It is dark and hard and scary. It feels like something is sitting on your chest. Like you might cry but there isn’t anything there. That somehow your body is stopping you. It knows.

It knows better than you do that something is wrong. Something is fundamentally and completely upside down.

That you’ve fallen down some twisted rabbit hole – not one with scary queens and stoned men in big hats and painted red roses – but one that is dark and unwieldy. One filled with things coming at you that you can’t control. That when you wake up in the morning some new shoe will have dropped.

Some new Awful will be there.

A diagnosis. A job loss. A medical bill. A scared kid. A sick partner.

That’s what the world feels like right now. But I’m not in the rabbit hole. Well, not the same rabbit hole.

I’m still here – figuring it out – though some lights have come on and it’s not nearly so overwhelming. But there’s this window into this other hole.

And it’s dark. And so scary. And I can watch and support and pray and hope that things get better.

And watch and pray and hope that it stays there. On the outside. Through the looking glass.

There’s just not enough room for more scary in here with me.

How do you balance that? How do I? How do I sit in my bubble and protect these two people I have fought for so very hard and still help the people in the window? It’s foggy and it’s hard to see and I have to go to it to see more and to try to understand and then it’s heavy again.

And I feel like I’m doing *something* but really it’s nothing much at all.

It’s scary there and here it is warmer and safer and there are no viruses here and no police.

I wondered about the white rabbit. I don’t remember Alice and her story very well at all. I was afraid of the movie so I never read the book. A casual google search led me to an article that said that there is a group of hateful people that have stolen the white rabbit and made it their own.

I always felt like the rabbit was the real bad guy in the story. To lead Alice down a dark and dangerous path and all of the rest of us with it.

If only it were as simple as waking up.