Almost Day — The Person I Became When Part of Me Died

My favorite color used to be purple. Now I can't stand it. It looks dead to me.

It seems essential to post a picture of me LIVING. This is at Lake Kamas in the High Uintas.

Today is a surprise post. I’m surprised I wrote this article, too. I wasn’t planning on it. It’s an edgier piece…for me.

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Today marks one year since my accident.

I've decided to call it my Almost Day.

Not because I almost died, though that happened too. But because I realized I've been living an Almost Day ever since.

• Almost ready to accept who I am now.

• Almost prepared to stop fighting my own rewiring.

• Almost willing to surrender to the person I've become.

My favorite color used to be purple. Deep, beautiful, rich purple - my favorite sweater, the pen I'd reach for first, so many favorites. For decades, purple felt like home.

Now I can't stand it. It looks dead to me. Lifeless.

I'm obsessed with orange now. Bright electric and earthy oranges. I don’t discriminate. The color practically hums with energy when I see it. I've bought orange notebooks, orange mugs, a dumb orange couch, orange everything, and I can't explain why except that orange feels like breathing while purple feels like suffocating.

I keep fighting it.

Keep trying to convince myself back to purple because that's who I was. That's who I'm supposed to be.

It feels like betrayal. Not of purple, but of the orange. Of who I am right now.

The Day Part of Me Died

The accident itself was unremarkable in its brutality. Semi-truck on the highway, rear-ended, lights out. The split second I saw those headlights in my rearview mirror, my brain managed one thought: "Ah, damn. I guess this is how I go."

I wasn't being dramatic. Highway speeds left very little room for hope.

And then my body remembered what my mind couldn't process - the cold grip of terror, the resignation that there was nothing to prepare for, nothing to control.

Everything went dark.

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I wasn't quite right from the moment I regained consciousness. Even with adrenaline flooding my system, I could barely pull myself together to make the 911 call. I was barely conscious as I guessed my way through questions the dispatcher kept repeating. Got the president wrong - Obama was apparently not still in office. Kept repeating myself like a broken record.

By the time I got to the hospital, I seemed better. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug.

The next day, I started going downhill fast. The stuttering began. Blinding migraines that felt like my skull was splitting. I couldn't think in straight lines. Started losing chunks of memory. Had no sense of balance - the world tilted constantly. Couldn't form complete sentences. Existing became impossible.

My brain was broken. Not bruised, not foggy - broken. The neural pathways that had supported decades of purple-loving, spice-avoiding, careful-with-words existence were damaged beyond repair.

That person didn't fade away gradually. He was obliterated in the collision.

I've been trying to resurrect a corpse.

The Rewiring I Can't Control

My nervous system reorganized itself without asking my permission. My taste buds developed a craving for spice that makes no logical sense - I was a spicy food wimp for decades, and now I put hot sauce on everything. My brain processes information differently. My body moves differently through space. My voice sounds different when I laugh. I fly off the handle at things that used to never bother me. But I’m WAY more grounded in general.

I can't think my way back to who I was. I can't logic myself into loving purple again. I can't discipline myself back into the old patterns because the neural pathways that supported them literally don't exist anymore.

The orange isn't a preference. It's information from my rewired nervous system about what feels alive now. And every time I fight it, every time I try to convince myself back toward purple, I'm betraying the intelligence of who I actually am.

I'm refusing to inhabit my own existence.

The Stranger in My Own Life

For a year, I've been trying to get to know this new person who showed up in my body. Analyzing the changes, cataloging the differences, studying myself like a fascinating case study in neuroplasticity.

But that became its own form of Almost Day. Almost ready to accept these changes. Almost comfortable with not knowing who I'm becoming. Almost prepared to trust this stranger's appetites and preferences and ways of being.

Meanwhile, this stranger - this orange-loving, spice-craving, migraine-having, sometimes-stuttering person - has been trying to live. Has been sending me signals about what feels true, what wants to emerge, what needs attention. Has been writing essays about aliveness while I've been busy trying to figure out who's been writing them.

