? Let me go back to the doctors, let me see what these testing, how this testing is, and go with and get feedback from them. So I went to the doctors, went back to the doctors, and a couple of the doctors that I was working with said, well, you have about a 90% chance that you'll get medically retired because it's either it could be MS or having brain tumors and it affecting you, you may not be able to be in the military. And so I'm like, ooh, 90%. And I don't know what who implemented this story. Maybe it's a story I created myself. I'm not gonna, it's I'm not looking for blame, but something came to me because my enlistment was coming up. My my time in the military, my contract was coming up, and I was afraid that they were not medically going to cover me or see me throughout this period of these brain tumors unless I re-enlisted again. And that I wasn't gonna get medically retired unless I re-enlisted again. Now looking back at that, I'm foolish. Uh, but I re-enlisted on September 1st. I re-enlisted for my final six years in the military. September 1st is my wife's birthday. I didn't even have a conversation with my wife about it. I came home, signed the papers, showed her, and uh I remember she was disgusted. She was upset. We never really talked that much for the following upcoming days. And so as I sat with from the September 1st of re-enlisting, and I had the story that I was going to be medically discharged, started to come to the realization that when when I started to seek second opinions because the neurologist I was working with just forced a diagnosis. So as I there's this black and white in the military that if you don't have a formal diagnosis, then you can be temporary, temporarily exempted, exempt from vaccinations and immunizations. So I pulled that out, showed my doctor uh around mid-September, and I remember he came back because we were getting closer to the timeline. He came back a day later saying that I was diagnosed with migraines. The MS testing, the seizure testing, yes, there was some markers for MS, but all that stuff came back um normal, and that the only thing that they could come up with it was being diagnosed with migraines. So now the ball was back in my court. I needed to get a vaccine that I still did not know what was going on within my head because the testing, it still wasn't uh, you know, it wasn't solid. They they said that it could be this, it could be this, it could be this. No one was really sure, but they threw a diagnosis because of the black and white that I put into their awareness. So I immediately said, you know what? I appreciate you. I don't align with how you're doing business. I want to get a second opinion. I started to look for second opinions. I got a second opinion from a migraine specialist, I got a second opinion from a functional practitioner within the military. I also reached out and it wasn't even a second opinion, but I wanted to have a conversation with my daughter's neurologist, who was a Navy commander at the time. And I remember sending her all my information, my medical records, sitting down with her. She did her own research. I don't know if she's still in the military, uh, but I know she got transferred pretty soon, right after all this went down. And she looked at me and she said, What you're asking for on medical exemption, it we we should grant it for you because we really don't know what's going on. We don't know how these lesions would act with the COVID vaccine. We'd be putting you in harm if we just went forward with it. And she told me more about how my seizure or my tumors related to my daughter's tumors, that they're 90% very similar, that my seizures, because they weren't the location that they were at, or my tumors with the location they were at weren't causing seizures. Where my daughter's tumor was, it did cause seizures. And so we talked about that. She gave me some alternatives of helping with the symptoms, told me to drink water, get adequate sleep, sunlight. Uh, she gave me a B6, B12 complex, like told me all of these things that I could do to help with the symptoms. And she told me that I needed to push for a medical exemption. So I uh so through that and the functional practitioner, uh, they they gave me a medical exemption for the COVID vaccine in October of 2021. And I put it back to my chain of command. The deadline was approaching the five-day deadline, the 10-day deadline. And man, I remember sitting there and just like so scary. I was angry because I was in that situation. And I don't even know who I was angry at at the time. Like now that I've like now that I'm sitting here and reflecting, I remember just being so angry and not knowing who to be angry at. But this was the this was I knew that this was a turning point in my life because I had never chosen my health before, like I haven't chosen myself before anybody else. And as I was going through this process, my wife and I, our marriage was we were in shambles. I didn't know how to be relational, I didn't know how to be present. Like through all the stresses that I was going through with work, I was working even more. I was struggling, I was drinking heavily more than I have drank up to that point. I was always a social drinker, but I was starting to drink at home. Corona, 12 packs. I was, I was, I was chugging them. And and it came to a breaking point. My wife was pregnant with our fifth at the time. October 20, uh, October 24th, 2021. My my wife had a