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.

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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?

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I missed two weeks.

Not on purpose. Just happened. One week bled into the next and I didn’t write and honestly? It felt good.

My creative soul needed the break. I missed you, yes. But I needed the quiet more.

And now I’m back with a single word I can’t stop thinking about: majesty.

Not the royal kind. The other kind. The Oxford definition is “impressive stateliness, dignity, or beauty,” but that doesn’t quite capture what I mean.

Last weekend I beheld beauty so striking it left me speechless. I didn’t take a photo. I just stood there, mouth open, heart full, completely and utterly arrested by what was in front of me.

Majesty. That’s the only word that fits.

And it made me wonder: what if majesty is already here, waiting to be noticed? Not manufactured or sought after or earned through effort, just present, asking to be seen.

This holiday season, I’m curious: where might you find it?

Not the smart-phone-clamoring moments. The other ones. The ones that make you stop walking. That fill your chest before your mind catches up. That reminds you the world contains more beauty than you remembered.

Or majesty might be quiet. It might be small. It might be so ordinary you almost miss it.

But it’s there. Asking to be witnessed.

Where might majesty be right in front of you, simply asking to be seen? Where can you be captured by the dignity of the moment?

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Merry Whatever YOU Celebrate (even if it is just a regular ol’ Thursday).

I’m grateful for you.

-Alex

About Alex

I’m Alex Lovell — political psychologist, yoga therapist, and writer.

Lived homeless. Been divorced. Survived a seven-car pileup with a semi. Fell in love with questions that don’t have easy answers. I’ve met a lot of thresholds. Even the one before death.

These days, I split my time between research, writing, and holding space for people figuring out who they are after everything shifted.

This Substack is where I make sense of things out loud.
I write for people in transition — between roles, beliefs, relationships, selves.
The ones quietly wondering, “What now?” but allergic to one-size-fits-all answers.

Sometimes I quote research. Sometimes I quote my own nervous system.
One speaks in data, the other in sensation. I’ve stopped choosing sides.

Free subscribers get weekly articles and insights (sometimes twice a week!). Paid subscribers get the Thursday Offerings, seasonal companion pages, post-nidra audio, and live slow sessions. Join me?

Subscribe now

The Christmas tree at Trolley Square has stopping power.

It is massive—twenty feet tall, maybe more—and dominates the side atrium of Trolley Square. Lights everywhere, ornaments catching the afternoon sun through the skylights in that specific way department store trees do.

We’d just walked in. Black Friday. The place was decorated and festive, smaller trees lining the hallways, cheerful music playing over the speakers. I could hear carolers somewhere in the distance.

And my body and mind went somewhere else entirely.

I’d been here before. Not last year. Not recently. Nearly a decade ago. Same day. Same store. Same Black Friday chaos. Same purpose: buying knife sets.

The spatial memory hit before my mind could process it. My body recognized this place—the layout, the light, the specific quality of sound in that atrium—and just transported me backward through time.

The Man Who Stood Here Before

I was in my twenties. Married. Buying good knives, the kind you research before purchasing. The kind built to last. But you still have to feel before you buy them. I’m kind of old-fashioned.

I was building a home in a house with ceilings that were too low. Building a life in a marriage where I was learning to make myself smaller and smaller without completely disappearing. Building something I couldn’t quite name as wrong yet, but my body knew. My shoulders knew. My jaw knew.

I was here. These hallways. This same Christmas music probably playing overhead.

And in this past? I was alone.

Not technically. I was married. But I was alone in the way that actually matters. Alone in the wanting I couldn’t speak. Alone in the truth I kept swallowing. Alone in that carefully managed life where I performed fine while my body kept score of everything I wouldn’t say.

For a moment—just a flash, but complete—I was him again. That version. Standing in this exact spot. Younger. Trying. Not knowing what was coming. Not knowing about the basement or the breaking or the countryside or the solitude that would teach me what it meant to be whole.

Just here. Buying knives. Building something I thought would last.

The feeling was so strong I could have been actually there. Time folding back on itself. Present collapsing into past.

And then I heard my name.

Called Back

“Alex? Yo. You good?”

They were looking at me. Smiling. That particular smile that means where did you go?

I came back. Present. Here. Now.

