Aliveness Isn’t Self-Care. It’s Self-Disruption.

Why restlessness isn't a problem to solve, it's intelligence to follow.

A little too early in the morning… no one joined me for a while.

I've been thinking about courage all wrong.

For most of my life, I thought brave people were the ones who felt afraid and did it anyway. The ones who pushed through discomfort, who muscled past uncertainty, who forced themselves to act despite every instinct telling them to stay small and safe.

But throughout the last month, I met four people who showed me something different.

They weren't pushing through fear. They were following something that felt more true than the fear. They weren't overcoming their discomfort; they were trusting it as information about what needed to change.

They were practicing what I've come to think of as aliveness itself: the art of refusing to shrink.

The Mythology We've Been Sold

I think aliveness has been turned into a commodity.

Self-care Sundays and morning routines and optimization strategies… all designed to make us feel better, more balanced, more in control. As if being alive were a problem to be solved through the right combination of habits and mindset shifts.

But here's what I learned sitting across from strangers on sometimes delayed trains: aliveness isn't about feeling better—it's about feeling braver.

The botanist letting his corporate life burn wasn't trying to feel good. He was choosing productive destruction over comfortable suffocation. The artist staying liquid in his Radiohead hoodie wasn't optimizing anything—he was refusing to solidify into someone else's timeline. The young mother with the crying baby wasn't practicing self-care; she was relearning the radical act of taking up space without apology. The chef with recipes sketched in three languages wasn't chasing a dream; she was following the intelligence her body had been giving her for years.

Each one was doing something our culture tells us is dangerous: following their discomfort toward something more true.

The Necessary Unraveling

Here's the thing about aliveness that no one wants to tell you: it's not gentle.

Real aliveness—the kind that actually changes you rather than just making you feel temporarily better—requires a willingness to let parts of yourself die. To dissolve into uncertainty. To make noise that disrupts other people's comfort. To move in directions that don't make sense to anyone watching from the outside.

The caterpillar doesn't ease into becoming a butterfly. It dissolves into soup. Complete cellular breakdown before reconstruction. The walls of its old body literally liquefy, everything it was becoming nutritional material for what it's becoming. The process isn't painful because something's going wrong—it's painful because something's finally going right.

I think about my own soup phases. The divorce that liquefied everything I thought I knew about partnership—how for months I felt like I was floating in some unrecognizable version of myself, my chest aching with the constant sensation of free fall. The career transitions that left me floating between identities, my hands literally shaking some mornings as I reached for coffee, my body registering the uncertainty before my mind could rationalize it away.

But what if normal was the problem? What if the urge to quickly reconstitute myself into a recognizable shape was just another form of hiding?

The artist in the Radiohead hoodie had figured something out about aliveness that I was still learning: uncertainty isn't something to endure—it's something to inhabit. He wasn't waiting for his life to begin once he figured it out. He was living fully in the figuring-out itself.

"Everyone's always asking me what I want to do with my life," he said, sketching spirals in his notebook while our delayed train held us suspended between destinations. His pencil moved in these intricate patterns, like he was mapping out some invisible geography the rest of us couldn't see. "But what if that's the wrong question? What if the real question is: what do I want to stay curious about?"

This reframed everything about aliveness for me.

I'd been treating my periods of not-knowing like intermissions between the real acts of my life. But what if the not-knowing was the most alive part? What if certainty was just another word for closing off possibilities?

The Permission You Didn't Know You Needed

Car 3 was cathedral-quiet until her three-month-old decided to announce himself. Sharp. Piercing. Immediate. The kind of sound that doesn't just break silence—it shatters it. Heads turned. Eyes darted. The collective flinch of people whose peace had been interrupted.

She bounced him gently, her shoulders curved inward as if she could make herself smaller, whispered apologies to no one in particular. "I'm sorry," she kept saying. To strangers. For having a baby. For existing in public with needs that couldn't be scheduled or contained.

Here's what that baby understood about aliveness that most adults have forgotten: the world adjusts to authentic need, but only if you're willing to express it without editing.

He wasn't performing distress. He was reporting it. Clean, direct, unashamed. Meanwhile, she was doing what we all do: managing other people's comfort at the expense of our own truth.

But watch what happened when she stopped apologizing. Her shoulders dropped. Her voice steadied. By the time she gathered her things to get off the train, something had fundamentally shifted in her posture—not the careful, apologetic stance of someone trying to take up less space, but the natural confidence of someone who'd remembered they had a right to exist fully.

Your needs aren't a negotiation. They're just information about what it means to be alive.