appointment with the OBGYN and at the OBGYN she had they asked her if she wanted a papsmare. And she hadn't gotten one in a long time, and so she let them she this is after we talked about it. She said that when she got the papsimor, she started bleeding a little bit, which is very common when you get pap smears. And that when she started to bleed, she got excited because she thought the baby was gonna pass. And I'm I'm not doing or giving the due diligence in the store in the story, but I can tell you that when my wife found out that she was pregnant in August time frame, she wasn't happy. She didn't want the baby, she didn't want to keep it. We weren't even doing well. We were basically at that time just co-parenting and co-habitating. We would have transactional sex occasionally, but it was becoming few and far between. So October comes and and so she had that past marriage, and she has that feeling of relief. And then when she realized that the bleeding stopped, she was upset, she was disappointed. And so she made her own decision, she had to make her own decisions. She decided to have an abortion, she decided to move through the the abortion. Uh, she had gotten the abortion pills early on, and we were going back and forth, fighting back and forth. I was giving her an ultimatum of like, if you have an abortion, I'm leaving you. And she had the abortion. October 24th, she had the the half smear appointment. October 25th, she took the pills, and uh 26th, I believe, uh, she she passed the baby. And it was a baby born, 13 and a half or 14 weeks old. You could see the penis, you could see 10 fingers, 10 toes, you could see the head. It was a tough time. It was a tough time. I was there, I was screaming, I was crying. The kids, the boys were they were at an unschooling school, a Montessori led school. The girls didn't know what's going on. And uh my wife had asked me for a divorce. I was lost, fucking lost. Oh. Let me take a deep breath for that. That's that was a lot there. And I have never said that fully. But my wife had asked me for a divorce, and I I felt alone, I felt lost, sad. Didn't know if I wanted to continue going forward. And through this whole journey, I realized that I wasn't gonna get better if I didn't work on myself. If I didn't dive into my childhood trauma, if I didn't dive into really what it means to be a man and what I want to be in the world. And I was sitting on the beach a couple days later, 6.13 at night, had my four kids, and I just sat there like sad and lost on the beach, like watching them as they're running around and having like screaming and playing, and I felt numb. Felt alone. And this podcast, like it comes from that moment right there. Comes from that moment of feeling lost, feeling alone, like no one knew what I was going through. So I had to pick up the pieces. So over the next few days, I was fortunate in I had inquired about a men's organization called the Uncivilized Nation or the Man Uncivilized, who is led by, and he'll be on the podcast this this season, Traver Ball. I remember diving into the initiation process. It was a six-week process. There's a guy there, and he's on my podcast in season one named Mike Danson, who was the first person that I met. And he was like my my he was like my unassigned mentor. I remember having conversations with him and crying and screaming and trying to make sense of everything that just happened to me. And then the more that I spoke to him, and the more that I spoke to other men within the nation, I realized that I was not alone on this journey. That there were so many men that have been going through or have gone through what I was going through. And it just gave me a sense of relief that in order for me to live the life that I wanted to live, to be present, to be available, I had to dive into myself. I had to dive into why I showed up the way that I showed up. And when I did that, things started to unravel. First of all, I had never meditated like before in my life. So I started to meditate. I started to journal. I was continuing with the cold tub, but allowing that to be more of an expansive process. I wasn't working out as much. But I remember the meditation, the journaling, the talking with these men, getting on the phone and just getting on these calls and opening up. Internally things were shifting, starting to shine light on parts that I never have even known about myself. And bringing an understanding of the why I showed up the way that I have in my relationship with myself and with my kids and with my wife. And rather than that being a victim to it, I chose to take responsibility. I chose to dive into it. I chose to take action. Because without action, there's not going to be change. And so my wife and I, we had a trial separation. When she asked for the divorce, we had a trial separation. She moved into the kids' room, including all her clothes, everything, and I kept the master bedroom. And uh we we started to divvy up the responsibilities. We had times when who had the kids and who didn't. When she cooked, she let me know if I was invited. Uh, when I cooked, you know, that's the same. We would take care of our own needs, our own laundry. We had rules around how we were doing this. That if we did decide to move on, that we wouldn't bring other partners into the house, that that was our family unit for now. So we we got really detailed, and it was hard for me. I didn't want to, I did not want to accept it, quite frankly. I was