I laughed it off and smiled. “Yep. Just time traveled.”

Except I wasn’t just here. I was in multiple places at once, multiple timelines layered over each other like transparencies.

The man who stood in this store a decade ago, alone, buying knives for a kitchen in a house that was too small.

The man standing here right now, with someone, looking at knife sets for their mother.

And somewhere ahead of me, not yet visible but pulling at me with terrible gravity, the man I’m becoming. The one who has to keep choosing this. Who has to stay present and whole and available not just today but tomorrow and next month and five years from now when they casually talk about our future like it’s already decided.

All of it happening at once. All of it demanding my attention. All of it equally real.

My chest was tight with something I couldn’t name. Grief? Joy? Terror? All of them, maybe. Or something that doesn’t have a single word because it’s all three at once.

What We Were Actually Doing

We were holding knife sets. Comparing weights. Reading the descriptions on the boxes.

“What do you think about this one?” he asked.

A simple question. The kind couples ask each other when shopping. But it landed differently in my body. Like I had an opinion that mattered. Like we were making this decision together. Like this was normal.

Which it was. Except it wasn’t.

We were shopping for his mother. For family. For the kind of casual holiday ritual I never got to practice in my marriage.

We weren’t close to his family. Or mine. That wasn’t really how we operated. It was just us in that house, in that carefully constructed life where I kept making myself smaller and somehow didn’t completely disappear.

But now? Standing in Trolley Square on Black Friday, comparing knife sets for someone’s mother?

This was different.

This was something I’d wanted but didn’t know I’d been grieving. The belonging. The woven-in-ness. The specific intimacy of being someone who participates in family. Who’s integrated enough into someone’s life that you’re buying gifts for their mother on Black Friday like it’s the most ordinary thing in the world.

“This one’s better quality,” I heard myself say. “I love the richness of the wood handles. And it has a protective coating. Ooooh. I mean, now I kind of want them.” As I start to giggle.

“Wait, what was that price? Just kidding…”

Better than the set I bought a decade ago. Truly better. Sharper. Built to last longer.

We were holding it between us. Both of us looking at it. Both of us here.

Together.

Not alone. Not performing. Not carefully managing what I could show and what I had to hide.

Just together.

What My Body Was Holding

My shoulders were tight. My breathing was shallow. That animal awareness that something significant was happening and I needed to pay attention.

But attention to what? The past that kept flooding back? The present that felt almost surreal in its ordinariness? The future that terrified me with its implied continuity?

I couldn’t choose. They were all there at once.

The version of me who stood in this store alone, buying knives for a life that was ending even though I didn’t know it yet. The grief of that. The loneliness I’d learned to normalize.

The version of me standing here now. With someone. Looking at better knives. For their mother. The joy of that. The unexpected relief of being part of something instead of carefully partitioned from everything.

And the version of me I’m becoming. The one who has to keep doing this. Who has to keep choosing presence and vulnerability and openness not just in peak moments but in ordinary ones. In Black Friday shopping and planning holidays and all the sustained intimacy I’ve never actually practiced. The terror of that.

All of it in my body at once. All of it demanding to be felt. All of it equally real and equally impossible to resolve into something manageable.

And standing there, holding that knife set, I realized: maybe I’m not supposed to resolve it.

Last week I wrote about being grateful for three versions of myself—past, present, future. Three people across time, each giving what they could give.

But standing in Trolley Square, I understood something else: they’re not just people I’m grateful for. They’re all here. Right now. In this body.

This is what I’m learning to call the practice of simultaneity. Not just remembering the past while living the present. Not just anticipating the future while standing in the now. But actually experiencing all three timelines as equally real, equally present, equally demanding attention.

Maybe this is what aliveness actually looks like. Not the clean narrative of “I was broken, I healed, now I’m whole.” But this messy, layered experience of living in multiple timelines simultaneously. Of feeling grief and joy and terror in the same moment, maybe even the same breath, and not making one more real than the others.

At the Register

We were at the register, waiting to check out. Arms full of bags. The knife set boxed and ready.

And I felt something unexpected: relief.

Not just about the knife set. About all of it.

About being here. About participating in this. About being someone who gets to do Black Friday shopping for family gifts. About being part of something instead of performing proximity to it.

