The phone was on the table, on speaker, so I could take notes. Otherwise I wasn’t going to remember anything. That had become true at some point, and I had stopped pretending it hadn’t.

I was on the orange floral sofa. Helix and Poppy were asleep on the chairs across from me. The afternoon sun had already started its daily setting on the opposite side of the house. For such a beautiful day, a darkness had entered the room.

My lawyer was explaining the neuropsychological evaluation.

“Your neuropsychological evaluation will cover your entire life, not just the accident. Be ready to talk about your childhood, your entire mental health history, everything.”

I froze. The pen stopped above the page. My stomach did the thing where it feels like it is about to leave the body.

“Alex? Alex, are you there?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m just processing that.”

He kept going. He was not unkind. He was matter-of-fact. He does this all the time, and he expects you to play ball, which is what you promised when you signed with him. He is one of the best for a reason. I had done my research. He is empathetic, but only to a point, and the point arrives quickly, because the point is where the work begins, and the work is what you hired him for.

“You don’t really have a choice in the matter,” he said. “If our expert doesn’t, theirs will, and will attack you viciously.”

I wrote viciously on the page. Underlined it. I do not know why.

I had thought I was done. I had built a life on top of what happened. I had the language for it. I had written my way through the recovery and out the other side of the recovery, and I had set the recovery down, and I had walked into the rest of my life carrying what I was going to carry and leaving the rest behind. The healing was real. I am not interested in pretending it wasn’t.

But the healing was not the same as the doneness. I had confused them. I had treated them as one verb. They were two.

The phone was still on speaker. The lawyer was still talking. He was moving on to the schedule, the intake forms, and the medical/legal/academic/personal records the evaluator would need. Helix shifted on the chair without waking.

The light kept leaving me.

I had made a mistake. Not in hiring him. Not in pursuing the claim. The mistake was earlier, smaller, and harder to name.

I had thought the after was a place you arrived. I had not understood that there was an after to the after, and that the after to the after would require me to go back through the after, and that I would have to be the one to walk myself back through it.

Time is not linear, I’m learning.

Healed, unhealed.

I wrote that down too. I do not know why I wrote that down either. The pen kept moving. The light kept leaving. The dogs kept sleeping. The lawyer kept talking. I said yes in the places where yes was the answer, and I took the notes I would need later because I was not going to remember any of it, and at some point, the call ended, and I set the phone down on the table and sat on the orange floral sofa and did not move for a while.

The fight was already underway. It had been underway for some time.

Apparently, I was the last to know.

About Alex

I’m Alex Lovell, PhD — political psychologist, yoga therapist, and the founder of a made-up institution called The Department of Aliveness.

By day I’m a VP leading global research on what makes people come alive at work. I love it. By every other random hour I’m here — writing, facilitating, and walking beside people who are figuring out what it means to be alive after everything shifted.

I’ve been homeless. I’ve been divorced. I’ve had my brain rewired by a semi-truck and my life rearranged by things I didn’t choose. I’ve also been surprised by how much aliveness was waiting in the wreckage — not because suffering is a gift, but because I stopped waiting to be healed before I started paying attention.

I’m on a mission to remind one person a day that the life they’re living is the one that counts.

Subscribe now

The wine arrived before I had decided whether to read or to listen. The pub had six tables crammed into a room built for four, and my elbow was nearly touching the elbow of a woman at the next table over, and I had brought a book the way I always bring a book, and the book was open in front of me, and within ten minutes I knew I was not going to read a word of it.

I had come in to be alone. The people in the pub had other plans.

It was my last night in Amsterdam. The kind of evening I usually like, where I do not have to translate anything or decide anything or be anyone in particular. Just a body in a chair with a pie on the way and a glass of red I had not yet touched.

The conversation at the table to my left turned political about the time my food arrived. A woman in her sixties, halfway through what I suspected was not her first glass of wine, was naming things about my country with a precision I could not argue with, even if she had been talking to me, which she was not.

The man across from her, quieter, said one sentence about a person he used to know and put his fork down. Grief, the kind that does not need volume.

Behind me, a younger pair were jubilant about something the woman in her sixties was furious about. Their voices were bright and a little loud in the way voices get when you are sure you are right and you are also sure the room agrees.

To my right, a couple in their thirties were arguing about whether to be furious or to stop reading the news for a week, which is its own kind of grief.

And me. In the middle. With a book I had stopped reading and a wine I had started drinking and a body that was registering all of it at once, the way a microphone registers everything in a room without choosing.

For more essays about attention, aliveness, and the rooms that teach us things we did not go looking for, you can subscribe here.

Subscribe now

Then They Noticed Me

The thing about being the only American in a room full of strangers talking about America is that eventually someone notices.

The woman in her sixties was the first. She glanced over at one point, mid-sentence, and then leaned slightly toward my table and asked, with the kind of warmth that is also a small invitation to fight, what I made of it. As an American. Surely.

I smiled. I said I had not really thought about that. Which was a small lie, the social kind, the kind we use to keep our dignity and theirs at the same time. I had thought about it. I just was not going to give it to her.

She accepted the lie graciously. Went back to her conversation.

The jubilant pair behind me tried next, about twenty minutes later. Their version was friendlier. They wanted me to share their happiness about the thing they were happy about. Wanted confirmation, I think, that they were not crazy to feel what they were feeling. I told them I could see why they felt that way. Which was true. I could. I just was not going to feel it with them.

The man with the grief did not try to recruit me. He was somewhere I recognized. He needed nothing from anyone.

The exhausted couple to my right asked me, around the time the pie arrived, whether I read the news. I said I did. They asked how I lived with it. I said I was still figuring that out. Which was the most honest thing I said all night, and also the thing that ended the conversation, because nobody at a pub on a Thursday wants to hear that you are still figuring it out. They want you to have an answer. So they can argue with it, or agree with it, or feel less alone in their own.

I did not have one.

What I Did Not Do

I did not argue. I did not catch the woman’s eye and apologize for my country, which I have done at international tables for years and had grown tired of doing. I did not perform sophisticated detachment (and let me tell ya, I can detach very sophisticatedly when I want to). I did not put my book up like a wall. I did not tell anyone what I actually thought.

I sat there. I enjoyed my food. I eavesdropped. I did actually read my book. Cut my pie. Drank the wine. Smiled when I needed to smile. Said the small social lie when it kept the peace. Was complimentary about perspectives I did not share and noncommittal about ones I did. Listened.

Something in me was online but quiet. The watcher was on. The watcher was not narrating. The watcher was just there, registering the woman’s fury and the man’s grief and the jubilant pair’s certainty and the exhausted couple’s question, all at once, none of them collapsing into the others, none of them pulling me in.

Ten years ago I would have argued. Five years ago I would have apologized. Two years ago I would have left.

I did none of those things.

What Did Not Earn It

I want to tell you what I think I was doing instead, since I think it is what a lot of us are trying to figure out right now and do not yet have language for.

To participate, without being participative.

To be present, without giving all of your presence.

These were important conversations. These were important experiences. They had not earned my activation. Only my interest, and my witnessing.

I have been thinking about that sentence since I wrote it down on the flight home.

The thing about activation is that it gets extracted from us all day long. The news, the feed, the headline, the email, the text from the friend who needs you to be furious with her about the thing she is furious about. The pub, on a Thursday, in a country that is not yours. Each of them is asking for your full nervous system response. Most of them have not earned it. Most of them never will.

I used to think this was a moral question. That if I cared about a thing, I owed it my full activation. That to be informed and not activated was a failure of integrity. That detachment was the only alternative to engagement, and detachment was for people who had given up.

I do not think that anymore.

There is a third posture, and it is the one my body found in that pub without my asking it to. It is the posture of being awake to what is happening, letting it register, letting my interest be real and my witnessing be real, and reserving my activation for what my body has decided is mine to carry.

Activation is finite. It belongs to me. The world does not get to extract it on demand just because the world has decided this is the moment everyone is supposed to be activated. The pub does not get to extract it. The headline does not get to extract it. The friend who is furious with her thing does not get to extract it.

I get to decide.

What the Room Did Not Need From Me

Here is the part that surprised me. The room did not punish me for it.

Nobody at the surrounding tables actually needed me to activate. The woman did not need an American to be furious alongside her. She was already furious. The man did not need a stranger to grieve with him. He was already grieving. The jubilant pair did not need anyone to share their certainty. They were busy being certain. The exhausted couple did not need a mediator. They needed to finish their dinner and go home.

What they wanted from me and what they needed from me were not the same thing.

What they wanted was for me to take their side, or to give them somebody to push against, or to confirm they were not alone. What they needed, if they needed anything, was for somebody in the room to stay. To not flee. To not collapse the room into a single response by joining one table or judging another. To let the room be what it was, varied and contradictory and alive, and to be inside it without trying to fix it or escape it.

That is the work. That is what I have been learning at home for years and did not see myself doing in a pub in Amsterdam until I was halfway through the pie.

To stay in the room without becoming the room. To be a body at a table among other bodies at tables, each of us doing our own version of what a lot of us have been quietly doing for a long time, which is staying awake to a world we cannot fix and cannot leave.

The Kitchen

I am writing this in my kitchen. Helix is asleep at my feet. Poppy is somewhere in the room making the small grumbling sounds she makes when she is dreaming about something I will never know about. Luis is in the next room. The kettle has instructions I can read again. The coffee is good.

The news is still running. The cycle is still turning. The headlines are still asking for my activation, today, like they did yesterday and will again tomorrow.

Most of them have not earned it.

I have my interest. I have my witnessing. I am keeping the rest.

You are allowed to do the same.

-Alex 🧡

If you know someone who is learning to stay in the room without becoming the room, send this to them.

Share

About Alex

I’m Alex Lovell, PhD — political psychologist, yoga therapist, and the founder of a made-up institution called The Department of Aliveness.

By day I’m a VP leading global research on what makes people come alive at work. I love it. By every other random hour I’m here — writing, facilitating, and walking beside people who are figuring out what it means to be alive after everything shifted.

I’ve been homeless. I’ve been divorced. I’ve had my brain rewired by a semi-truck and my life rearranged by things I didn’t choose. I’ve also been surprised by how much aliveness was waiting in the wreckage — not because suffering is a gift, but because I stopped waiting to be healed before I started paying attention.

I’m on a mission to remind one person a day that the life they’re living is the one that counts.

