My Brain Saved My Life — Now It Tortures Me Twice a Week

What my nervous system charges for miracles

The migraine announced itself at 3 AM like a debt collector who doesn't care about your sleep schedule.

I knew immediately it would be a two-day affair.

Your brain learns to recognize its own particular forms of malfunction. By sunrise, I was lying in my bedroom with blackout curtains drawn, a cold compress over my eyes, practicing the kind of breathing that's less about relaxation and more about just getting through the next ten seconds.

This is what aliveness looks like when your nervous system decides to bill you for staying alive.

The Price of Surviving What Should Have Killed You

Here's what no one tells you about surviving a traumatic brain injury: your brain saves your life, then spends the rest of your existence making you pay for it.

The accident rewired me. Not metaphorically. My neural pathways that died in the collision forced my brain to MacGyver new routes around the damage. Brilliant, life-saving engineering that happened automatically while I was unconscious.

The migraines are what that engineering costs.

Twice a week, sometimes more, my rewired nervous system short-circuits and floods my skull with pain that makes thinking impossible, movement unbearable, existence itself feel like punishment.

I call it the survival tax.

The ongoing fee for the privilege of being alive in a brain that reconstructed itself without blueprints. Your body saved you, so now it gets to torture you. Indefinitely. No appeals process.

The wellness world wants to make this meaningful. They want me to find the gift in the pain, the lesson in the suffering. The hidden wisdom in lying in a dark room wanting to escape my own consciousness but being unable to leave.

Sometimes pain isn't teaching you anything except that consciousness doesn't come with an off switch.

The Prison That Forces You Present

During a migraine, I am intensely, unbearably present.

Not the gentle, chosen presence I wrote about with the animal outside my tent. This is involuntary presence. Consciousness with no escape hatch, unable to think about anything except nerve endings screaming.

Every pulse of blood through my skull requires my full attention. Light feels like violence against my optical nerves. Sound physically assaults the inside of my skull.

You can't breathe your way out or find a more comfortable position. You can't meditate past it or analyze it into submission. You just lie there, completely present to pain, learning exactly how many ways consciousness can hurt.

I am never more alive than when I most want to die.

That's not poetry. That's the brutal mathematics of a nervous system that won't quit functioning, even when functioning feels like torture.

What Your Brain Charges for Miracles

The intelligence that kept me breathing when everything went dark now floods my skull with pain twice a week.

This isn't betrayal, exactly. My brain isn't punishing me for surviving. But it feels like betrayal. It feels like being sentenced to twice-weekly suffering for the crime of not dying when I was supposed to.

Chronic pain strips away every comfortable story you tell yourself about your body. That it's on your side. That it wants what's best for you. That consciousness is fundamentally a gift rather than sometimes a burden.

Your body becomes both your most intimate companion and your most reliable torturer.

The thing that saved your life and the thing that makes you question whether life is worth living.

Aliveness at Its Most Stripped Down

The migraine teaches me things about aliveness that would never make it onto a vision board.

That being intensely present can feel like punishment. That embodiment sometimes means being trapped in tissue that's actively hurting you. That consciousness doesn't discriminate between experiences you want and experiences that make you want to claw your way out of your own skull.

Pain is proof of life, but it's the kind of proof nobody wants to examine too closely.

When I'm lying in that dark room, breathing through waves of neural static, I'm not having a spiritual experience. I'm not connecting with some deeper truth about existence.

I'm just alive in the most basic, undeniable way. Neurons firing, blood flowing, consciousness continuing whether I want it to or not.

This is aliveness at its most stripped-down: the simple, brutal fact of being awake in a body that won't let you escape into unconsciousness.

No transcendence. No transformation. No hidden wisdom.

Just the tax bill for surviving what should have killed you.

The Teacher You Never Asked For

If my migraines teach me anything, it's that aliveness includes experiences you would never choose but cannot avoid.

They teach me that my nervous system has its own agenda that doesn't consult with my preferences. That consciousness can be simultaneously the most precious and most unbearable aspect of existence. That being alive means being available to the full spectrum of what nervous systems can produce.

Including the frequencies that feel like punishment.

The migraine strips away everything except the basic fact of being here. Not here in some beautiful, transcendent sense. Just here in the most fundamental way: aware, breathing, unable to opt out of feeling.

When it finally lifts (and it always does, though never on any timeline I can predict), I'm grateful not for the lesson or the wisdom or the deeper connection to my mortality.

I'm grateful for the simple, ordinary miracle of consciousness that doesn't hurt.

For neural networks that fire without flooding my skull with pain. For the privilege of being present to my life without that presence feeling like torture.

For the brief reprieve before the next tax bill arrives.

The Compound Interest on Almost Dying

This is what nobody tells you about almost dying: survival has interest rates.

Your body performs miracles to keep you alive, then charges compound interest on those miracles for the rest of your existence. The neural rewiring that saved me comes with a twice-weekly reminder of exactly what it cost my nervous system to MacGyver its way around catastrophic damage.

I'm alive because my brain was brilliant enough to improvise new pathways in real time. I suffer because those improvised pathways sometimes short-circuit in ways that turn consciousness into torture.

The aliveness that saved me is the same aliveness that sentences me. The consciousness that refused to quit is the same consciousness that won't let me escape when it turns against itself.

This isn't a story about finding meaning in suffering or discovering hidden gifts in chronic pain.

This is a story about what it actually costs to be alive in a nervous system that saved your life and now makes you pay for it. Twice a week. Without appeal. Until the final bill comes due.

The debt collector doesn't care about your sleep schedule. It doesn't negotiate payment plans or accept partial installments. It just shows up at 3 AM, every few days, to collect what survival costs.

The survival was worth it.

Even with the interest rates.

Even when the collector never stops coming.

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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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