The comfort of that surprised me. The excitement.

I’d thought letting someone in would mean shrinking again. Making myself smaller to fit. Learning to accommodate my wanting to someone else’s capacity. Returning to that careful choreography of who I could be and what I could say.

But standing there with bags in my arms, that’s not what this felt like.

This felt like finally having room for something I’d wanted but never let myself practice. Family. Belonging. The ordinary intimacy of being woven into someone’s life enough that their mother’s Christmas gift is a shared decision.

I didn’t get this before. In my marriage. In my carefully managed life where I kept everything small enough to fit.

And I’m getting it now.

And it terrifies me and fills me and I have no idea how to hold it except to stay here. Present. In all three timelines at once. Letting them coexist without demanding they resolve into one clean story.

Walking Out

We left Trolley Square together. The Christmas tree still glowing in the atrium behind us. The knife set in the bag. The caroler’s songs echoing in the background. Their hand in mine.

I wasn’t the version of me who walked out of this store alone a decade ago. That man is gone. That marriage ended. That life dissolved.

But he’s still here somehow. Part of me. The longing he carried. The loneliness he normalized. The way he couldn’t speak what he needed. That’s still in my body somewhere, still part of what makes this present moment so weighted with significance.

I’m not him anymore. I’m this version now. The one who learned to be whole alone. Who learned what presence actually feels like. Who spent months in a basement and years in the countryside practicing aliveness until it became more than theory. Who put up an eight-foot tree and felt his chest fill with light. Who opened the door and let someone in.

And I’m also the version I’m becoming. The one who might know how to stay. Who might learn to keep choosing this kind of presence. Who might be able to receive family and belonging and sustained intimacy without my whole nervous system treating it like a threat.

All three versions. Same moment. Same body.

Past. Present. Future.

Not resolved. Not reconciled. Not choosing one timeline over the others.

Just holding all of it. Learning to be spacious enough to contain the simultaneity without demanding it simplify into something more manageable.

The Beginning Middle

I thought this series would end with arrival. With me landing somewhere. With resolution.

I thought I’d be able to say: here’s what I learned, here’s where I am now, here’s how the story wraps up.

But that’s not what’s happening.

I’m not at an ending. I’m not even at a clear middle where I can pause and assess and know what comes next.

I’m in this strange space where everything is happening at once. Where I’m grieving what ended and building what’s beginning and terrified of what’s coming—all in the same moment, sometimes the same breath.

Where the past keeps showing up not as memory but as lived presence. Where the future keeps calling not as promise but as demand. Where the present is so full I don’t know how to contain it.

And I’m learning that maybe containment isn’t the point.

Maybe aliveness isn’t about resolving the simultaneity. Maybe it’s about developing the capacity to hold it. To stand in a store and be transported backward and called forward and completely present all at once without fracturing under the weight of it.

To feel grief for what ended and joy for what’s here and terror for what’s coming without making one feeling more legitimate than the others. Without demanding they take turns instead of coexisting.

The basement taught me what presence feels like in devastation. When everything is breaking and there’s nothing to do but stay with it.

The countryside taught me what presence feels like in rebuilding. When you’re practicing aliveness while still figuring out who you are.

The star taught me what presence feels like in unexpected joy. When your chest fills with light and you let yourself have the thing you’ve wanted since childhood.

The door taught me what presence feels like when terror and choosing happen simultaneously. When you’re scared and you do it anyway.

And Trolley Square is teaching me what presence feels like when you’re living in multiple timelines at once and you don’t get to choose which one is real because they’re all real and they’re all demanding your attention and you have to find a way to hold them all without breaking.

The man who stood here a decade ago, alone, buying knives for a life that was ending.

The man standing here now, together, buying better knives, participating in family.

The man I’m still becoming, still figuring out, still choosing with every moment I stay present instead of fleeing.

All of them here. All of them real. All of them me.

In the beginning of something. In the middle of something else. In the end of something that shaped everything that came after.

Not finished. Not resolved. Not landed anywhere I can name.

Just alive. In the beginning middle. In the weird temporal space where past and present and future blur together and instead of demanding clarity, I’m learning to stay present to the complexity.

This is the last essay in this series. Not because the story is complete. Not because I’ve arrived somewhere final. Not because I have answers about how this all turns out.