Subscribe now

It’s 5:17 in the morning in Amsterdam and the canal outside is doing something I didn’t know canals did. A soft liquid knocking, like someone testing a door. My body thinks it’s yesterday evening. The kettle in this apartment has instructions in Dutch and I’ve been staring at it long enough that the word koken has stopped meaning anything, if it ever did. Helix and Poppy are ten hours away. Luis is asleep. The bed here is too firm in a way I’ll still get used to by the time I just leave.

And I’ve done this to myself on purpose.

That’s the part I keep coming back to.

I bought a ticket. I packed a bag. I agreed to be this loose in my own skin for five days. And yet the looseness itself, the particular quality of being unmoored from my routine and my dogs and my person and the angle of light in my own kitchen, feels almost identical to a looseness I did not choose, twice, years ago now. Once when a semi-truck hit me and I could not find the word for spoon for three weeks. Once when a marriage ended and I woke up for eleven months in a house that was becoming less ours by degrees, like a photograph left graying and curling in the sun.

The aliveness is the same. The aliveness of unmooring is the same whether you boarded the plane or the plane boarded you.

If you've ever felt your life come loose and needed language for it, subscribe now.

Subscribe now

The Wrong Light

By six the light is coming through wrong. Not wrong exactly, just different in a way my body notices before my brain catches up. Grayer. Lower. Almost filtered through all that canal water somehow.

I make the coffee badly. Apparently, even fancy European coffee tastes terrible in a hotel room.

I sit by the window in a bathrobe someone else washed. A man in a long coat walks a small dog past the canal and neither of them look at me, which is why I request high floors. To be a body in a window. To have no one need anything from me for five days.

Here’s the thing I keep trying to name.

I am more alive to this badly-made coffee and this gray light than I’ve been to a morning in weeks. And I am duller. Heightened and muffled at once. The part of me that usually narrates my life back to me as it’s happening, you know the part, the one that says oh, this is nice or save this for later, that part is off. The coffee is just coffee. The light is just light. Sharper and slower. No voiceover.

I came here to do a job. Show up at a conference room. Say a few things about the future of work. Eat delicious food (and I had the most amazing Dutch Apple PIE). Fly home tired and a little proud of myself.

I did not come here to be emptied out.

But something empties when you leave the life you know. Even for five days. Even on purpose. Even with the return ticket already in your phone.

And I have been here before.

Seventeen

The first time I was unmoored without choosing it, I was seventeen and my parents told me to leave.

I’ve written about the park before. The one in Salt Lake where I turned eighteen. Luis and I rode past it on scooters and I said it out loud for the first time in a long time. Then we kept riding because the sun was out and the convention was ahead of us. That’s what being alive long enough lets you do.

I’m not going back to that park in this essay. I’m going to the months before that early birthday. The ones I don’t talk about much.

I was unmoored the way you are unmoored when the people who were supposed to keep you safe decide you are the thing to be kept safe from. I was unmoored from a house, a bed, a last name that meant something in the town I grew up in, a future I had been quietly assembling for years. I was unmoored from the idea that I could predict what adults would do.

I was unmoored from Sunday dinner after church.

The world got sharper. The way a world gets sharper when you don’t know where you are sleeping. I noticed every doorway I walked past and every car that slowed down near me. The smell of a specific kind of laundry detergent could flood me, because it was the detergent someone’s mom used, and I could tell just from the smell that she was a mom who would let me in if I asked. I did not ask. But I noticed.

And the world got duller. Food stopped tasting like much. Hours stopped meaning much. Whole days arrived and left, and I would not be able to tell you what happened in them, not because I was dissociating in some clinical sense, but because there was nothing in them to hold onto. Nothing to mark time against.

Sharper and duller. Both. At once. At seventeen.

I did not have the word for it then. I do not think there is a good word for it now. But the shape of what I was feeling is the same shape I am feeling in this Amsterdam room, watching a stranger walk a small dog past a canal.

To be clear. I am not saying being kicked out of my house at seventeen was like a work trip in Amsterdam. I am saying the human phenomenon of being unmoored, that specific quality of consciousness that arrives when you are loose from the life you knew, did not know the difference between what I had chosen and what had been done to me. My nervous system was not checking the paperwork.

It was only showing up the way it always has.

The Paperwork

It showed up when a car hit me. It showed up when a marriage ended. It has shown up in smaller ways I am not going to catalog here, because the point is not the catalog.

The point is that I am in a hotel room in Amsterdam that I chose and that I will leave tomorrow morning with a suitcase and a return ticket, and I am feeling the same looseness in my chest that I have felt at various points in my life. The volume’s different. The duration’ss different. The paperwork’s different. The looseness is the same.

I used to think the involuntary unmoorings were the real ones and the chosen ones were a pale imitation. Travel as a kind of low-dose version of the real thing. A rehearsal.

I don’t think that anymore.

I think the nervous system has one response to the life you knew coming loose from you, and it does not care how the looseness got there. It just registers the looseness. It just makes you more alive to the bad coffee. It just turns off the voiceover. It just leaves you sitting in a bathrobe in a country that isn’t yours, watching a man and a dog who will never know you walk past a canal that has been there forwho know’s how long.

The Permit

Here is what I want to say before I close the laptop and go find breakfast.

If the unmooring came for you without your permission, if you are inside one right now, the slow kind or the sudden kind, I want you to know the aliveness you might be feeling underneath the grief or the fear or the disorientation is not a betrayal of what you’re losing. It is your nervous system doing the only thing it knows how to do when the life you knew comes loose. It is showing up. It is turning the volume up on the bad coffee. It is letting you feel the light on your face a little more than usual, even now, even here.

And if you are not inside one, if your life is intact and ordinary and yours, you do not have to earn your unmoorings either. You do not have to have survived something to deserve the aliveness that comes from being loose in your own life. You are allowed to buy a ticket. You are allowed to drive somewhere you’ve never been for no reason. You are allowed to sit in a coffee shop in your own city at a time of day you don’t usually sit in coffee shops and feel the scaffolding come down a little.

That is not a lesson. That is just what is true.

The canal is still doing its soft knocking. The coffee is still bad. The kettle still has instructions I am choosing not to read.

I am unmoored. I am alive. Both. At once.

-Alex 🧡

If you thought of someone while reading this, that’s probably who it’s for. Send it to them.

Share

About Alex

I’m Alex Lovell, PhD — political psychologist, yoga therapist, and the founder of a made-up institution called The Department of Aliveness.

By day I’m a VP leading global research on what makes people come alive at work. I love it. By every other random hour I’m here — writing, facilitating, and walking beside people who are figuring out what it means to be alive after everything shifted.

I’ve been homeless. I’ve been divorced. I’ve had my brain rewired by a semi-truck and my life rearranged by things I didn’t choose. I’ve also been surprised by how much aliveness was waiting in the wreckage — not because suffering is a gift, but because I stopped waiting to be healed before I started paying attention.

I’m on a mission to remind one person a day that the life they’re living is the one that counts.

Subscribe now

Luis and I were on scooters, weaving through Salt Lake on our way to a tattoo convention. It was after my pre-birthday lunch. The sun was out. One of those days that feels like a gift after a long winter.

We passed a park, and I said it before I even thought about it.

“I turned 18 here.”

It’s just a park. Trees, benches, grass. Nothing that would tell you a seventeen-year-old once slept there. That he was kicked out and had nowhere else to go. That this stretch of ground holds some of the hardest months of my life.

I don’t talk about this much. I don’t revisit it. Luis knows that about me. So when I said it, he listened the way he does. Quiet. Present. No rush to fill the space. Tear’s filling his eyes. But with a grounded composure that holds the space I need to share. And then we kept riding. The sun was still out. Birds still chirping. The convention still ahead, and him next to me.

That’s the thing about being alive long enough. You can pass the place that almost broke you on the way to something good. You can hold both at the same time. The city doesn’t stop for your memory. And sometimes, neither do you.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about March.

For years, March has been hard for me and I have ALWAYS had explanations.

The liminality of the season. The tension between winter and spring. Mercury in retrograde. Some vague spiritual weight I couldn’t name. I’m sensitive to transitions, I told myself. I’m someone who feels the in-between.

All of that is true. None of it was the actual thing.

My psychiatrist asked me this year to pay attention. To lean into the seasonal shift and notice what came up. I expected something subtle. What I got was a scooter ride and a park, and the sudden, obvious truth I had been narrating around for a very long time.

March is hard because March is when the worst of it happened.

If you’ve ever had the past tap you on the shoulder in the middle of a beautiful day, you’re in the right place. Subscribe below.

Subscribe now

I have done the work. Many many many many years of it.

Therapy. Medication. Books. Meditation. Retreats. Breathwork. Journaling. Somatic practices. Some far-out things too.

I have flung myself against the wall like spaghetti, checking, always checking: Am I done yet? Am I healed? Can I stop now?

Maybe you know this version of working on yourself. The ravenous phase. The one where you get a glimmer of peace and then spend the next several months (or years) chasing it, trying everything, willing to do whatever it takes. Until you realize your wall is covered in spaghetti and you have nothing left to eat. Nothing left of yourself to spend on yourself.

I thought the goal was to get to the other side. To finish. To arrive at some point where the past didn’t live in my body anymore.

That point does not exist.

Here’s what I’ve learned instead.

My body keeps the appointment.

Every March, my nervous system remembers. The tightening in my chest. The low-grade hypervigilance. The pulling away. I’ve realized that it’s not a flaw. It’s not a sign I didn’t do enough. It’s my body being faithful to what happened. Keeping watch. Holding the memory when I couldn’t afford to look at it directly.

For years, I treated this like a problem to solve. Something to overcome. I wanted to win against March.

And I don’t think that’s the project anymore.

What do I have now that I didn’t have before?

I have the truth. Not the metaphysical cover story, but the real thing. March is hard because March is where the hardest parts are stored. There’s something grounding in finally letting it be what it is.

And I have witness. Luis knows now. The park has been named out loud. I don’t carry it alone anymore.

I have softness. Not because the memory is softer, but because I stopped fighting my own faithfulness. I stopped treating my nervous system like it was failing me when it was actually just showing up, every year, right on time. Like discovering someone has been leaving a candle in the window for you every March, and you just now looked up and saw the light.

And I have this: I’m still here. That seventeen-year-old in the park didn’t know that was coming. Didn’t know there would be scooters and tattoo conventions and a person to ride next to. Didn’t know March would keep arriving and that I would keep arriving with it.

If you have done the work and you still have the thing, you did not fail.