The intelligence that kept me breathing when my brain shut down is the same intelligence that reaches for orange instead of purple. The same intelligence that craves heat instead of mild.

I've been treating my own aliveness like a puzzle to solve instead of an experience to inhabit.

The Orange Knows Things

Here's what I'm learning about surrender: it's not giving up. It's finally showing up. As who you actually are. Right now.

The orange isn't just a color preference. It's my nervous system telling me what feels alive. The spice craving isn't random - it's information about what this rewired body needs.

When I stop fighting and just follow the orange, when I trust the intelligence of this new wiring, everything flows. The words come easier. The connections feel deeper. The migraines are still terrible and I still stutter when I'm overstimulated, but I'm not fighting those realities anymore. I'm not trying to force myself back into the shape of someone who no longer exists.

I'm collaborating with who I am now instead of mourning who I was.

The Almost Day Everyone Is Living

We're all fighting our own orange.

The friend who keeps trying to force herself back into the relationship patterns that worked in her twenties, ignoring the intelligence of who she's become in her forties. The artist who keeps making the same work he's always made instead of trusting what wants to emerge through his changed perspective. The parent who keeps trying to be the mother she thought she'd be instead of the mother she actually is.

We're all trying to resurrect previous versions of ourselves instead of inhabiting current versions. We're all almost ready to trust who we are now. Almost prepared to stop fighting our own rewiring. Almost willing to surrender to the intelligence of our actual existence.

The cultural message is relentless: get back to who you were. Return to normal. Heal means restoring the previous state. But what if healing doesn't mean going backward? What if it means accepting that you're not who you used to be and that's not a problem to solve?

What if surrender to who you are now is the most radical act of self-love possible?

Liberation from the Past

If I surrender to the orange, I'm liberated from the past.

Not just my past - the entire fiction that I'm supposed to be who I used to be. The exhausting project of trying to fit my rewired nervous system back into old patterns. The betrayal of refusing to trust the intelligence that's actually flowing through me right now.

Surrendering to the orange means accepting that part of me died that day and someone new emerged. It means trusting that my changed appetites and preferences and ways of being aren't problems to solve but information to follow. It means acknowledging my limitations - the migraines, the stuttering, the brain fog - without treating them as evidence that I'm broken.

It means recognizing that I have new strengths too. A Substack full of people I get to interact with regularly. The ability to write about what it means to be alive in ways that connect with strangers. Conversations that go deeper than anything I had access to before the accident.

This isn't recovery. This is emergence.

The Choice We All Face

Your Almost Day isn't about an accident. It's about the daily choice between inhabiting who you are and fighting to resurrect who you were.

Your orange might not be a color. It might be the career change that makes no logical sense but feels alive. The relationship that doesn't fit your old patterns but feeds something essential. The creative project that scares you because it's so different from what you've always made. The way you move through the world now that doesn't match who you used to be.

The question isn't whether you've changed. You have. We all have. Life rewires us constantly - through loss, love, time, experience, the simple act of being alive in a world that never stops moving.

The question is whether you're willing to trust the intelligence of who you are now.

Whether you're brave enough to surrender to your own orange.

The Only Day You Actually Have

I survived that collision not because I was prepared, but because life wanted to keep expressing itself through whatever form I became. The intelligence that kept me breathing is the same intelligence that reaches for orange, craves spice, writes about aliveness to strangers.

Your Almost Day - the one you're living right now - is the only day you actually have. Not the day when you figure yourself out, not the day when you become who you're supposed to be, not the day when you successfully resurrect who you used to be.

This day. With this nervous system. With these appetites and preferences and limitations and strengths. With this intelligence flowing through you, sending you signals about what feels true, what wants to emerge, what needs attention.

Stop fighting your orange. Start trusting it.

The person you are right now isn't a rough draft of who you're becoming. You're not almost ready to be yourself. You are yourself. Changed, rewired, different from who you were, and exactly who you need to be to live the life that's trying to live itself through you.

Surrender to the orange. It's the only way home.

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If Life As I See It resonates with you and you think others might find value in it too, consider recommending this publication to your readers or sharing this piece with someone who needs to read it.

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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