But because I’ve learned what I came to learn: You don’t wait to be alive until everything resolves. You practice aliveness in the unresolved. In the messy middle. In the simultaneous experience of grief and joy and terror that refuses to organize itself into a clean narrative.

The knife set is better. The person is different. I’m not alone.

And I’m learning to hold all of it—the past that shaped me, the present I’m choosing, the future I’m building—without needing them to resolve into something simpler.

Just here. Just now. Just alive.

In the beginning middle.

In the all of it.

Exactly where I need to be.

Someone you know might be in their own beginning middle—not broken, not healed, just alive in the messy simultaneity of it all.

Would you send this their way?

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About Alex

I’m Alex Lovell — political psychologist, yoga therapist, and writer.

Lived homeless. Been divorced. Survived a seven-car pileup with a semi. Fell in love with questions that don’t have easy answers. I’ve met a lot of thresholds. Even the one before death.

These days, I split my time between research, writing, and holding space for people figuring out who they are after everything shifted.

This Substack is where I make sense of things out loud.
I write for people in transition — between roles, beliefs, relationships, selves.
The ones quietly wondering, “What now?” but allergic to one-size-fits-all answers.

Sometimes I quote research. Sometimes I quote my own nervous system.
One speaks in data, the other in sensation. I’ve stopped choosing sides.

Free subscribers get weekly articles and insights (sometimes twice a week!). Paid subscribers get the Thursday Offerings, seasonal companion pages, post-nidra audio, and live slow sessions. Join me?

Subscribe now

I’m grateful for someone who doesn’t exist yet.

Not in the metaphorical sense… not grateful for “future possibilities” or “what’s to come.” I mean literally: there’s a version of me I haven’t met, and I’m learning to thank him before he arrives.

This is not how gratitude is supposed to work, but here I am doing it anyways.

I’m learning there are three people I need to thank.

The Past Self: Thank You for Not Knowing

The man in the raised garden beds, rehearsing a life he couldn’t have yet. The one who kept the longing alive through seed catalogs and cedar frames. Who made himself smaller and smaller and somehow didn’t disappear completely.

I used to think I needed to be grateful to him for surviving. For enduring. For keeping me alive through those years.

But that’s not quite right.

I’m grateful for him not knowing. For his inability to see what was coming. For the mercy of his limited vision.

He couldn’t see the basement. Couldn’t imagine the breaking. Had no idea what it would cost to finally speak after four years of swallowing.

If he’d known, he might not have made it. The weight of what was coming might have crushed him before he got there.

So I’m grateful he didn’t know. Grateful he could garden and hope and quietly long for countryside he’d never asked permission to want. Grateful he was naive enough to keep going.

Maybe you know what this feels like? Loving someone in your past not for what they accomplished, but for what they couldn’t see coming. For the protection that not-knowing offered.

He wasn’t failing by not seeing. What looked like blindness was actually keeping us both alive.

That’s not a lesson he taught me. That’s not growth I extracted from his pain.

That’s just: thank you for being exactly as unaware as you needed to be. Thank you for not knowing what I know now. Thank you for making it here.

The Present Self: Thank You for Not Waiting

And then there’s me. Right now. The one standing on the stepladder with the star.

The one who learned to be whole alone and is now terrified of staying whole while witnessed. The one whose hands tighten on the steering wheel when someone casually plans five years out.

The one who’s writing this essay instead of having all the answers.

I keep thinking I should be grateful for the work I’ve done. The practices. The integration. The capacity I’ve built.

But that’s making gratitude conditional. Saying: you earned this by doing the work.

What if the gratitude is simpler?

Thank you for not waiting to be ready.

Thank you for putting up the tree in mid-November instead of waiting until you felt more settled. Thank you for saying yes to dating even though you have no idea how to let someone all the way in. Thank you for moving to the countryside while breaking.

Thank you for practicing aliveness before you figured out how.

The cultural script says: heal first, then live. Get through the grief, do the work, become the person you’re supposed to be, then place the star.

I almost believed it. I almost waited.

There was a weekend in October when I walked through the Christmas section at the store. Saw the trees. Felt that pull. And immediately thought: Not yet. Wait until things are more settled. Wait until you know what you’re doing with this relationship. Wait until you’re sure.