Healing doesn’t mean finished. It never did.

Maybe the project was never meant to get to the other side. Maybe it’s to stop flinging yourself against the wall and sit down, finally, in the room with what remains. Because you remain. You.

Your body isn’t broken. It’s keeping the appointment.

You get to be whole and still have your March.

-Alex 🧡

Maybe someone else needs permission to be whole and still have their March. Would you share this with them?

Share

About Alex

I’m Alex Lovell, PhD — political psychologist, yoga therapist, and the founder of a made-up institution called The Department of Aliveness.

By day I’m a VP leading global research on what makes people come alive at work. I love it. By every other random hour I’m here — writing, facilitating, and walking beside people who are figuring out what it means to be alive after everything shifted.

I’ve been homeless. I’ve been divorced. I’ve had my brain rewired by a semi-truck and my life rearranged by things I didn’t choose. I’ve also been surprised by how much aliveness was waiting in the wreckage — not because suffering is a gift, but because I stopped waiting to be healed before I started paying attention.

I’m on a mission to remind one person a day that the life they’re living is the one that counts.

Subscribe now

This is your RSVP for The Living Room — a gently facilitated space to exhale in company, be witnessed, and be human with others who get it.

Our gathering: Saturday, April 18 — 9:00 AM
Where: Zoom
Length: 60 Minutes (and it will go by too quickly, I’m sure 🧡)
Who it’s for: Paid members of The Department of Aliveness

Read more

I was looking at a piece made of computer keys when my brain offered its verdict:

Ya’ll. 🙄

I couldn’t do that. I definitely couldn’t. But that’s not the point.

The point is that my brain wasn’t letting me just look. It had to assess. It had to render a verdict.

That’s the tax. The decider’s tax. You can’t just experience something. You have to process it first.

For the deciders, the over-functioners, and the ones learning to receive.

Subscribe now

I caught myself mid-assessment. And something softened.

I went back to the computer keys. Looked again. And this time I saw it: a face, made from the arrangement of the keys. A subtle shadow. The whole piece shifted. It had been there the whole time, but I couldn’t see it while the machine was running.

The ceramics came next.

I probably wouldn’t have even looked at them. I was there for art. ART and soup. Duhhhhh. Ceramics are functional. Bowls are bowls. Vases are vases. It’s not art, bowls, and soup.

My pre-filtered brain had already sorted them into a category that didn’t require my attention.

But then the vendor called to me and invited me over. Something human in me said - yes. I let the filter go.

And suddenly the bowls were beautiful. The glazes. The weight of them. The way light literally danced across the surfaces. Seriously. Look at the picture. The glaze is mesmerizing.

I walked out with quite a few ceramic pieces. BECAUSE LOOK AT THAT BOWL.

Luis wants to keep fruit in there. Ugh. I want to make bread in it. Sigh…

And the soup… I swear the soup got better too. Same soup. Same event. But I could actually taste it once I stopped running the machine.

I make a lot decisions for a living.

All day. The best available choice with the least available information. And I’m good at it. I’ve built a reputation on it. People look to me for it.

And it bleeds into everything. The restaurant, the art benefit, the grocery store. The decider doesn’t take days off. It just keeps running, sorting the world into categories, rendering verdicts, establishing positions.

It’s exhausting in a way that’s hard to name because it feels like me. It feels like personality. But it’s a role. A function. A thing I do, not a thing I am.

Luis and I went to Urban Hill for my early birthday. I wrote about it last week: the Polaroid, the framed photo, the sparkler I didn’t expect.

What I didn’t realize? I didn’t decide anything. The cake. The camera. The moment worth marking. Someone else had already built the infrastructure before I walked in.

All I had to do was receive it.

Two moments. Same discovery.

At Art and Soup, I set the mantle down myself. Caught the machine running, and chose to let it go. And suddenly I could see the face in the keys. The beauty in the bowls. The actual taste of the soup.

At Urban Hill, someone else had already made the decisions for me. The infrastructure was built. The decider wasn’t needed. I just walked into a space where receiving was the only job.

Either way, the relief was the same.

And here’s the thing I keep coming back to: nothing collapsed.

My job didn’t crumble while I was eating soup. Decisions didn’t pile up and crush me because I took an afternoon off from making them. The mantle waited. Oh, it was certainly patient. It was still there when I got back. 🙂

We act like the decider has to run constantly, or something will fall apart. Like the muscle will atrophy if we rest it.

But I looked at art without assessing it, and I still know how to assess things. I received a birthday without planning it, and I still know how to plan. The capacity doesn’t disappear because you set it down.

The mantle is more patient than we give it credit for.

The Polaroid is on a shelf in my house now. A ceramic bowl from Art and Soup sits on my kitchen counter.

Evidence that I was there. That I was happy. That I let the machine stop running long enough to actually see what was in front of me.

Here. This is what you looked like when you weren’t deciding anything.

The Department of Aliveness offers you a Permit:

Set it down for an hour.

The mantle will wait. The decisions will be there. Your competence won’t evaporate because you stopped performing it for a lunch, an afternoon, a single art benefit where you let yourself just look at things without rendering a verdict.

You can pick it back up whenever you’re ready. It’s not going anywhere.

And you might find (I did) that the soup tastes better. The art reveals itself. The birthday lands differently.

Not because you earned the relief. But because you let yourself have it.

-Alex 🧡

If you know someone who hasn’t stopped deciding in a while, please pass this along.

Share

About Alex

I’m Alex Lovell, PhD — political psychologist, yoga therapist, and the founder of a made-up institution called The Department of Aliveness.

By day I’m a VP leading global research on what makes people come alive at work. I love it. By every other random hour I’m here — writing, facilitating, and walking beside people who are figuring out what it means to be alive after everything shifted.

I’ve been homeless. I’ve been divorced. I’ve had my brain rewired by a semi-truck and my life rearranged by things I didn’t choose. I’ve also been surprised by how much aliveness was waiting in the wreckage — not because suffering is a gift, but because I stopped waiting to be healed before I started paying attention.

I’m on a mission to remind one person a day that the life they’re living is the one that counts.

I’d love for you to join me on this journey of aliveness. Join the department today!

Subscribe now

A migraine took me out completely last week. The kind where light hurts, thinking hurts, and the only thing to do is wait it out. Miserable.

Saturday was recovery. Sunday, Luis and I went to lunch.

Urban Hill. We’d never been. Luis and I wanted to celebrate my birthday a little early, mid-month is the actual day, but we knew we’d be busy then. Now was the window.

When I made the reservation, the app asked if we were celebrating anything. I selected “birthday” almost absentmindedly. I didn’t expect it to matter (because who reads those?).

We sat down, and I opened the menu, and there it was. “Happy Birthday” printed at the top. My name. On the menu. Before I’d said anything, before I’d done anything, someone had already decided this moment was going to be marked.

That was the first surprise. Someone had actually read the reservation note.

The meal was one of those rare ones that makes you stop mid-bite and keep looking at each other across the table like are… you… tasting… this? I was still tired in that post-migraine way where everything feels slightly softer than usual, like the world turned down its volume a notch. But the food was cutting through.

And then the cake came.

Flourless chocolate. I hadn’t ordered it. They just brought it. And then they lit it—not a candle, a sparkler. The whole thing was throwing light all over the table, and I could feel my face doing something I hadn’t planned. Surprise. Delight. I was smiling before I even knew I was smiling.

Our server took out a Polaroid camera.

Not my phone. Not “want me to get a picture of you two?” A Polaroid. The restaurant’s Polaroid. They keep one behind the counter for this.

He framed the shot. Took the photo. The image started developing right there, my face slowly appearing on the film—lit up, caught off guard, happy in a way I hadn’t planned.

Then he put it in a frame. A little frame they had ready. And handed it to me.

Here. This is yours now.

The Department of Aliveness is for people who want to live like their life is actually happening. If that’s you, subscribe here.

Subscribe now

I have a Polaroid camera at home. I bought it a few years ago because I’d noticed something about my phone.

I have thousands of photos on it. Thousands. And I could delete most of them tomorrow without any heartburn. They’re just... there. Documentation of things that happened. Scroll past. Forget.

But the Polaroid film is expensive. Every shot costs something. So when I pick up that camera, I pause. I think about whether this moment is worth the click.

My phone is full of pictures I barely remember taking. With the Polaroid, I stop first.

And the photos I’ve actually printed and framed, the ones hanging on my walls, are the ones I return to. Not because the moments were bigger, but because someone decided they were worth making permanent.

Usually that someone is me.

But Sunday, I didn’t decide anything.

Someone else had already made the choice. Before I walked in, before I sat down, before the sparkler lit up my face—Urban Hill had decided birthdays deserved something tangible. Not with a phone snap that disappears into a camera roll. With film. With a frame. With an object you take home.

They’d bought the camera. They stock the film. They have the frames ready. All of it was already in place before I ever walked in.

I walked into a place that had already made room for my life to matter a little.

What stays with me is this:

I’m usually the one who does this for other people. I think about the gesture, the moment, the thing that makes someone feel seen. It’s part of how I move through the world—at work, in relationships, in the retreat I run.

So rarely does someone hold it for me.

And this wasn’t even someone who knew me. He didn’t know anything about me beyond what was on the reservation. He was doing his job. But the job had been designed with intention. The whole gesture said: this moment deserves to become something you can hold.

He executed it perfectly. And I got to just be the birthday boy.

There’s a difference between documenting a life and collecting evidence that you lived one.

I think about my camera roll, thousands of images and most of them are meaningless. I think about the photos I’ve actually printed, the ones on my walls, the ones that make me stop when I walk past them.

Documentation is automatic now. We capture everything and we keep almost nothing.

Evidence is different. Evidence requires someone to say: this one counts.

Usually we make that choice ourselves (rarely, I might add). We print the photo. We hang the frame. We decide, after the fact, that a moment mattered.

But sometimes—if you’re lucky—someone else makes the choice for you. They hand you a finished artifact. Already framed. Already declared important.

All you have to do is receive it.

After lunch, we rented electric scooters and rode to the Salt Lake City tattoo convention. Luis is a tattoo artist, so it was good for him—networking, seeing what the market’s responding to. We walked around for a while. Looked at art. Talked to people.

The Polaroid was in my bag the whole time.

Life just kept going. I didn’t stop to process the moment or journal about what it meant. I got on a scooter with someone I love and rolled through the city, still a little tired, still a little soft from the week, carrying a framed photo of my own surprised face.