pushing really, really hard of let's just make it work, let's just do this without the trial separation. My wife was my wife kept being out of there, like, you need to do your work. Nothing is going to change my mind because for the longest time I just resort back to the old me. And I needed to show her that this time was different, this time was real. That whole lot that all happened in October. And uh so I started that journey, I began that journey in the end of October, last week of October. I want to jump back into the work aspect of it. Because while all that was going on, I still had a decision to make with the Navy. Take the COVID vaccine and be able to finish out my 20. Uh I would be okay. Or not get the COVID vaccine. They had denied my exemption. Big Navy denied my exemption, not get the COVID vaccine and enter the unknown. I'd get kicked out administratively separated from the military and have to figure life out. I can tell you, now that I look back at that, that was the ultimate blessing. And what kind of timing all of that played into. It like it sucked. By myself, having to sit with my thoughts, I stopped drinking. I I stopped doing porn for the most part because I was heavily coping with porn as well. I like reduced everything so I could start to really feel what was going on. And I remember that I had to do a lot of work around how I could live a life of presence with my kids and with my wife and not being in the military. Because for 13 years, 13 years and like three months, at to that point, I was I had a security blanket. I was financially providing, I had a stable income, I had medical, dental, my whole life that was preached to me. That's what a man's responsibility was. And I knew that if I got the COVID vaccine, uh and I'm very real here, I knew two things. If I got the COVID vaccine and I stayed in the military, the transformation that I needed to and wanted to experience wasn't going to happen in a fast time frame. And that there was a possibility that I would lose my wife and kids. And then the second thing is the other piece was that if I got the COVID vaccine, there could be a part of me that just starts breaking down health-wise. So I had to sit with that. That I knew that I didn't want to, I didn't want to not be with my kids. And I didn't want to not be with my wife. I needed to show know and figure out how to show up relationally on the level that they needed from me. And that what I needed from myself. Because through this whole abandonment process, when I say abandonment, like emotionally abandonment, abandoned, uh being emotionally abandoned, um, excuse me, emotionally abandoning my kids and my wife, I was also abandoning myself. So I realized through that process that if I chose, I want my wife, I want my kids, I want me. I want, I want to be fully connected. So I was, I was disconnected for 31 years of my life. And now that I sit back here and analyze it and bring awareness to it, I'm not ashamed to say that. Because if you grew up in a traditional household, if you grew up in any type of traditional sense, you were pushed into the system. My dad was helping build the American dream. He was in the military. And so everything that I knew was like, hey, it worked for my dad, it's gonna work for me. So I just kept following the system and following the system and following the system. Until that day, and I'm metaphorically saying that, where my wife looked at me and she said, you know what? You can follow the system. We're not gonna be with you anymore. You give everybody else the best, Alex, but we're not giving it to you. You're not giving it to us. And I'm not giving, I wasn't giving it to myself. So I signed the paperwork. They forced me out of the military. I had five, I have five brain tumors, had five brain tumors, words matter, had five brain tumors. Going through everything I was going through. My daughter was still having seizures, but uh, you know, we knew what was going on. We had uh some form of a plan, a strategy that was that was working a little bit. And uh I said, you know what, I'm I'm I'm choosing me. I'm choosing me. I don't know which direction it's gonna go, I don't know how it's gonna go, but I'm choosing me because I want to choose, I want to choose connecting with myself so I can show up the way that I want to for my wife and kids. So I signed the paperwork, I knew what was happening. September, I I wanted to take a step back and say September, because my daughter was going through the seizures and having all of the medical uh challenges, I was able to be uh put in a program where you stay home most of the time. The program you work a minimal like to 10 to 15 hours a week, but you are not at C, you're not in a very demanding billet uh to where you could be more present with your family or that the it's called Hums Humanitarian Assembly. And because my wife and I had so many kids, and my other kids were in school, and my daughter was having so many seizures a day. At the time, she was having five to seven seizures a day uh on the highs, sometimes ten. They let me be home. I just had to phone muster. I had to phone call in and say, hey, I'm here, I'm alive. Uh, is there anything you need me to do from the computer? Uh so on and so forth. So I did that starting in September. So I say all of that because when I transitioned from the command that I was, I was on a ship, to this, to this um shore duty command, they didn't know who I was. They didn't know