After the After

Five pieces on what comes after you thought you were done. Part one.

Poppy is asleep in what is basically her chair.

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

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

My lawyer was explaining the neuropsychological evaluation.

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

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

“Alex? Alex, are you there?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The light kept leaving me.

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

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

Time is not linear, I’m learning.

Healed, unhealed.

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

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

Apparently, I was the last to know.

About Alex

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

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

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

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