Now it’s on a shelf in my house. Evidence that I was there. That I was happy. That someone else thought it was worth capturing.

I keep looking at it.

Not just because the lunch was extraordinary. It was excellent. It was nice. But the photo—the object—lets me return to something I can’t manufacture. My own face, caught off guard by care I didn’t arrange.

Here. This is what you looked like when you were delighted.

The Department of Aliveness offers you a Permit:

Move something to evidence today.

Print the photo that’s been sitting in your camera roll for months. Hang the picture you keep meaning to frame. Or let someone else decide you’re worth documenting—receive the gesture, the gift, the moment someone else made permanent for you.

You don’t have to earn it first. You don’t have to be at your best. I walked into that restaurant post-migraine, barely recovered, and definitely not performing anything.

And someone handed me proof that I was happy anyway.

That’s the whole thing.

-Alex 🧡

Know someone who’s been moving too fast to notice their own life?

Send this to them and say: “This moment counts.”

Share

About Alex

I’m Alex Lovell, PhD — political psychologist, yoga therapist, and the founder of a made-up institution called The Department of Aliveness.

By day I’m a VP leading global research on what makes people come alive at work. I love it. By every other random hour I’m here — writing, facilitating, and walking beside people who are figuring out what it means to be alive after everything shifted.

I’ve been homeless. I’ve been divorced. I’ve had my brain rewired by a semi-truck and my life rearranged by things I didn’t choose. I’ve also been surprised by how much aliveness was waiting in the wreckage — not because suffering is a gift, but because I stopped waiting to be healed before I started paying attention.

I’m on a mission to remind one person a day that the life they’re living is the one that counts.

I’d love for you to join me on this journey of aliveness. Join the department today!

Subscribe now

Someone told me yesterday that I seemed lighter.

We were mid-conversation, the kind that wanders and lands somewhere unexpected, and he just said it. That he’d noticed something different in me. An energy. A lightness.

I sat with that for a second. Because he was right.

He’d had his own brush with mortality, a significant heart issue a few years back. So he knew what he was looking at. He recognized the specific quality of someone who’s been rearranged by the things that almost took them out.

And as we kept talking, I found myself trying to explain it. The accident. The divorce. All these ruptures that weren’t supposed to be gifts but somehow left something behind anyway.

What I landed on was this: I’m grateful to be here. AND I’m content.

Content. I used to think that word meant I’d given up.

But here’s what I’ve learned. I can have goals. I can want things. I can dream about what’s next.

And I do.

And I can also sit on the couch with Luis and the dogs tonight and feel like absolutely nothing is missing.

Both things. Same person. Same moment.

I used to believe ambition required hunger. That if I ever felt satisfied, I’d stop moving.

I’ve wanted things both ways. There’s the wanting that comes from lack, the voice that says you’re not enough yet, that you’ll feel okay once you arrive. I lived in that one for too many years. Always future-tense. Always almost there.

And there’s the wanting that comes from something else. You want it because it interests you. Because you’re alive and this is what being alive looks like. You’re not trying to fix anything. You’re just here, doing things.

That first kind keeps you somewhere else. You’re not in your lif, you’re in the next version of it.

I spent decades there. Therapy. Self-help. The constant fixing of myself. Always another thing to work on before I could feel okay about who I was.

Do the work. I did the decades of therapy. It mattered.

And live. That’s the part that gets left out.

After the accident, I kept waiting to feel healed. And at some point I realized my body had just... been doing it. The whole time. Without my permission or my supervision. It didn’t need me to manage the project.

I think we do that, hover over ourselves like worried contractors. Checking the progress. Wondering when it’ll finally be done.

But at some point you have to ask yourself: Am I still healing, or have I just gotten used to thinking of myself as broken?

Life is happening now. Right now. And you’re allowed to be in it.

I don’t think humans are built to stay still. There’s something in us that wants to learn, to try things, to become.

The trouble starts when growth becomes another way to beat yourself up. When you’re forcing yourself to learn things you don’t actually care about because someone said that’s what serious people do.

I’ve watched students tell me they hated math and then fall in love with statistics. Same person. They just needed to find the thing that fit them instead of cramming themselves into what didn’t.

Wanting to grow is human. But that feeling of being perpetually behind—like you’re losing a race you didn’t sign up for—that’s not built in. We made that up.

So yesterday, when he said I seemed lighter, I think what he was seeing was this:

A man who still has ambition, who still wants things, and who is building something he cares about. AND who isn’t hungry anymore… not the kind of hungry that leaves you empty, no matter what you get.

I’m not waiting for some future version of me to show up so I can finally relax. I’m here. This is the life. And I can want more without treating what I have like it’s not enough.

You can move the furniture around. You can let the dishes sit in the sink for a day. You can dream about the garden you’ll plant next year.

You’re already allowed to live in it.

-Alex 🧡

Know someone who’s chasing the next version of their life?

Send this to them and say: “You’re allowed to live now.”

Share

About Alex

I’m Alex Lovell, PhD — political psychologist, yoga therapist, and the founder of a made-up institution called The Department of Aliveness.

By day I’m a VP leading global research on what makes people come alive at work. I love it. By every other random hour I’m here — writing, facilitating, and walking beside people who are figuring out what it means to be alive after everything shifted.

I’ve been homeless. I’ve been divorced. I’ve had my brain rewired by a semi-truck and my life rearranged by things I didn’t choose. I’ve also been surprised by how much aliveness was waiting in the wreckage — not because suffering is a gift, but because I stopped waiting to be healed before I started paying attention.

I’m on a mission to remind one person a day that the life they’re living is the one that counts.

I’d love for you to join me on this journey of aliveness. Join the department today!

Subscribe now

Last Saturday I ran my finger down the leaf of a plant I’d never seen before, and my whole body went electric.

We were at a nursery we’d never been to, one of those winter greenhouse places where the air hits you the second you walk in, warm and muggy in a way that doesn’t quite belong to February. Luis and I had come for the usual reason: we needed more plants.

We did not need more plants. We have a gazillion plant babies. We went anyway, because that’s what you do on a Saturday when you’re alive and someone you love also thinks a Monstera counts as a personality trait.

I was browsing. Just browsing. Moving through the aisles the way you drift through a bookstore… no agenda, just open hands. And then I touched this thing. A Sander’s Alocasia. Deep green leaves, almost too green, with a pale line running through each one like someone had traced it there on purpose. The leaves were bigger than you’d expect for the size of the plant. And the texture. Ya’ll, I wasn’t ready for the texture. Glossy, almost fuzzy, like something that couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be touched or not.

I ran my finger down the leaf and pulled my hand back. Not because it was unpleasant. Because it was unexpected. A shiver went through me—that full-body thing that lives somewhere between ewww and delight, the kind you can’t manufacture. And then I went right back in. Touched it again. Slower this time.

Luis was giggling at me. I told him to shush. We both laughed. I said I had to get it because I was already obsessed. He knew. He’d seen me like this before, standing in a greenhouse in my orange-and-blue furry jacket and black track pants, completely gone over a leaf.

Here’s the thing about that moment. I wasn’t doing anything. I wasn’t healing. I wasn’t growing. I wasn’t practicing mindfulness or gratitude or presence. I wasn’t optimizing my Saturday. I was just standing in a muggy warm room in winter, touching a plant that surprised me, laughing with someone I love.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

I’ve spent most of my life getting ready for a moment like that without recognizing it when it showed up. Too busy planning. Too busy recovering. Too busy working on myself to notice that the self I was working on was right here, running a finger down a leaf and getting the shivers.

If you’re tired of living in ‘almost-ready’ mode…

Join the Department. Subscribe for stories that pull you back into your actual life, not an improvement plan.

Subscribe now

The Industry That Needs You Unfinished

There’s a reason you’ve been treating yourself like a rough draft. You were taught to.

The self-help shelf says: do the work first, then live.

The wellness industry says: heal first, then live.

The optimization crowd says: build the system, then live.

And so you keep preparing. You keep getting ready. And the Saturdays keep passing, and the leaves keep growing, and the warm air keeps hitting you when you walk through the door, and you miss it, because you were told the moment doesn’t count yet.

The wellness industry doesn’t just fail to help people stop treating themselves like rough drafts. It depends on you continuing to do so. The whole business model requires you to believe there’s a better version coming. After the program. After the protocol. After the 30-day challenge. After you’ve done the work.

They need the “real version” to stay just out of reach. The healed you. The complete you. The arrived you waiting on the other side of enough effort and expense. Because if you ever actually got there—if you ever stopped believing in the need for more work—you’d stop buying.

What Rough Draft Mode Looks Like

We know the behaviors. Hell, I bet most of us have done some of them. I’m sure some of us have also uttered our frustrations with them at least once just this past week.

Eat healthy. Exercise. Sleep on time. Go to therapy. Meditate. Journal. Be mindful. Work on my traumas. Read the book. Do the course. Find my purpose. Align with my values. Become the person I’m supposed to be.

The list never ends. You’re probably adding to it in your sleep!

We’re treating ourselves like a renovation project instead of a home. Always another thing to fix before we’re allowed to live in it.

When do we stop fixing the foundation and just sit on the damn porch?

And somewhere underneath all of it, maybe you’ve felt this too, there’s a question you’re afraid to ask out loud: What if I don’t want to be healed? What if I don’t know who I am without the work? What was it all for?

The Real Version Doesn’t Exist

We’ve all imagined them. The future version who is finally ready.

They’ve healed from the thing that broke them. Done the inner work. They wake up at 5am and journal and have a morning routine that actually sticks. They don’t eat their feelings or avoid their inbox or snap at the people they love. They’re not too much or too little. They’re just right. They’re ready.

We’re waiting for them to arrive before we let ourselves have the thing we want.

They’re not coming.

There’s just us.

The ones who didn’t put their peanut butter and jelly in their overnight oats and so it’s suuuuper bland. Forgot to call (and text) a bazillion people back. Spent eight dollars on a sugary coffee and felt guilty. The ones reading (or writing) this right now with seventeen tabs open.

That’s the whole thing.

What I’m Learning in the Greenhouse

I spent years getting ready to be alive. After a brain injury, a divorce, and enough waiting rooms to last a lifetime, I thought I had to complete some kind of recovery curriculum before I could stop being a project and start being a person.

No one ever told me I could just—stop. That the unremarkable, unoptimized, unhealed moment in the greenhouse was the thing. That I didn’t need to earn it.