I think about all the ways I've learned to apologize for my own existence. The creative projects I keep "preparing" for, instead of starting, as if preparation were a destination rather than an excuse. The conversations I postpone until I feel ready, as if readiness were something you could purchase instead of something you discover in the doing.

The parts of myself I've convinced myself are too risky to reveal, as if safety came from hiding instead of from being fully seen.

When did we decide that wanting more than what we have was somehow ungrateful? That following our aliveness was selfish? That the ache in our chest for something different was a character flaw instead of a compass?

Rivers Don't Ask Permission

"I'm not a cul-de-sac kind of woman," the chef said, her notebook full of recipes for the café she was planning to open in a Utah canyon town. "I'm a river."

Here's what struck me about her confidence: she wasn't rebelling against stability—she was redefining what stability actually meant to her.

Everyone told her not to leave her stable catering job. But watching her sketch those recipes, I realized she'd figured out something the rest of us missed: security isn't about staying in the same place. It's about trusting your ability to adapt to new places.

The people clinging to jobs that drain them, relationships that diminish them, lives that feel like beautiful prisons? They're not being stable. They're being static.

And there's a world of difference.

"People keep asking me what my backup plan is," she said. "But I think the real question is: what's my backup plan if I don't try this? Spend the next thirty years wondering what might have been?"

She'd flipped the risk equation entirely. Staying wasn't the safe choice—it was the dangerous one.

I think about my own carefully curated life. The color-coded calendar, the five-year plan, the way I've optimized my entire existence around efficiency and predictability. How I've mistaken control for contentment, organization for aliveness.

But here's what she helped me see: we've confused having a plan with having direction.

A plan is static: it assumes you can predict the terrain ahead.

Direction is dynamic: it responds to what you discover along the way.

She wasn't being reckless by leaving her stable job. She was being responsive to information her body had been giving her for months: this isn't working. This is slowly killing something essential in me. The reckless thing would have been ignoring that signal for another decade.

The Audit You've Been Avoiding

Here's what a month of paying attention taught me: aliveness is not self-care—it's self-disruption.

Not the destructive kind that burns everything down without purpose. The productive kind that clears space for something truer to grow.

Stop managing your aliveness and start following it.

This is the challenge those four strangers left me with. Not some gentle suggestion about finding balance, but a direct confrontation with the ways I've been betraying my own existence.

Where are you holding matches too long? What dreams are you keeping in perpetual preparation mode instead of letting them burn their way into reality?

What are you apologizing for that doesn't require an apology? Where have you learned to whisper your needs instead of stating them clearly?

Where are you staying solid when you need to be liquid? What old version of yourself are you clinging to because dissolving feels too uncertain?

What current are you damming that wants to flow? Where are you choosing the safety of the cul-de-sac over the movement of the river?

These aren't comfortable questions. Aliveness isn't comfortable. It's the opposite of the numbing we've perfected, the careful life we've built that looks impressive from the outside but feels hollow from within.

But here's what I know now: the discomfort isn't punishment. It's information. It's your aliveness insisting on being acknowledged, refusing to be managed into submission any longer.

Aliveness is what returns when you stop trying to be good.

The Movement That's Already Happening

The truth is, you're already in motion.

You've always been in motion.

The question isn't whether you're ready to change, it's whether you're brave enough to stop pretending you're not already changing.

Your restlessness isn't a bug in your system; it's a feature. Your dissatisfaction with comfortable mediocrity isn't ingratitude; it's intelligence. Your inability to settle into spaces that feel too small isn't a character flaw; it's integrity.

But here's the part that surprised me about aliveness: it doesn't wait for your permission to start changing you. It's already working in the background, like yeast in dough, creating pressure from the inside out. Those moments when you catch yourself humming a song you used to love as a kid? When you laugh differently at home than you do at work, corporate laugh versus actual laugh? When you hold your breath in meetings, not from stress, but from not wanting to take up space?

That's not dysfunction. That's your aliveness trying to get your attention.

The people I met on those trains weren't special because they were braver than the rest of us. They were just finally listening to signals they'd been receiving for years. The botanist had been driving past those botanical gardens for decades before he finally understood what his body was telling him. The chef's hands had been sketching recipes in margins long before she admitted she needed to follow them somewhere new.

Your aliveness is the match you've been holding, the soup you've been swimming in, the cry you've been apologizing for, the current you've been damming.

It's been waiting this whole time for you to stop managing it and start following it.

Even when it burns. Even when it dissolves everything you thought you knew. Even when it makes noise. Even when it carves a path no one else understands.

Especially then.

The train is already moving. The only question is whether you're brave enough to stop apologizing for being on 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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