the person I was, the caliber of sailor that I was. I was a chief petty officer in the Navy. That's highly um coveted, it's respected. You know, you you you do a lot to get there, but they didn't know who I was. There was no relationship with me. So when I made these tough decisions, it was easy for them to just say, okay, and and go and push forward with it. And I'm glad, now that I think about that, I'm glad because if I was on my ship, I'm sure that it would be, it would be challenging for for them to process that paperwork. Not saying they wouldn't, but I'm sure it'd be challenging them for them, and they would possibly help me fight even more. But I was on shore duty and uh went through that process. I remember it was late December. I didn't know it at the time. We uh we I had COVID. I had symptoms. I knew I had COVID. I didn't have any symptoms, excuse me. And uh I didn't know that my daughter, Linavelle, the one that has the brain tumor, had the brain tumor, had COVID either. And it was it was December, January time frame. I don't remember the exact date, but she had a 15 minute seizure. Uh for those that know seizures um and kind of what they do. We were we were given when she was diagnosed with seizures a rescue medication that if she had a seizure that lasted more than five minutes, she needed to inject the rest of the rescue medication into their rectum and uh call 911. So I was on the phone with a friend at the time and we were talking. I was laying with my daughter because my back had been blown out. Like I have I had I had chronic back issues, have chronic back issues that I'm working through, and my back had gone out, so I was struggling. I was laying on a mat, on an acupuncture mat, and my daughter was laying next to me, and I had gotten up to take this phone call, and I was probably on the phone five minutes. And my wife walks in uh to her room and uh starts like screaming, like Alex Linavelle's having a seizure, and she was going through a loop. You could see it, she was having the seizure. We didn't, I didn't know how long she was having the seizure and just still doesn't either uh up to this day. But we started the clock and we just we sat there trying to get her out of it, breathing through it, talking through it. I could tell you I was crying, I was screaming, like I felt uh helpless and five minutes hit, and I run and get the rescue medication. Call 911, I'm on the phone with 911. It took 911 like 25 minutes to get there. I I felt so helpless in the moment. I and I I administer the first rescue medication. I I put her uh and I'm being vulgar here, but this is the reality of it. I was putting her, I put her buck cheats together to keep the medicine inside of her uh her anus, and I I wait. Five minutes turns into 10 minutes. And they say if at the five minute mark, if she doesn't stop, this benzodialopene, it shuts down the brain, it's supposed to stop everything. So we administer the first dose. Nothing happened. So then we go to the second dose. 10 minutes in, second dose, and that's it. You can't give her any more. So I'm sitting here from 10 minutes plus, I administered the second dose, and I just need her to stop having a seizure. Because if she has a seizure longer than 15 plus minutes, there's a the the risk of being brain dead or having a brain injury is is high. And and I had not knowing how much she had already had a seizure. Trying to breathe my kids, like keep my kids calm, my son's, you know, we're there, my other, you know, my daughter was there, my wife is crying, I'm crying a little bit, but holding it as best as I can, and finally she stops. So she's just lifeless. She's lifeless. You know, she had this benzodialpeme that just shut her whole brain down. So they got here, they that they put her on a stretcher, they put her in an ambulance, they, you know, did everything they had to do. And it took me back to when I I was six years old. First time I remember when my mom tried to kill herself, and it wasn't like she came out and was trying to kill herself, like she got out of the hospital and she had all these IVs connected to her, and she was mad about something. I was in Florida, and uh I guess my dad did something. I don't remember the exact situation, but my mom started ripping all the IVs out, and she was bloodied up. And my dad put me to the neighbor's house as fast as I could, and I remember them wheeling her out to the ambulance. And I remember that like that was the vividness that with my daughter, like seeing her going into the ambulance, and I'm just freaking out because I have no fucking control. I can't take it away from her, I can't help her in this situation. We get to the hospital and the doctors say, look, the only thing that we can say is that like COVID, she has COVID, she's tested positive for COVID. You got to remove her from the hospital, blah, blah, blah. She's contagious to everybody. Um, she's back to normal when she gets to the hospital. Obviously, they need to do tests. The one pharmaceutical medication that we were using up to that point, uh, which had extreme side effects for her, Kepra wasn't working, wasn't reducing the seizures. And so, you know, we switched medications to trileptol, which is a different uh medication. And in the eyes of doctors, my my daughter is my daughter's diagnosis, part of her, she has she's seizure resistant to medication, or her she has seizures that are resistant to medication because the the medication, if you hit