And the crazy thing? I’ve had SO many of those moments. Being alive is a wild thing. It never stops until it does.

The radical move is refusing the premise that you were ever broken in the way they told you. That you need their program to become the person who deserves the Saturday, the leaf, the shiver, the laugh.

You were never a rough draft. There was no revision process that was going to deliver you to some final version. You were always the thing itself.

The Dare

Go somewhere this week with no agenda. A nursery. A bookstore. A park bench. Somewhere your body wants to be.

Let it be pointless. Let it be ordinary. Let it count for nothing except that you were there.

Touch something. Let yourself get the shivers.

See what happens when you let the Saturday count before you’re ready for it to.

With love,

Alex 🧡

Know someone who’s been waiting to feel ready?

Send this to them and say: “Let Saturday count.”

Share

About Alex

I’m Alex Lovell, PhD — political psychologist, yoga therapist, and the founder of a made-up institution called The Department of Aliveness.

By day I’m a VP leading global research on what makes people come alive at work. I love it. By every other random hour I’m here — writing, facilitating, and walking beside people who are figuring out what it means to be alive after everything shifted.

I’ve been homeless. I’ve been divorced. I’ve had my brain rewired by a semi-truck and my life rearranged by things I didn’t choose. I’ve also been surprised by how much aliveness was waiting in the wreckage — not because suffering is a gift, but because I stopped waiting to be healed before I started paying attention.

I’m on a mission to remind one person a day that the life they’re living is the one that counts.

I’d love for you to join me on this journey of aliveness. Join the department today!

Subscribe now

INTERNAL MEMORANDUM

February Anchor Pack — Kind Firmness

If you read the February theme email, you already know where we are. January lasted nineteen days and also several years. The fog is clearing just enough to see what’s actually here—not what we thought would be here. Just what’s real.

This memo is what to do with that.

If you’re picking this up later—March, July, whenever—that’s fine too. Kind firmness doesn’t expire. The authorizations stand.

Read more

The furniture saleswoman asked what I did for work. Turns out her uncle had worked for my company many years ago - a salesperson who left after they changed the commission structure. She called him ornery, said it with affection.

One day, he was hiking and had an accident. Severe brain injury (triggering for me, right?). He was never the same after. Couldn’t hold down a job. Divorced and remarried multiple times. The injury changed everything.

But she kept coming back to the same thing: his ten golden years. The decade before the accident when he was himself, working, living, whole. Those years sustained him through everything that came after. She said it like it was the most important fact about him.

At the antique store, another woman told me about her husband’s death. How it changed her nine children. How it changed her relationship to control - taught her it was an illusion. That faith held a universal quality. The acceptance that you can’t orchestrate outcomes, that you’re participating in something larger than your ability to manage it.

She said only his death could have taught her that. Through grief. Through loss.

I came home and opened my laptop, re-reading essays I’d saved for another day. I read those lines with my jaw clenched, like I was bracing.

Lou Blaser writing about enoughness and ambition: “The test is, ‘Will you give more to the world than you take?’” The question landed like a hand on my shoulder.

Mel Moseley on the theoretical future, the one we can't control: "I find peace in the uncertainty because that's where the possibility lives." Something in me exhaled, permission to stop demanding a map.

Chloe Hope on what it means to witness death without flinching: “Living beings do not become organic matter at Death; they simply become undeniably so.” I read it three times. Each time it got quieter and truer.

Essay after essay, all published around the same time, and all saved by me for reading again for another day, all circling something I couldn’t name yet. Mortality. Brevity. Enoughness. The undeniable fact of being matter, being here, participating in something we can’t control.

My own near-misses surfaced. Being homeless. The car accident. The brain injury and the long healing after. How that accident taught me more about surrender than yoga ever could.

Aliveness kept arriving. From strangers’ voices. From essays on my screen. From my own body remembering what it learned when control collapsed.

If you want a weekly permission slip to stop performing and live life alive, subscribe.

Subscribe now

What Happens Next

When awareness lands like that - from six directions at once - and the reflex is immediate.

Make it mean something. 😂

Turn it into a gratitude practice. Polish the rupture into a lesson about living fully. Perform the integration before you’ve even sat with what broke through.

The performance of acceptable responses is taught early. We learn to temper our honest relationship with reality so it doesn’t make people uncomfortable. We learn to make our aliveness palatable.

But what if the first move isn’t to make it useful?

What if it’s just to touch it?

The furniture saleswoman’s uncle had ten golden years. Real years that sustained him through everything after.

The woman at the antique store didn’t get handed tidy wisdom. Grief taught her slowly, through pain, to stop reaching for control she never had.

The essays offered witness: we’re here, we’re matter, this is brief, we’re undeniably in it.

Unpolished is intentional. It’s raw contact with what’s actually true before you domesticate it into something shareable.

This Week’s Practice

One true sentence on paper each day.

About aliveness as you’re experiencing it right now. In your body. In your kitchen. In the gap between what you’re carrying and what you’re pretending to carry.

Before you make it inspirational, turn it into a takeaway, and especially before you perform having understood it.

Just what’s true.

A few writings prompts, if they are helpful:

• “The truest thing about being alive today is…”

• “What I am not admitting is…”

• “What I need is…”

“I don’t know” is allowed. Contradictory is allowed. Tired is allowed.

You don’t have to make your aliveness presentable this week.

You get to touch it. Unpolished. As it is.

Because sometimes awareness doesn’t arrive gently. It arrives through strangers telling you about brain injuries and faith learned through loss. Through essays landing on the same day, all saying: you’re here, you’re matter, this is limited.

Through your own body remembering what surrender actually feels like. And the work isn’t to immediately integrate it.

The work is the first honest touch.

One sentence. Unpolished. True.

That’s the authorization.

If you felt seen by this, please share it with someone you love. We don’t get many chances to tell the truth out loud.

Share

The barber looked at me and said I looked stressed. 😂

I was in the chair. Cape on. Mirror in front of me. Nowhere to go.

He disappeared for a minute, came back with a Coke, set it on the counter next to me. “Just relax for the next hour. Don’t think about anything but what we’re talking about.” And then he started trimming my beard.

I could have cut it myself. I know how. I’ve been doing it for weeks - quick, functional, in the bathroom mirror between other things. But I came here instead.

And when he told me to relax, I did.

We talked for an hour about life. Me growing up. My background. His family in Flint, Michigan. What the 2008 crisis did to people there. Stories that didn’t need to go anywhere or solve anything.

My shoulders dropped. My breath slowed. The tightness in my chest - the thing I’ve been carrying for weeks without naming - loosened.

Nothing changed. I didn’t fix anything. For an hour, someone else held the container—and I let myself be held.

The script I didn’t follow

There’s a version of this week where I don’t go to the barber. Where I keep cutting my own beard in the bathroom mirror. Where I tell myself it’s fine, it’s faster, I don’t have time for an hour in a chair doing nothing.

Where “doing nothing” means: being tended to. Being seen. Being a person who takes up space as someone worth grooming.

That version keeps me efficient. Keeps me moving. Keeps me in the narrative that right now is about getting through, and I’ll be a person again later when things calm down.

I almost followed that script.

What actually happened

I sat in the chair and the barber said I looked stressed and I didn’t argue.

I let it be true.

And he handed me a Coke and told me to relax. And I did. And it was glorious. For an hour, I wasn’t managing anything. Wasn’t optimizing. Wasn’t building lists or making bargains with the week.

I was just there. Talking. Being talked to. Letting someone’s hands move carefully around my face while we shot the shit about Flint and the financial crisis and what it’s like to grow up where we grew up.

Pure aliveness.

What I’m seeing about the frame

I’ve been thinking about the frame as something I build for myself. The plate. The bed. The fifteen minutes outside. The small things I protect when I don’t have room for the thread.

But the barber’s chair was different.

I didn’t build that container. He did.

He saw me carrying too much and said: not here. Not for the next hour.

And I let him hold it.

I refused to perform capacity I don’t have.

The cultural script

The script says: you can be alive when you have margin. When you have space for the practice, the ritual, the thing that looks like self-care.

When you don’t have that, you’re surviving. You’re getting through. You’re waiting for your real life to start again when the conditions improve.

But what if that’s backward?

What if aliveness isn’t about having room?

What if it’s about the moment you stop pretending you have room - and let yourself be held anyway?

What refusal looks like

It looks like sitting in a barber’s chair when you could have done it yourself.

It looks like accepting the Coke when someone notices you’re stressed.

It looks like an hour of talking about nothing urgent with someone who’s trimming your beard (and holding a knife up to your neck) and not asking you to have answers.

It’s ordinary. It won’t photograph well. It’s still the choice to be tended to - even when everything in you says you don’t have time, you should be handling it yourself, you need to keep moving.

That counts as living.

What happened after

I left the barber and my beard was trimmed and my shoulders were still loose and I felt like a person who’d been seen.

He focused on the moment. I left feeling recognized.

Someone looked at me and said: you’re carrying too much. Sit down. Relax. Let me take care of this.

And I let them.

I don’t know if that’s the frame or the thread or something that doesn’t have a name yet.

I just know: I didn’t wait for better conditions to be a person worth tending to.

I showed up. I sat down. I let someone else hold the container for an hour.

And it felt like breathing.

What I’m noticing

Our culture wants us to believe that right now doesn’t count. That I’m just getting through until I have “capacity” again. Until I can be the version of myself with time for rituals and practices and the kind of aliveness that looks intentional.

But I sat in that chair and talked about Flint and 2008 and my background and his family. And my whole body said: this counts.

It wasn’t productive. It didn’t move me toward anything. It still counted—presence counted.

Because it was the refusal to treat myself like I’m disposable just because the week is impossible.

Aliveness isn’t a reward for having margin.

It’s the choice to be seen, to be tended to, to take up space as a person - especially when you don’t have room for it.

The thread is aliveness when you have room.

AND

The frame is aliveness when you don’t.

And sometimes - maybe sometimes - the frame is just letting someone else say: not here. Not for the next hour. Just relax.

I’m not waiting anymore.

I’m here. Being tended to. Being a person.

Even when - especially when - I don’t have room for it.

That’s living too.

For an hour, my barber held the container. The Living Room is that—together.

Our next Living Room is on February 28th. Come sit down. You don’t have to carry it alone.

RSVP Today

The notifications start with that tiny sound, like someone tapping a microphone to see if it’s on. And suddenly I’m not in my kitchen anymore. I’m in next week.

