The Fight You Don't Choose

Some yeses are not yeses. Part 2.

The Sofa, Again

The phone is on the table. The pen is in my hand. Helix has a toy and Poppy wants it, and the small thunder of a Weimaraner negotiating with a border jack who is not in a negotiating mood is happening in the background of what is about to be the worst phone call of my month.

It was a winter morning in Ogden. It did not feel like morning. Winter mornings in Ogden have a way of arriving as the middle of something. The light is gray. The cold has been in the windows since before I woke up. Luis is at the studio. The house is mine and the dogs.

I am on the orange floral sofa.

It’s funny, I didn’t realize until I sat down to write this series how often I kept ending up on the orange floral sofa. Damn that sofa.

The Number

My lawyer is breaking down the first settlement offer.

He says the number.

I know it in my body before my mind catches up. My head drops. My right hand goes to the back of my neck. I sit like that while he keeps going.

He breaks it down. So much for his payment and costs. So much here. So much there. So much for the health insurance lien.

The number gets worse as the breakdown unfolds.

It is about half of what I need to satisfy my health insurance lien. I pull my right leg up against my body. I do not remember deciding to. The pen keeps moving on the page. The neck keeps being held.

The Half-Laugh

Well, I say. What’s next?

Arbitration.

He explains my agreement with my health insurance. I have a “duty to proceed.” They have made clear they will not accept less than what they have paid out unless I demonstrate a good-faith effort.

So I have no choice?

Well, he says. You can pay the remainder out to them yourself.

We both half-laugh.

I do not know if my laugh is warmth or release. It might be both. It might be neither. It is the sound a body makes when the absurdity in the room has nowhere else to go.

He has done this a thousand times. I have done it zero times. The laugh is the only moment in the call where the asymmetry between us collapses for a second.

The system is so screwed up.

Yeah, he says. No kidding.

Do you want me to start?

Yes.

Alright. I’ll tell them to go pound sand, then.

He keeps talking. Five years of medical records. Medical experts. Evaluations. They don’t believe me. That’s the problem with brain injuries. They just aren’t believable.

I write not believable on the page.

Poppy gets the toy. Helix accepts the loss with the dignity of a Weimaraner who has decided he wanted something else all along. The call ends. The phone goes down on the table.

The Fight You Don’t Choose

Here is the thing about being wronged in this country.

You think the wronging is the wound. The car. The collision. The body afterward. The months of recovery. The slow learning of what is yours to carry.

It is not the whole wound. The whole wound includes the part where you find out the wronging comes with a fight. The fight does not ask if you want it. The fight does not ask if you are ready. The fight does not ask if the recovery is done. The fight arrives because the math arrives. The medical bills arrived. The insurance paid some of them. The other driver had no insurance. Your own carrier wrote a number on a piece of paper that does not cover what you owe. Your health insurance has a lien. The lien says you have to try.

You did not choose to be hit. You did not choose to be in this room. You did not choose the orange floral sofa to become the furniture of the legal phase. You did not choose any of it.

But here you are.

The yes you say when your lawyer asks if you want him to start is not a yes the way yes usually works. It is the only available verb. The other options are not options. You cannot pay the remainder yourself. You cannot tell the health insurer to drop the lien. You cannot ask the system to be gentler than it is. You can say yes to going forward, or you can say yes to going forward by another route. There is no version of the morning where no is an answer.

That is the part nobody warns you about.

The wronging is not the whole wound. The administrative aftermath is the second wound. The structural one. The one that arrives after you thought the body was the only thing that had been hurt.

The Floor

I sit on the sofa for a while. Then I move.

I go down to the basement and I do what I do when my body is asking to be returned to itself. I roll out the mat. I sit. I breathe. I run the kundalini cycle I have run for years, the one that walks me back from whatever the day has done to me. I stretch. I let the floor hold me for as long as the floor is willing to.

The dogs come down. Poppy lies on the corner of the mat. Helix finds a sunbeam from the small basement window and claims it.

I am not letting go of the call. I am making room for the call inside a body that is also doing other things. The breath is the other thing. The cycle is the other thing. The cold floor under the mat is the other thing.

Life is happening to me. I am happening back to it, slowly, in the only way I have figured out how.

The Bread

I go upstairs and I make bread.

Not because I have a plan. Because the dough is already proofing from the night before and the day is going to keep happening whether I bake or not. I shape the loaf. I score it. I put it in the oven. The kitchen smells the way kitchens smell when bread is doing what bread does.

The bread comes out delicious.

That is the most honest sentence in this piece.

The call happened. The fight is underway. The number is half of what I need. The five years of records are waiting. The expert is waiting. The arbitration is waiting.

And the bread came out delicious.

At least that could be done.

The Underway

The five years of medical records turned out not to be five years. It turned out to be more. That is a thing I learned later, the way you learn most things in the legal phase, after you have already agreed to whatever you agreed to.

I did not start the records that day. I was too tired. I let the day end without doing the thing the day had asked me to do.

Healed, unhealed.

I wrote that down in the margin too. Not believable on one page. Healed, unhealed in the margin beside it.

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If you are inside a fight you did not choose, the kind that asks you to keep going while telling you that what happened to you is not believable, I want to tell you the thing it took me a while long to learn.

You are allowed to keep the parts of your day the fight did not get to touch.

The bread is allowed to come out delicious on the day the offer is too small. The dogs are allowed to play with the toy. The body is allowed to find the floor. The kundalini is allowed to be the kundalini. The system is allowed to be broken without you being broken inside it. And, you are allowed to feel broken and still be healed in the same breath.

The fight gets the part of you it gets.

And you keep the rest.

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Part three piece is the eval, and learning just how hurt I still really was. That eval was a surprising gift. This process was.

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Read part one here.

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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.