There’s a trend circulating online right now about “The White Rabbit.” Structurally, it’s simple: a happy moment, followed by a rupture. A before-and-after that marks the exact point where life split without warning. But, beneath the edits and sound clips, the white rabbit is not a trend at all. It’s a name. A collective attempt to articulate something humans have always experienced but rarely been given language for.
The white rabbit comes from Alice in Wonderland — the time-obsessed figure always rushing, always late, always pulling Alice into a reality she didn’t ask to enter. In the trend, the rabbit symbolizes sudden, often painful turning points. Moments that arrive loudly or quietly, expected or not, but always with consequence. Moments that disrupt normalcy and rearrange the shape of a life. Over 180,000 videos have used the trend, not because people want to dramatize pain, but because it resonates with a shared truth: most of us can point to a moment where everything became “after.”
For me, the rabbit arrived in October.
And for me, life didn’t subtly shift. It exploded.
I lost Jimmy.
It was a death so unprepared for, so sudden, that it felt cinematic in the worst possible way — the kind of moment where you can mark the exact second your nervous system fractures. There was no easing into grief, no gradual realization. Just a loud, clear, undeniable before and after.
Once he was gone, the world became unreal.
It felt like walking through my own life with the wrong prescription lenses. Things still looked familiar — the same rooms, the same streets, the same routines — but they were no longer experienced the same way. I was present, technically, but not fully inside the moment. Time kept moving forward, but I didn’t. And you don’t. You can’t. You don’t let go — not in the way people like to suggest.
The loss didn’t come alone.
Alongside Jimmy, I lost friends — the ones who disappeared, the ones who couldn’t show up, the ones who revealed the limits of their care when things became inconvenient or uncomfortable. I lost a sense of stability I didn’t even realize I relied on. My health collapsed in ways I wasn’t prepared for, and it has been terrible ever since. Everything seemed to fall at once, as if grief triggered a domino effect through my body, my relationships, and my sense of safety.
Things have been bad before. Hard before. Painful before. But never like this.
That’s what the white rabbit really represents: the moment when your baseline changes. When your understanding of what’s survivable shifts. When the illusion of safety — the quiet belief that “this won’t happen to me” — is stripped away. A core part of the rabbit’s symbolism is time. Or more accurately, our misplaced faith in it. We’re told that time heals. That “in time” things will soften, make sense, return to some recognizable version of normal. But time doesn’t undo death. It doesn’t bring people back. It doesn’t erase the moment your life was permanently altered.
Time doesn’t heal — people adapt.
Adaptation, however, doesn’t mean forgetting. It doesn’t mean moving on. It doesn’t mean the rabbit loosens its grip. In many ways, the rabbit shrinks us — our sense of certainty, our emotional range, our tolerance for triviality. Even when life appears fine from the outside, the fact remains: something happened. Something changed. And no amount of forward motion negates that truth.
What’s striking about the white rabbit trend is how universal it feels across generations. This isn’t a Gen Z phenomenon or a social media invention. Humans have always lived through rupture — war, illness, loss, betrayal, awakening. What’s different now is that we’re naming it together. We’re recognizing that beneath wildly different lives, the same existential disorientation exists.
Different rabbits. Same pull.
So what do we do once we recognize it? Once we admit the rabbit got us, that time slipped through our fingers, that our minds wander forward because staying fully here feels unbearable?
The uncomfortable answer is: there is no fix.
There’s no going back. No version of life where Jimmy exists again. No rewind that restores the friends who left or the health that collapsed. The rabbit doesn’t disappear just because days pass. It lives on in the body, in the bones, in the nervous system. It becomes something we carry rather than something we overcome. What is possible, though, is inquiry. Attention. A slow, unglamorous probing of what this rupture has changed — not to make meaning where none exists, but to understand the new terrain we’re standing on.
This isn’t about romanticizing pain or assigning purpose to loss. It’s about acknowledging transformation without pretending it was chosen. The white rabbit doesn’t mean life is over. It means life is altered. And alteration is not the same as destruction — even when it feels like it at first. Over time — not because time is magical, but because humans are resilient in ways we don’t ask to be — we learn how to live with what happened without letting it consume everything that follows.
So yes. The white rabbit got me.
And that doesn’t mean I’m fine. It doesn’t mean I’ve healed. It doesn’t mean I’ve moved on.
It means I’m living in the after — learning, slowly and imperfectly, how to exist in a world that no longer feels safe in the way it once did.
And maybe that’s all any of us are doing.
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