I open my laptop “just to check something,” and within ten minutes I’m building the list. The priorities. The must-do’s that pretend they are neutral facts.

My hands are shaking a little, and it takes me a second to clock why. Coffee. More coffee than I thought. Coffee as a strategy. Coffee as a way to get through a day that isn’t even fully here yet. Whoops. No more espresso for me today. 🙃

My chest is doing that quiet clench thing. Not enough to call it panic. Just enough to make everything feel tighter than it needs to be.

The list is huge. Offensively huge. And my mind does what it always does when it sees a wall of tasks: Did I really not do anything last week?

Then I look at last week’s list. Just as long and mostly done. Proof that I wasn’t lazy. Proof that I was working the whole time. Proof that the load keeps regenerating like something alive.

My calendar looks like Tetris on level 100. No clean lines. No empty spaces. Just blocks falling faster than I can place them.

There’s a bargain that starts forming in my body before I even finish the coffee: If I can plan hard enough today, tomorrow won’t hurt as much. Somewhere along the way, “prepared” started meaning “pre-suffering.”

But the thing is, planning is still work. And Sundays weren’t meant to be a second job.

What I’m Protecting Now

I’m not back on the mat yet. I haven’t figured out how to hold the new role and the thread and the grief and the wanting. I don’t have the architecture for all of it.

So I’m doing something smaller. Three things. Boring things. Things that don’t make a good story.

Getting in bed like it matters, instead of collapsing like I’m disposable. Even when I don’t sleep well. Even when my brain keeps pacing.

A plate. A chair. Ten minutes where I’m not eating like I’m being chased. Even if it’s leftovers. Even if it’s not peaceful. Even if it’s just human. And I’m lighting candles every night at dinner. It’s beautiful 🧡

Fifteen minutes outside. The cold air on my face. Proof the sky is still doing sky thingys. No music. Just me and the clouds.

These aren’t the thread. They’re not the thing I’m proud of. They’re not the version of me I’m trying to get back to. They’re handrails. The small structure I grip when the stairs are steep and my body is already bargaining with the week.

The Difference

The thread is what you tend. It needs attention. Consistency. Room.

The frame is what holds you when you don’t have room. When grief brain is eating your short-term memory. When money stress turns every decision into math. When sensory overload makes simple things feel loud. When your body is quietly threatening a migraine if you keep pretending you’re fine.

The frame isn’t impressive. It’s not the thing you’d put in a caption if someone asked how you’re doing. It’s the unsexy answer to one question: What keeps the structure from collapsing while I carry everything else?

What’s Happening in the Body

The body doesn’t speak in paragraphs. It speaks in signals.

The headache that isn’t “about” anything. The anxiety with no story. The shoulder pain you can’t explain. The breath that won’t deepen. The sudden flash of irritation at basically nothing.

It’s not broken. It’s getting louder until you answer.

When we skip lunch, override tired, push thrhrough, our system escalates. Not to punish us. To get our attention.

But when we protect these three small things, when we prove through repetition that we won’t abandon the basics, when we wont abandon ourselves… something changes. The system stops screaming.

Not because we fixed our life. Not because we got back to the version of us with time for rituals and a calm nervous system. Because we answered: Yes.

Even in this. Yes.

Departmental Authorizations

Some of you wrote last week and said: I know exactly what you mean. My thread loosened too. I stopped baking muffins. Oh, that one I felt in my soul. 🥺

And maybe you’ve been trying to get back to it. Or telling yourself you should. Or quietly grieving it while also feeling ridiculous for grieving something so small.

But it’s not small. It’s not the yoga. It’s who you were when you had time to be a person.

This week isn’t about getting back to it.

This is what you’re allowed in the meantime:

• Be allowed to let the thread stay loose.

• Be allowed to stop performing resilience.

• Be allowed to let maintenance be the whole plan.

• Be allowed to be a person who is not “improving” right now.

The discipline isn’t in doing more. It’s in protecting the same three small things. That boring scaffolding. Those handrails of life. Even when they feel too small to matter. Even when they don’t look like progress. Even when part of you hates that this is what you can manage.

This Week

The thread is still there. It didn’t break. It loosened. And we can trust that we will re-meet these threads later, and they will re-meet us, when we are ready.

But right now, I don’t need the thread. I need the frame. Three things. Small enough to keep. Boring enough to protect.

Not to do more. Not to be better. Just to be held.

The Living Room is scaffolding in community form. A place to show up as you are, with the thread still loose, and be witnessed as the beautiful human you are.

Our next Living Room is on February 28th. You are welcome.

RSVP Today

I was writing about grief. I even posted about it last week. Sat with it. Turned it over. Wrote it down.

And the whole time, something in me was aching.

Not metaphorically. Actually.

I kept thinking: but I’m not grieving. So what is this?

If you know this ache, subscribe to The Department of Aliveness.

Subscribe now

The Yes

January. A new role. Something real, something that mattered, and I said yes without hesitation.

I still don’t hesitate. I still love it. It’s fun, challenging, exhilarating, and exciting. All the things!

But it took up space. The way water fills a room… you don’t notice the level rising until you’re already standing in it.

Some days I was wired. Just wired. My brain was buzzing from the moment I woke up until long after I should have been asleep. Other days, I was hollow. Not alive. Just... going. And some days—and I still don’t know how this works—I was both. Wired and numb at the same time?

Everything was asking for something. And I kept giving. Because it mattered. Because I wanted to.

And the first thing that went wasn’t something I chose to give up. Nothing so deliberate as that.

The thread just loosened. The consistency. The small thing I’d been doing every day that kept me tethered to myself.

Yoga.

Some days it was twelve minutes. Some days an hour. The amount never mattered. What mattered was that I showed up. That I kept coming back.

And then I didn’t.

And I didn’t notice.

What He Saw

Luis said it casually. Had I been practicing yoga lately?

Not with concern. Just an observation. The kind of thing someone says when they know you well enough to see what’s shifted without needing to make it into something.

I sat with that for a moment.

And then the ache I’d been carrying for weeks—the one I’d been writing about on the page without knowing I was writing about myself—suddenly had a shape. A name. Feelings.

I’d been grieving. I just didn’t know what for.

The First Thing That Goes

Here’s what I know about the thread.

It’s not the thing that looks important. It’s not the thing other people notice. It’s the quiet, invisible thing that keeps everything else from collapsing.

And it’s the first thing that goes when life expands. Not the obligations. Not the work. Not the things that have deadlines and consequences.

The thread. The one that, when it’s there, you don’t notice. And when it’s gone, you don’t notice that either.

Not until someone who knows you says something simple. And suddenly the grief is right there.

It was there the whole time.

What This Is Not

This is not a story about doing less.

I said yes to something I wanted. I still want it. Nothing about that has changed, and I wouldn’t change it. Not a thing.

This is a story about what quietly disappears when you say yes to something that matters. The small loss. The kind that doesn’t earn sympathy or make for a good cautionary tale.

The thread loosened. I kept going. I didn’t notice until I did.

And then I grieved it.

The Exemption

This week, the department issues an Exemption from More.

More means: more output, more emotional labor, more responsiveness, more being “fine.”

Not a suggestion. Not a maybe. An exemption. The kind of thing that doesn’t require justification.

Over-capacity is not a mindset. It’s a calendar. A body. A set of obligations that will not negotiate.

And the thread—the small, invisible thing that was keeping you tethered to yourself—it went quiet. Not because you failed. Because there was no room left for it.

So here is what the exemption grants:

You are allowed to stop giving. Not permanently. Not dramatically. Just long enough to feel your own pulse again.

You are allowed to notice what’s gone. To grieve it.

You are allowed to put something down so that you can feel it again.

A small thing went quiet.

That’s enough. Sometimes the knowing is enough.

Not Yet. Soon.

I haven’t solved the arrangement, the new role and the thread and the grief and the wanting.

But I can tell the truth: the thread is still there.

It didn’t break. It loosened.

And now that I can feel it again, I know how to return.

Soon.

Know someone who needs an exemption from more? Share this.

Share

I had to check the calendar three times this morning because that cannot possibly be right. January lasted approximately 19 days and also several years. I keep having this sensation of just waking up to 2026—like I’ve been here the whole time but only just opened my eyes.

Did I miss a memo? Was there a meeting? Did someone speed up time and forget to tell me?

Anyway. It’s February. Apparently. 🙃

And honestly? Maybe the disorientation is the point. Because now the fog is clearing just enough to see what’s actually here. What’s real.

And if what’s real is that you’re over-capacity (because whoops, I am), then the move isn’t a reinvention. It’s one clean no. One small stabilizer. One repair.

Here’s what it looks like when I actually try to do that:

I’m learning to speak truth earlier. Not perfectly… I still feel my hands tighten on the steering wheel when someone plans five years out. Butttt, I’m saying the true thing in week one instead of swallowing it for years. I’m practicing staying whole while witnessed, which turns out to be completely different from staying whole alone. I’m setting boundaries that are one clear sentence instead of a full explanation.

It’s awkward. It’s new. But it’s happening.

Because January (and all of last year) showed me the receipts. For what I’d been overgiving to. For the way I kept waiting to have enough energy for the full overhaul instead of just making one small repair. For how exhausting it is to keep performing readiness.

February is where I get to practice something different. Where we get to practice it together.

February’s theme at The Department is:

Kind firmness

Kind firmness is what you need when motivation isn’t doing the heavy lifting anymore. When the friction is real. When overgiving has sent the invoice and your body is asking for something simpler, smaller, true.

So the Department is issuing the following authorizations for February:

You are cleared to say one clear no and let it be enough.

No explanation required. No essay. The no is the complete sentence.

You are authorized to pick one small stabilizer for this week.

Not the month. Not the year. Just: what’s one tiny thing that holds you upright right now?

You have permission to simplify and repair one thing.

When it feels messy, when you’re overwhelmed, when the friction is real… you are officially authorized to make it smaller and fix just that one piece.

This isn’t advice. This is departmental permission for what your body already knows it needs.

Before I share this month’s calendar, a quick note: I experimented in January with sending the main newsletter on Friday evenings. Based on your feedback, that didn’t work… Friday evenings aren’t when you want to read this kind of content. So I’m returning to publishing on Tuesday mornings. Thank you for letting me know what works.

Below you’ll find February’s calendar. Just remember that these are invitations. The authorization above? That’s standing permission. You don’t need to wait for Tuesday’s email or next week’s post.