two medications, then you're resistant. We wanted a very holistic path um in the sense of her main form of medication, which was THC, cannabis oil, which I can die, I can dive into that in another day or another podcast, and um and really kind of how that transformed. But long story short, with the trileptol and the seizure uh and and the cannabis medication that we had had been doing for her on some herbal uh supplements, Chinese herbs and stuff like that, started to work. And uh that was going from March of 2021 to, or excuse me, that was going from December, January time frame of 2021 all the way up until about March, April timeframe. And uh by this time my wife and I were back together. Uh, I had come to realize like I started to really lean into life after the military. I was already doing a lot of self-development work. I'd gone to men's initiations, I had created a meditation and a and a um journaling practice, started to show up more present in my own traumas and things of that nature, my childhood traumas and being a better father, being a better husband. I stopped drinking November 24th, I stopped drinking. And so I was I was leaning into this life that we were creating. And in the December timeframe of 2021, we had decided that we were full all in to full-time RV. So I sold the house. We had a business at the time, um, sold the house, sold the cars, sold everything, had the business still, bought an RV, and we hit the road. We started to prepare to hit the road for June of 2022. I was still being on administrative hold uh for the Navy. All of the COVID kick, you know, administrative separations came final around June of 2022. My last day in the military was June 6th. So I I got my I got my um word that I was getting kicked out. It was a it was official. That was going to be my last day in the Navy. And March April timeframe, and I may have these dates a little confused. I know my wife talks to me often about this, but March April timeframe of 2022, my daughter just stopped having seizures. She stopped taking the medication, the cannabis and the trileptol, and the Chinese herbal supplements, and the Reishi mushrooms, and the lion's mane, and everything that we were doing for. She stopped it all. Didn't want to take it all. And she stopped having seizures. And I can tell you to this point, right now, I don't know uh if her brain tumor is gone, but I do know the last MRI in the Navy, they told us that it was involuting. They wouldn't tell us it's shrinking, but they said it's involuting. And envoluting is a term of shrinking. So whatever we were doing, it was working. It was great because Linnabelle stopped having seizures. We had chosen, uh, we were doing our own work. Gacile was doing her inner work, I was doing my inner work. We chose to live a life of consciousness, of presence, of a family life, choosing us first, which is each other like ourselves, each other and our family. And when all that happened, Linnabelle stopped having seizures and we began our travels. So 2021, I went through the fire. And uh I'm sure you've heard this many times before, but when there's a forest fire, everything's ablaze, the soil is prepared for trees to root even more and to grow even deeper. And so rebirth after a fire is beautiful. 2021 was an opportunity for me, now looking back, to bet on myself. It was an opportunity for me to dive into myself, to choose myself, to understand that my past, my childhood, yes, I experienced it. I went through some hard times that I wouldn't wish on anybody, but it was for a reason. And that reason was so I could understand what I wanted in this life. And part of that was I found out that I came to this awareness and this understanding that I chose the military to create a connection with my father. It wasn't something that I wanted to do for myself. It was because I wanted connection and be able to have my father's approval. And so when I did that, when I created this space and leaning into myself, I was able to let go and know that that was an opportunity in my life that gave me so much. And now this opportunity, all of this struggles, all of the challenges that I could choose how I wanted to be as a man, as a husband, and as a father. So you'll hear me say it many, many times before, but that in order for us to live a life of purpose and power and within full integrity, we have to sit with our most painful times. We have to sit with our challenges, we have to allow a space to where we can understand it, where we can feel it, and where it can be a guy for us to show up to our power in the world, to show up to be the man that we want to be. And I was being a victim to it rather than taking responsibility. So that was 2021 in a nutshell. I hope you enjoyed part two of my story. And please subscribe, like, comment if this resonates. Look forward to the next podcast where we kick off season two of a man's journey. Thank you for listening to A Man's Journey podcast. These conversations aren't just stories, they're reminders that we're not alone, that there's power in showing up, that growth doesn't require perfection, only presence. If this episode moved you, challenged you, or lit something up inside you, share it with a brother, a friend, or a man who needs to hear it. And remember, you were never meant to do this alone. The journey back to yourself is the most courageous path you'll ever walk. But it's one worth taking. Until next time, keep walking, keep feeling, keep becoming.