The Flinch: Why We're Allergic to Our Own Aliveness

We've trained ourselves to kill joy before it can take its first breath.

I'm standing in my kitchen yesterday morning, waiting for my Ninja to finish its single-serve magic, and suddenly I want to dance to the music playing from my phone. Not a gentle sway—full-body, embarrassing-if-anyone-saw-me dancing. The urge hits like lightning: move your hips, throw your arms up, be ridiculous.

Then it happens.

The flinch.

My body literally recoils from its own impulse.

Chest tightens. Shoulders freeze. I stand there like a responsible adult waiting for my coffee to finish brewing (yes, I know, another coffee revelation…apparently all my profound insights happen between the shower and the Ninja, what can I say) while something alive in me quietly dies.

This isn't about dancing.

This is about the split-second allergic reaction we have to our own aliveness. The way we've trained ourselves to snuff out joy before it can take its first breath.

I started writing this essay about how seriousness is overrated. But three weeks in, I realized I was only scratching the surface. The real question isn't why we choose seriousness. It's why aliveness feels so dangerous that we kill it before it can fully express itself.

The Real-Time Mourning of Our Own Lives

Here's what I've been watching myself do:

• I get an impulse to call an old friend, then immediately think of seventeen reasons why now isn't the right time.

• I want to try painting again, but first I need to research the best brushes, the proper workspace, and the ideal lighting conditions.

• I feel like dancing to the music playing in the coffee shop, but catch myself before my shoulders can move.

Each time, there's this micro-moment of death. Not dramatic, not visible to anyone watching. Just the quiet extinguishing of an impulse that wanted to live. Your body starts to move, then freezes. Your chest tightens. Something that was reaching toward joy suddenly pulls back, like touching a hot stove.

What strikes me about this pattern is how automatic it's become. I'm not consciously choosing seriousness over joy. I'm unconsciously choosing numbness over feeling, prediction over spontaneity, appropriate over alive.

The flinch happens faster than thought. It's a bodily response to the threat of actually inhabiting our own lives.

We've become skilled morticians of our own moments, embalming our impulses before they can become embarrassingly human.

Why Joy Feels Like Betrayal

Last Tuesday, I was walking to my car after a particularly soul-crushing meeting about quarterly projections (the kind where you can feel your life force slowly draining through fluorescent lighting), and something in me just wanted to skip. Not metaphorically—literally skip down the sidewalk like I was seven years old and had just discovered gravity was optional.

The impulse was so clear, so immediate, that I almost followed it.

Then the flinch. My body just... stopped. And then the thoughts came flooding in like a SWAT team responding to a joy emergency.

What if someone sees you? What if a client drives by? What if you look unprofessional? What if people think you've lost your mind? What if you actually have lost your mind and this is the first sign?

I walked normally to my car, each step a small funeral for the part of me that wanted to bounce.

Later that evening, sitting in my living room, I realized why the skipping felt so threatening. It wasn't just about looking childish. It was about the deeper terror of being genuinely happy when I'm supposed to be appropriately concerned about adult things like productivity and professional image and whether I'm saving enough for retirement and why my back hurts when I wake up and if that weird noise my car is making means I need to be adequately worried.

Joy feels like betrayal because we've constructed our entire identity around being appropriately worried about everything. We've made suffering our default state, our proof that we're taking life seriously. To be spontaneously happy feels like evidence that we're not paying proper attention to all the very important things we should be anxious about.

We trust tired people more than joyful ones. We assign more credibility to the friend who's always stressed than the one who seems genuinely content. We've made exhaustion our badge of honor and joy our guilty pleasure, something to be earned through sufficient suffering.

But here's what's really happening: we've confused numbness with wisdom, grinding with purpose, constant preparation with actual living.

When did we decide that the person humming while they work probably isn't taking their job seriously enough?

The Terror of Completeness

But the betrayal goes even deeper than our relationship with suffering. Here's the insight that's been stalking me for weeks, showing up in my dreams and my shower thoughts and that weird space between sleep and waking: we're not just afraid of failure. We're afraid of the moment when we might actually feel content with our lives as they are right now.

