He replaced drinking with 365 days of gratitude. One year later, he reflects.

When I met Kyle Bender on Day 163 of his 365-days-of-gratitude-and-sobriety challenge, he was treating himself to a chocolate chip cookie chased by an iced white chocolate mocha.

Bender, 33, challenged himself to post a video on Facebook nearly every day to share his daily dose of something he felt grateful for, starting on Jan. 1, 2017. He happened to have given up drinking alcohol a few weeks earlier, in the spirit of Thanksgiving.

So he spent the 365 days of 2017 sober, finding at least one thing a day to express gratitude for, and continuing his work as the owner of Scarlett Real Estate and Scarlett Properties.

“When you tell people this is what you’re going to do,” he told me that year, “they’re going to hold you accountable for it.”

It’s kept him humble, he said. When his self-proclaimed “Soberversary” arrived in December 2017, he didn’t celebrate. He didn’t drink either, he said, laughing. “I can’t believe it went by this fast.”

The publicity he’s gotten for his gratitude challenge has given him a sense of pressure, too, from his Facebook friends following his frequent posts to his story getting picked up by media outlets like CharlotteFive and WCNC.

“I feel like everybody wants something bigger,” he said.

While Bender said he didn’t have a problem with alcohol in the past, he was tired of the social expectation to drink.

He said, “Most of my friends want to drink … Everywhere you go there’s drinks.”

Even the U.S. National Whitewater Center, he pointed out, has craft beers and wines in addition to all of their opportunities for healthy, physical activity that he enjoys.

Over the year, Bender has made new friends as he’s avoided alcohol, but he’s also kept his old friends. He’s saved a lot of money (particularly because his drink of choice when he goes out now is just water, nothing fancy), and he’s made fewer of what he calls “bad decisions.”

“It was kind of an experiment,” he said. “Being thankful was the biggest part of it. It’s not what kept me from drinking, it was just cool to have something to do.”

Really, he said, he always used to have a beer in his hand when he was out. But he doesn’t want to be seen as a partier, or as a drunk.

“I want people to know me as a great real estate agent,” Bender said.

He certainly became a more grateful one.

He’s also more hooked on sugars, what he calls his “kryptonite,” from candy to cookies.

As he neared Day 365 of his gratitude challenge, he posted his December list on Facebook, numbered with day of gratitude, followed by day of the month:

He started getting questions about what his final day of gratitude would bring.

“People kept asking me, what is it going to be, what is going to be your big thing?” he said.

His reply: “I don’t know. It will come to me.”

And it did. He made it through December a sober man, and he’s still not drinking. He spent New Year’s Eve with a group of friends, eating dinner at Chima Uptown before calling it a night.

And on his 365th day of gratitude, Bender felt thankful for one thing, which he typed out in all caps on his Facebook page: LIFE.

He also posted this video:

“With our lives it’s always up and down,” he said in the video. “And a lot of it, you see me trying to be positive and happy — there’s days that are terrible. Days that I really don’t enjoy it at all, but try to find something. And seeing something as easy as utilities being on, having electricity everywhere you go, I mean, we definitely have first-world problems sometimes.”

While Bender is still sober, he is no longer posting daily expressions of gratitude on social media. He’s contemplating what he’s thankful for and he sometimes writes it down.

Now, he finds himself waiting for that feeling of gratitude to flash across his day, whether it hits him in the morning or right before he falls asleep.

“I just kind of wait for the feeling — that lightbulb going off,” he said. “The butterflies.”

Photo: Kyle Bender

This story was originally published January 4, 2018 at 11:00 PM with the headline "He replaced drinking with 365 days of gratitude. One year later, he reflects.."