Is anyone else having vivid dreams about the end of the world, or is it just me?

An affirmation of wherever uncomfortable place you are at.

Holding It All: On Dreams, Pills, and the Weight of Feeling

Last night, I had one of those full-color dreams. The kind where people from the past - long gone - come back to life to stand beside you in your current fear. Both my recently deceased grandparents were alive and well and doing things like helping out with meal prep. In this dream, war had broken out. It was chaos, something like a zombie apocalypse, the kind you'd see in movies like 28 Days Later. Grocery stores were gone. Water was no longer there. In one moment, we were in a home with the oven, filled with chicken parm, still cooking. I kept asking myself: How will we eat? How will we drink water? How will we get our meds for Margaret’s Cystic Fibrosis? And most terrifying of all: I was watching Margaret, the person I love most in this world, begin to starve. In the dream, we were in Gaza, but also not. It was a surreal, composite terror. And when I woke, the weight of it hadn't left my body as I did my morning ritual of meds for the day for Margaret.

Since the pandemic, I've often wished for a strange cure, a magic, tasteless, painless pink pill (maybe magenta, because that color brings Margaret joy) to tuck away with our passports and baby teeth in the safe in our Oakland home. This pill would be something we could take in the moment when everything in society breaks. Something that would make it all more bearable, or transport us out. A just-in-case kind of hope in pill form, that would also come with the release of the end of the tension in our muscles. Like if things got dire, we could just give up, and all the pain would go away.

The first time I wished for this sort of death, a calm sleep that we just didn’t wake up from, was when the fires were burning all around us in the bay. When we slept on the tile floor in our kitchen on a mat with our newborn child, trying to let the cold of the floor seep into our veins and regulate us into sanity.

This morning, with the dream still echoing in my chest, I told my mother-in-law about it. She's not always the person I go to for comfort, her offerings often land like clunky platitudes: "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger," or "That's what the Lord wanted." But today, she said something different. Something that, oddly, grounded me. "Carissa," she said, "you have lots of things to worry about that have a higher probability of happening."

It wasn't dismissive. It was clarifying. And she was also right.

I keep trying to parse what really stayed with me from the dream. It's not just the imagined war. Or even the strange closeness I suddenly felt to my mother-in-law. It’s the confusion I live in every day: I don’t always know what I’m supposed to feel anymore.

In previous generations, we were taught to feel certain things at certain times. Emotions were like reflexes: You fall, you feel pain. A loved one gets sick, you cry. But what if you fall and feel joy instead? Or hear about a tragedy and feel nothing? Or scroll past a disaster on your phone and feel... hungry?

In therapy, I've been dismantling the tyranny of "should" feelings for over fifteen years. I tell myself: there are no wrong emotions. There is just emotion. Look at it. Let it pass. Honor it without judgment. And mostly, I can do this. I have 42 years of data points that suggest I will make it through whatever thing that I am feeling is just too much in the moment.

But lately, even that practice feels slippery. I no longer know what I want to feel. Or what I’m supposed to feel. The world is loud with suffering and louder with opinions about how we should respond. Grieve this. Donate here. Don’t celebrate that. Act now. Speak louder. Do more.

And yet…

I also want to laugh with my daughter. I want to feel sun on my face. I want to eat something delicious without guilt. I want to jump on my trampoline and scream joy into the sky while knowing that other people are living out the horror of my dreams.

This year, I spent months looking away. From the news. From other people's pain. From my own. Not because I didn't care, but because I couldn't hold it all. And somehow, I told myself, maybe my job was to locate joy - not as escape, but as resistance. To taste it fully. To remember that delight is part of being alive, too.

So, here I am. Holding the grief and the joy. The dream and the daylight. The judgment and the forgiveness. The fear of war and the pink Benadryl (a symbol of relief from ending it all) of my imagination. And maybe, just maybe, that’s the only way forward: to make space for it all and still keep going.

Even when we don’t know what we’re supposed to feel.

Sending love, Carissa

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PS I’m doing a series of events with Happy Women Dinners in the Fall— one in the SF Bay Area.

To reserve a seat, email jill@happywomendinners.com. The ticket ($150) includes a signed copy of Breathe Through It, dinner/brunch, a Q&A with me and Tara Schuster, and some hang time with other women.

SAN FRANCISCO: Sunday, September 7th, 12pm-2:00pm (private home in the Oakland Hills)

PPS I will be in NY for Shoppe Object next week - come say hi if you feel up for it. I will be giving long hugs…