You’re authorized now.

For paid members:

This month comes with additional support you can actually use.

I’m not interested in giving you more to do. Nope. I’m interested in giving you something to lean on.

So we’re formally launching two membership offerings:

The Living Room — a gently facilitated space to be witnessed and be human in company. First session: Sat Feb 28, 9:00 AM. The Living Room is where you get to exhale in company. Details here:

The Anchor Pack — our first Monthly Department Memo + Packet: a one-page focus, a recipe-style practice, quick weekly check-ins with the self, and options for busy/okay/good days. February’s pack is built to make kind firmness simpler in real life. Especially when capacity is low.

Both are included for paid members.

If you’d like to be resourced this month (instead of doing it solo), you can upgrade to the Front Office here:

Subscribe now

Okay, calendar below. 🙂

Week of Feb 1: Exemption from More

We begin by naming the real situation. Over-capacity is not a mindset—it’s a calendar, a body, a set of obligations that will not negotiate. This week, The Department issues an Exemption from More. We aren’t “building a better life.” We are stopping leaks so you can feel your own pulse again.

Sat Feb 7, 9:00 AM | Coffee Chat: The Clean No (free) — A short community hangout about simple boundaries.

Prompt: “What do you keep doing that you resent, and what is the smallest no you can try?“

Also this week: Tuesday story, Thursday fieldwork via chat.

Week of Feb 8: Authorization for Bare Minimum Support

Most “discipline” is sold as a hero project. Here, discipline is simply scaffolding. Beautiful boring structure that holds you up when life leans hard. This week, The Department authorizes you to be supported by the bare minimum.

This week: Sunday practice, Tuesday story, Thursday fieldwork via chat.

Week of Feb 15: Authorization of the Unpolished

With a floor to stand on, we can afford to be less rehearsed. This week is the Authorization of the Unpolished. We are listening for the raw signal of what is true right now.

This week: aSunday practice, Tuesday’s story, Thursday fieldwork via chat.

Sat Feb 21, 9:00 AM | Coffee Chat: Repair Without the Essay (free) — A short hangout about clean repair when things get tense or misunderstood.

Language you can steal: “I see what happened. I’m sorry. Here’s what I’ll do next time.” Four lines are enough.

Week of Feb 22: Permission to Scale Down

The fog is thickest at the end. When visibility is low, the most alive move is Scale Down. This week is a protocol for low capacity. We stop trying to see the horizon and focus on the three feet in front of us.

This week: Sunday practice, Tuesday story, Thursday fieldwork via chat.

February isn’t about fixing everything or figuring it all out. It’s about finding the smallest thing that holds. The one true sentence. The boundary that doesn’t need an explanation. The repair you can actually finish.

I’m here. You’re here. We’re both standing in February, witnessing what’s real, together.

I’m glad to be here with you.

-Alex 🧡

This is your RSVP for The Living Room — a gently facilitated space to exhale in company, be witnessed, and be human with others who get it.

Our gathering: Saturday, Feb 28 — 9:00 AM
Where: Zoom
Length: 60 Minutes (and it will go by too quickly, I’m sure 🧡)
Who it’s for: Paid members of The Department of Aliveness

Read more

“New year, new you.” “Fresh start.” Get it together.

It doesn’t say “try.” It says: if you were enough, you wouldn’t still want. If you were disciplined, you wouldn’t be here again.

I felt it this year. I fell for it this year. I built systems to prevent another “wasted” year. Two weeks in, my chest was in a vise. That tightness wasn’t a motivation problem. Rather, it was a consent problem. My body was pushing back on the life I kept forcing it to live.

Last week I told you about that—about Helix’s intervention, about choosing my creative life over my compulsive management of it.

What I didn’t tell you is this: the reaching wasn’t wrong. The friction was real. I just kept mistranslating what my body was trying to say.

This is your permission slip. Get the Department in your inbox (messy parts included).

Subscribe now

The Cost of Making It Work

I’m spending 8–10 hours a week commuting to and from a house I don’t particularly like, in a neighborhood that doesn’t feel like mine.

I chose this place after the divorce for simple reasons. It was available. Far enough from the city. It worked. The backyard is good. The dogs have space. Rural living matters to me. I love the countryside.

I’m also not attached to this house. I never was. I love to cook, but the kitchen is too small. AH. And the previous renter wasn’t the greatest at cleaning and their pets… well, “used” the house inside as well as outside. Thank goodness I’m still renting. 😅

For months I’ve been acting like moving is too complicated. Like I already hit my quota of big changes. Like it’s noble to stay “reasonable.” Like I shouldn’t rock the boat in a life that has finally found still seas.

Meanwhile, the commute has been stealing my life.

So I did what I’m good at. I tried to optimize around it. Tighten everything else. Make the rest of my life small enough that twelve hours a week in the car could somehow fit. Ultimately, making myself smaller to accommodate something that was never going to serve me.

That’s January tyranny in action. A reach that says: prove you can make it work. Prove you’re disciplined. Prove you’re grateful.

Then I landed in something steadier in other realizations. My life is fine. I have work I love. A relationship I’m deepening. A dog, who moonlights as a life coach, apparently knows when to step in.

From there, the wanting changed texture.

The question stopped being: How do I make myself fit this?
It became: What actually serves me?

The Kitchen Moment

I was making coffee when it landed.

“I’m moving.”

Not back down to Salt Lake. Just closer. Space and quiet still matter to me. I just don’t want to pay for them in hours on the road.

My shoulders dropped. My chest unclenched.

Relief is data. The exhale was the answer.

An hour of my life, returned to me. Every single day.

The Quiet Rebellion

January’s reach carries an assumption: wanting means you aren’t enough yet. Desire is treated like evidence of lack. Desire gets moralized. Contentment is portrayed as the end of appetite.

I don’t buy that anymore.

What if “this is enough” isn’t the end of wanting.
What if it’s the beginning of true wanting.

When you start from enoughness, desire stops being a fix. It stops being a plea. It stops being a performance. It becomes exploratory. Sometimes playful. You are present, and something genuinely wants to shift.

In my work with people (and… myself), I’ve noticed two kinds of reaching.

Reach-of-necessity

It arrives with panic in its teeth. A compulsory energy. A white-knuckling. The future becomes a problem to solve. The reach-of-necessity is almost reaching to get out of trouble. The body tightens as the mind starts sprinting. It feels like control as salvation.

Reach-of-purpose

It arrives with space around it. Curiosity. Contact. A grounded yes. It comes from listening to what’s alive. The body stays open as the desire comes online.

Your chest knows the difference.
Grasping tightens it. Curiosity opens it.

I don’t want to move because my life is “wrong.”

I want to move because my life is “precious.”

That difference matters.

What the Friction Revealed

I had to build the cage to feel how wrong it was.

I had to optimize every minute. I had to feel the tightness for two weeks. I had to let my dog step on me before I could hear what my body was saying.

The friction was diagnostic. I kept translating it as “try harder” when it was saying, “change the actual thing.”

Sometimes you have to feel the cage close before you know you built one.

My life is fine. And I still want something.

One is the ground. The other is what becomes possible when you stop trying to prove you deserve to stand there. I’m watching for the moment my freedom hardens into another system. I’m good at taking beautiful concepts and turning them into prisons.

So I’m learning to trust what my body knows.

Tightness: grasping.
Spaciousness: listening.

The friction isn’t wrong. It’s information.

Maybe January’s tyranny isn’t “reach harder.”
Maybe it’s “stop being reasonable about things that are quietly stealing your life.”

I still don’t always know which kind of reaching I’m doing. Sometimes I have to feel the cage close before I recognize it.

At least now I know what each one feels like in my chest.

And when I forget, I have an 80-pound Weimaraner who doesn’t need a framework to know what matters.

He just plants his paw on my chest and waits for me to remember.

Don’t let this be a moment, make it a rhythm!

Come back Sunday for the February Calendar + Sunday Practice.

I wrote on Friday about creative sovereignty, about being the one holding the scepter and the one with the blueprint.

Which means I get to build systems that serve me. And I get to keep them soft enough to be lived in.

And I keep realizing something small and slightly embarrassing: a lot of my “sovereignty” lately has looked less like grand declarations… and more like a countertop trash can.

Not a big one. A tiny one. Just big enough for the Splenda packets I tear open every morning while I’m still half-dreaming.

Is it efficient? Yes.
Is it sacred? Debatable.
Is it a quiet way of saying, “I get to make my mornings easier on purpose”? Absolutely.

And then there’s the blanket in my office.

It’s my favorite one. Soft, fluffy, deeeeelightful. And every day I folded it up after I was done using it.

…

……

………

And then I stopped folding it.

Sure, it looks less organized. But I love being able to sit down and immediately curl right into it. No ceremony. No extra step. Just: MMMM. Comfy.

And here’s the key detail: no one sees it.

No one is touring my office with a clipboard.
No one is scoring me on “workspace tidiness.”
The only person living in this environment is me.

So this week’s practice is about a kind of sovereignty we forget we’re allowed to have:
comfort.

A way of making your life easier without needing to justify it.

And especially as we keep living through day-to-day tragedy, anger, grief, and the whole swarm of feelings about things we simply cannot control, deliberately choosing one small element of your immediate experience can be quietly empowering.

It’s sovereignty.

Not over the whole world. Just over this corner of it: the light, the sound, the temperature, the texture. The part your body has to live inside.

And then you get to feel it, in little ways throughout your day and week: that “MMMMM. Comfy” moment. That softening. That tiny exhale that changes what it’s like to be you in your actual life.

If you aren’t a free member of the Department yet, subscribe and pull up a chair.

You’ll get Sunday practices (comfort included), 90-second Wednesday invitations, and Friday stories for the laughing/crying/“wow okay that’s me” parts of being alive.

Subscribe now

The Cozy Bunker Check-In

The whole practice is this:

1) Make one change to your environment on purpose.

Pick one:

• light (lamp on, overhead off, curtains open, screen brightness down)

• sound (music on, silence on, one annoying noise removed)

• temperature (socks, tea, sweater, fan, window cracked)

• texture (blanket, hoodie, chair swap, feet on something soft)

2) Add one body cue.

Just one, simple and physical:

• unclench your jaw

• drop your shoulders

• put one hand on your chest or belly

• feel your feet for one breath

• let your exhale get a fraction longer than your inhale

Then notice what’s true:

Does your body soften even 1%?
Do you feel just a little more “here?”
Do you feel even slightly less braced?

