this is happening...
from nightmares to awareness, it is time to wake up
Last night was one of the worst nights of sleep I’ve had in a long time.
I went to bed with my stomach in knots, my heart in shatters. The weight of the news settled in my body like a sickness. Our allies abandoned, the much-needed resources denied. Greed-driven tariffs threatening the very hands that feed us—our neighbors, our kin, the land that holds us all. The market plunged, not just in numbers but in meaning, in consequence, in the quiet but deafening reality of how fragile it all is.
I felt it deep—how quickly things unravel when power is placed in the wrong hands. How cruelty and cowardice shape policies. How history warns us, yet here we are again.
And apparently, my psyche couldn’t ignore it either.
I haven’t had nightmares that vivid in years. The devastation unfolding, the suffering that will only intensify, the cold, calculated apathy of those in power—it all played out in my dreams, as if my subconscious was begging me to see, to feel, to not turn away.
Carlos, our pup who passed away four years ago, was there. But he was sick—so sick. His small body trembling, unable to eat. I held him, desperate to help, desperate to save him, but he just kept getting weaker. I knew something unseen was poisoning him, something in the very air. Something subtle yet insidious, working its way into the most vulnerable first.
And then the knowing struck me like lightning—this is coming for all of us.
Was I running? Was I hiding? Was there even a difference? I just wanted to go home. I wanted Carlos to be well. I wanted to wake up.
But when I did, my body was shaking, and my mouth was screaming, “Just stop, just stop, just stop.”
I haven’t woken up like that since my parents died.
This fear, this grief, this devastation—it runs so deep. And I find myself in that strange, suspended space of wanting so badly for it all to disappear, to not be this unjust, this cruel, this real.
And yet.
It is happening.
It reminds me of the bargaining, the pleading I did with God, with my own mind, when my parents died. That desperate hope that I would wake up and find it was all a dream, that none of it had happened, that I would open my eyes and they would still be here. But every morning, reality pressed in. Every hour, every second, I had to digest and grasp—this happened. This is happening.
And now, here we are again.
The only hope I can hold is this: If my own grief, my own reckoning with loss, with injustice, with reality, could be the ground I rose from—maybe this can be, too.
Maybe this is the moment we wake up. Maybe this is where we rise.
Because we do have a choice. We do have a voice. We do have the ability to turn the lights on and see.
Will we fight?
Will we fold?
Will we flee?
Or will we stay asleep, numbed by the fiction that this isn’t our fight?
I do not want to wake up one day to find the fragile fibers of democracy unraveled. I do not want to look back and realize we let this happen—by our silence, by our avoidance, by our unwillingness to see.
They always come for the small, the vulnerable, the ones who are easiest to erase first. And don’t for a second believe that one day, that won’t be you.
I cannot bite my tongue. I cannot pretend. I cannot meet this moment with shallow words when everything screams of its depth.
But I also refuse to meet violence with violence.
I will meet it with love. With every ounce of wit and wisdom, with the depth of my heart, with the fire of truth and the power of presence.
I will stay awake.
And I hope, with all my heart, that you will too.