I left the store without buying anything.

But the next weekend, I went back. Bought the nine-foot tree. Brought it home. Set it up while having no idea what I was doing with my life.

I’m living and becoming at the same time.

And I’m grateful for that. Not for what I’ve accomplished. Not for how far I’ve come.

For my refusal to wait for permission. For choosing now as a complete answer even when I’m not a complete person.

For being exactly this unfinished and showing up whole anyway.

The Future Self: Thank You for Not Existing Yet

And then there’s him. The one I can’t see. The one I’m becoming but haven’t met.

The one who might know how to stay integrated when someone else is in the room. Who might have learned to speak truth on day one. Who might be able to receive love without his whole nervous system treating it like a threat.

Or maybe not. Maybe he’s figuring it out too.

Here’s what I’m learning: I’m grateful he doesn’t exist yet.

Not because I’m not ready to be him. But because his not-yet-existing means I get to choose.

Every morning I wake up and practice. Every time I place a star or let someone in or feel my chest fill with unexpected joy, I’m choosing who he becomes.

He’s not inevitable. He’s not predetermined by the past or guaranteed by the work I’ve done.

He’s possible. And that possibility is open. Unwritten. Mine to shape.

I picture him sometimes. Not his face or what he’s wearing. But the quality of his presence. The way he might move through a room without bracing. The way he might hear “I love you” without his shoulders tightening. The way he might plan five years out without white-knuckling the steering wheel.

Maybe he exists. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he’s someone entirely different than I imagine.

I don’t know if I can stay whole while witnessed. I don’t know if I can let someone all the way in. I don’t know if five years from now I’ll look back and recognize myself or feel like I’ve become someone entirely new.

And I’m grateful I don’t know.

Because it means it’s not finished. It means I’m alive in the becoming, not just arrived at some fixed destination.

The future self I’m grateful for is the one who gets to keep choosing. Who doesn’t have to be the completed version of anything. Who can place stars and feel terror and want things he’s never wanted before.

Who can be exactly as unfinished as I am right now and be whole anyway.

The Triumvirate

I don’t need to be grateful for the pain or for the lessons or for the pathway.

I need to be grateful for three versions of myself who each gave what they could give:

• The past self who survived by not knowing.

• The present self who’s living without waiting to be ready.

• The future self who doesn’t exist yet and gets to be chosen.

All three of them. Necessary. Unfinished. Exactly enough.

When I placed that star and felt my chest fill with light, all three of them were there:

• The man who survived by not knowing and kept the longing alive.

• The man on the stepladder saying yes to magnificence even though he’s terrified.

• The person he’s becoming who will remember this moment and know: that’s when I stopped making myself small.

Past. Present. Future.

All of them deserving gratitude. None of them requiring the others to have been different.

The star fits. The tree is tall enough. My chest is full.

And I’m grateful for all three versions of the person who made it possible.

Maybe you have your own triumvirate?

The person who survived something by not seeing it coming. Who kept going when knowing the full weight might have stopped them.

The person right now, living before they’re ready. Choosing something—a move, a relationship, a risk—while figuring out who they are.

And the person who doesn’t exist yet. The one who’s unwritten. Yours to shape.

You don’t need to be grateful for what happened. You can be grateful for who showed up. Who’s showing up now. Who gets to keep choosing.

Past. Present. Future.

All of them deserving thanks. None of them requiring the others to have been different.

Someone in your life might be trying to be grateful for their pain when what they actually need is to thank the person who survived it.

Would you send this their way?

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About Alex

I’m Alex Lovell — political psychologist, yoga therapist, and writer.

Lived homeless. Been divorced. Survived a seven-car pileup with a semi. Fell in love with questions that don’t have easy answers. I’ve met a lot of thresholds. Even the one before death.

These days, I split my time between research, writing, and holding space for people figuring out who they are after everything shifted.

This Substack is where I make sense of things out loud.
I write for people in transition — between roles, beliefs, relationships, selves.
The ones quietly wondering, “What now?” but allergic to one-size-fits-all answers.

Sometimes I quote research. Sometimes I quote my own nervous system.
One speaks in data, the other in sensation. I’ve stopped choosing sides.

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