That’s the point.

Comfort ISN’T laziness. Comfort IS information. As I’ve become used to the idea of comfort, I’ve realized that comfort is a nervous system signal that says, “You can be here.”

If you want an extra question to carry into the week, try this:

What’s one comfort I can choose today that helps me feel more here? More in my body? More alive in my actual life?

You get to live in your own environment (and you don’t have to fold your blanket).

Sometimes we forget we’re allowed to make our lives and our spaces kinder on purpose. As a way to keep ourselves close. As a way to stay inhabiting the life we’re already in.

-Alex 🧡

Our Upcoming Departmental Schedule

Wednesday: Our 90-second field assignment. This week: Delete one thing. One unsubscribe, one tab, one obligation, one small “no.” The win is space.

Friday: A lived story about the January reach. The push. The itch for more. The weird feeling of “my life is fine” paired with “I still want something.” We’ll follow the reach down to what it’s really asking for, and end with one small, honest shift.

Miss Something This Week? Not to worry.

Our Friday Story

Our Wednesday Field Assignment

It’s never too late to join us in the field.

Last Sunday’s Practice

Let’s be honest about something: the universe has a wicked sense of humor.

For years, I’ve approached my annual goal-setting through a yearly theme, choosing a word that serves as a North Star, something to orient toward. But looking at 2026, I was done with dreamy. I wanted effective.

Deliberate.

I wanted a theme I could grip in my hand.

So I chose: Operational Rhythms.

(Cue the “AHHHHHHHH” music overlay)

It sounded so productive and intentional. The year I’d finally master the mechanics of my days, weeks, months. I thought I was graduating to a “high-performance system.” I’m not kidding. I wrote that down.

(Spoiler alert: It was just hustle culture wearing a very expensive, very convincing disguise.)

The Headless Turkey Paradox

I re-learned a valuable lesson: it’s remarkably easy to optimize your way right into a cage.

Two weeks in, the Department underwent a surprise inspection by R.E.A.L.I.T.Y. and failed on every key metric. My “Operational Rhythms” looked like a turkey with its head cut off. I was running everywhere and managing every minute. Checking boxes with frantic intensity that left me feeling more scattered than when I started.

Here’s the thing: I knew it was wrong from the beginning.

Operational Rhythms. Doesn’t that phrase just make you want to eyeroll? I was trying to sound fancy, trying to make hustle culture sound sophisticated. And I had this moment, right at the start, where something in me asked: Are you really going to do this?

And I gaslit myself. Told myself it was a great idea. What was I even talking about, questioning my own brilliance?

I was so optimized in my time management that I wasn’t actually managing my time at all.

My to-do list grew monstrous. The work got done, technically, but my chest carried that familiar tightness, the physical signature of “productive” days that leave your soul feeling hollow.

I was building a treadmill and calling it a path.

The 80-Pound Intervention

The breaking point didn’t happen in a boardroom or over a spreadsheet.

It happened on the floor.

My body had finally had enough. I was resting in Savasana. Corpse pose. In the living room. In full access of the dogs. That should tell you I really wasn’t doing yoga.

And that’s when Helix, my Weimaraner, decided he’d seen enough.

He didn’t bark. Didn’t whine.

He just walked over and planted his massive paw directly on the center of my chest. Pinning me down. Standing over me with that singular canine clarity that says:

REST. DAMNIT.

And I did.

We sat there in the quiet of my space. In that stillness, I realized how many times over the last week I’d told him “not right now, buddy” when he’d stretched out on the couch next to me, looking for scratches and attention. How I’d just repositioned him like a throw pillow that was in the wrong spot.

How I’d turned my dog into an interruption.

Life is far too short, and far too precious, to spend it being the most efficient person in the room while feeling dead inside. This is the Department of Aliveness, after all. Not the Department of Deadness.

Ahem… speaking of, if you haven’t subscribed yet to this publication… you should! Subscribe to feel less dead.

Subscribe now

The Autonomy I Stole From Myself

As I sat with that tightness in my body (and it wasn’t just my chest, my shoulders had been riding up toward my ears for days), the real truth emerged.

It felt like being at a concert with the volume turned up too high and no earplugs. Everything amped up, everything too much, everything vibrating at a frequency that made my whole system scream.

I was missing autonomy.

And I realized, I was the one who’d taken it away.

When you’ve survived chaos you can’t control—homelessness, job transitions, dances-with-semi-trucks, divorce—your instinct is to white-knuckle the future. You try to eliminate surprise by sometimes, unintentionally, eliminating your own choices.

The lesson I’d learned from those experiences was simple: more control equals better outcomes. The tighter my grip, the safer I’d be. It’s also not the most correct lesson. 🙃

So I’d been responding to my life by giving up my agency in the day-to-day, without even realizing I was doing it. I’d convinced myself I was being intentional. Really, I was just trying to prevent another “wasted” year. Another imperfect year. Another year that didn’t go according to plan.

Forgetting, of course, that years just don’t happen perfectly.

I didn’t need a better schedule.

I needed to restore my own sovereignty.

Creative Sovereignty

Not just sovereignty. Not just creativity. The combination matters.

Sovereignty acknowledges that my time is my most valuable resource, and I’m the one holding the scepter. It’s about reclaiming the authority I’d been systematically handing over to my own systems, my own schedules, my own supposed “optimization.”

But the creative part? That’s what makes it living rather than limiting.

Creative sovereignty means I get to build the systems that serve me, not become a servant to the systems I’ve built. It means my work as a research leader and my writing here aren’t separate domains requiring separate rhythms, they’re expressions of the same creative force that gets to decide, moment by moment, what matters most.

It’s the difference between being a well-oiled machine and being the actual architect of the factory.

Sovereignty isn’t about doing everything perfectly. It’s about having the authority to choose what matters and the grace to let the rest go. And creativity? That’s what keeps it from calcifying into just another rigid framework.

I’m only a few days in, but the tightness is starting to unfurl.

The Headless Turkey has left the building.

The monarch is back on the throne.

(And yes, he’s currently sharing it with a very large Weimaraner who knows exactly when to step in and remind him what actually matters.)

But here’s what I’m watching for: the moment when Creative Sovereignty starts to calcify. When I catch myself trying to build a system around sovereignty itself. When the freedom becomes another framework I’m enslaved to.

Because the truth is, I’m really good at taking beautiful concepts and turning them into cages.

So far, I’m resisting. Trying to actually be the sovereign here, to have real autonomy over my time and influence over my own decisions.

But I know myself. And I know that the urge to optimize, to systematize, to control? That doesn’t just disappear because I found prettier words for it.

The difference, maybe, is that this time I’m watching for it.

This time, Helix is on the throne with me.

And I’m pretty sure he won’t let me forget what actually matters.

Be on the look out for our next Sunday practice, coming to you on… you guessed it. Sunday!

To be really honest, it probably started here:

I didn’t call them resolutions; I called them “Operational Rhythms”.

🤦🏻‍♂️

I had that familiar buzz, the one where you open a fresh document and start mapping out systems and all the ways this year will be different. I was ready to be better and EVEN more intentional about how my time and energy would be spent.

And then January actually arrived.

An amazing professional shift required more attention than I’d budgeted for. A few health things needed “healthing.” I had big plans for this Substack. The ordinary chaos of a body and a life didn’t pause just because I flipped the calendar…

I found myself in GO GO GO mode. Not because I was chasing some grand vision, but honestly, because I was just trying to get my feet back under me. I was trying to catch up to the pace I thought I should be keeping.

Do you know what the “Mid-month Audit of January” looks like in real life?

One day, it looked like me standing at the sink with my phone in one hand, thumb-typing an urgent message, while rinsing a coffee mug with the other. I realized I was clenching my jaw like I was in a high-stakes hostage negotiation with my own inbox. All while a meeting hummed in the background.

It looks like the “Hustle Story” we tell ourselves:

• “I’ll rest after I send this…”

• “After I answer that…”

• “After I just real quick…”

And suddenly it’s Tuesday, and your body realizes it hasn’t taken a full-body breath since Saturday. You’re moving so fast you almost don’t notice you’re actually a little bit scared of the pace.

So today, I am issuing a Departmental Cease and Desist.

I’m offering myself something small. And if it helps you, please take it too.

It’s a return. A brief, ordinary return to your own body before you hand yourself back to the day.

Not a member of the Department of Aliveness yet? No problem! Membership is free.

Subscribe for proof of life, weekly.

Subscribe now

A Small Rebellion

(The Permission to Pause Protocol)

If you want, set a timer for five minutes. (If timers make you feel bossed around by a machine, don’t set one).

Then see what happens if you:

1. Put something down. The phone. The task. The plan. One thing. Let your hands be empty for a beat.

2. Find one point of contact. Feet on the floor. Back against a chair. Palm on your belly. A hand around a warm mug. Pick one place your nervous system can register: I am here.

3. Name what’s driving you. Ask, softly: “What’s running me right now?” Answer with one phrase. Let the power rest in this naming. Maybe it is pressure, fear, habit, deadline, old programming, noise.

4. Choose one next move that is not urgency. A small choice. A sip of water. A slower exhale. A text that says, “I’ll reply tomorrow.” One task you do at a humane pace.

Then go back to your life. Not as a new person. As a person who paused.

Urgency will probably show up again in ten minutes to demand a meeting. That’s fine. You’re not failing; you’re just learning that the door exists.

If five minutes is too much, take sixty seconds of being officially unavailable to the hustle story that can inevitably catch us in January. No explanation. No announcement. No excuses necessary. Just sixty seconds of being exactly as unfinished as you are right now and being whole anyway.

You don’t need my permission, of course. But if it helps to see it on official departmental letterhead: You’re allowed to stop. Right in the middle. Without earning it. Without explaining it. Without waiting for everything to be handled first.

The world will keep spinning. You’ll keep going. But for five minutes (or sixty seconds), you get to pause.

With love (and fictional paperwork),

Alex 🧡

Our Upcoming Departmental Schedule

• Wednesday: Our first 90-second invitation, delivered via chat. A tiny, doable way back to yourself, no matter what is going on.

• Friday: A lived story on how I arrived at my yearly theme. Because “Operational Rhythms?” Nope. That was not the type of reframe I needed. It involves a bit of grace, a bit of the ridiculous, and the accidental lead-up to finally choosing what fits me.

If this landed, don’t leave yourself alone with it. Subscribe and stay. We’ll be here.

Subscribe now