The flinch isn't just about looking foolish.

It's about the deeper terror of discovering that you don't need to earn your joy. That you don't need to wait for permission from some imaginary authority figure to be fully present to your own life.

What if you're already enough? What if your life is already happening, right now, in this moment between the big achievements and the major milestones? What if aliveness isn't something you have to deserve through good behavior and sufficient productivity?

This is the real threat that makes us flinch: the possibility that we could stop preparing for life and start living it.

Because if you're already complete, if this moment is already enough, then what's the point of all that striving? What's the point of the careful planning and the strategic networking and the optimization apps and the five-year plans written in the margins of your anxiety?

If joy is available right now, without prerequisites, then what the hell have we been doing all this time?

The Practice of Not Flinching

I've been experimenting with catching the flinch in real time. Not trying to overcome it or push through it like some kind of emotional CrossFit, but just noticing it. The moment when my body wants to move and my mind slams on the brakes. The impulse to sing that gets immediately edited by my internal committee of appropriateness. The urge to call someone just because I miss them that gets postponed until I have a "better reason" that won't make me seem needy.

Yesterday, I felt like skipping again. Same sidewalk, same post-meeting energy looking for somewhere to go. But this time, I caught the flinch before it could kill the moment. I didn't analyze whether skipping was appropriate or professional or socially acceptable. I didn't run the impulse through my mental committee for approval.

I just... skipped.

For maybe ten steps, I was seven years old again. Fully present to the simple, ridiculous joy of moving my body in a way that felt good. No purpose except aliveness itself. No goal except the next bounce.

A woman walking toward me smiled. Not the polite smile you give to someone you're trying to avoid, but a real smile. The kind that recognizes something true in another person.

"Good day?" she asked as we passed.

"Yeah," I said, and meant it in a way I haven't meant anything in months.

This is what I'm learning about the flinch: it's not protecting us from embarrassment. It's protecting us from aliveness. From the radical possibility that we might actually enjoy being human.

That we might actually be allowed to enjoy being human.

The Invitation You've Been Avoiding

I keep thinking about that moment of almost-skipping. How close I came to choosing appropriate over alive. How many moments like that I've let die in the name of being a serious adult.

Your impulses aren't random. They're not childish or inappropriate or evidence that you're not taking life seriously enough. They're information about what it means to be alive in a body, in this moment, in this particular life that belongs to you and no one else.

The flinch is just fear dressed up as wisdom and maturity. It's the part of you that would rather be safely numb than dangerously alive.

But here's what I'm starting to understand: the cure for the flinch isn't more self-discipline or better boundaries or finding the right balance between responsible and spontaneous. The cure is simply noticing it. Seeing it for what it is—a habitual recoil from your own aliveness.

When you catch yourself wanting to dance, dance. When you want to sing, sing. When you want to call someone just because you miss them, call them. When you want to skip down the sidewalk, skip.

Not because it's optimized or productive or will make you a better person. But because you're alive right now, and being alive is not a problem to be solved.

It's an experience to be lived.

The sunlight is still streaming through your curtains. Your body still knows how to move. Your voice still knows how to sing.

The only question is whether you'll trust yourself enough to stop flinching and start living.

Even if someone sees you.

Especially if someone sees you.

A Quick Thank You

I wanted to extend my gratitude to two authors for recently recommending Life As I See It to their audiences. The first is

Old Man Talks

.

Old Man Talks shares wisdom on living with more balance and less burnout, more depth and less noise.

His most recent piece digs into why a single moment of real presence can blow away hours of mindless drifting, why we sometimes choose familiar pain over the terrifying possibility of joy, and why we need to stop treating ourselves like fixer-uppers and start loving the beautifully unfinished parts that make us human. I hope you enjoy!

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The second author I want to thank is

Debbie Dickey

. In Sensitive Soul Letters, Debbie Dickey writes letters to sensitive souls who are ready to put themselves first. Her latest piece tackles something most people won't talk about: energetic overload—why you wake up tired even after sleeping, why small social interactions leave you drained for days, and why traditional rest doesn't work when your nervous system never stops scanning for danger.

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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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