Dream like Breathing

​I’ve been living in my lizard brain.

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Do I have enough cat litter, enough Ragu? Will I keep my job? Is that tickle in my throat just allergies or the precursor to doom? Will the morning news ever stop making me curl into a ball? Survival. That’s it. Run and hide from the bad things and hold on desperately to the things I need to stay alive. I haven’t bitten or hissed at anyone yet, but if there were someone standing between me and the last bag of popcorn, I wouldn’t put it past me.

So, if you were looking for advice, move on to another blog. I’m just trying to figure out how to pry my greedy little fingers off of my extra rolls of toilet paper (I have enough to last me until January 15th 2021 – I counted) and give it to someone who needs it more.

There are a lot of reasons to be afraid; I bet I’ve considered approximately 75% of them (or maybe I haven’t , maybe this is just the beginning of the end, maybe I’ve been living in blissful ignorance of the YA dystopian novel-esque changes that are about to come, maybe I’ll get sick and grow horns from the latest mutation of the virus, maybe I’ll start fearing that my cats are staging a coup, maybe, maybe, maybe . . . I think you get the point.) The jist of it is, I’m scared.

But right now, however, right this very moment, I’m trying something different. I’ve beaten back the urge to count how many packages of Ramen I have and am trying to create something. With the writing of this blog, with the commitment my friend Gigi and I have made to each other to write each day at 6:00pm, I’m trying to remember that I’m a dreamer.

I need dreams like I need breathing. At some point, as we either emerge from the shock of what’s happening, or move into a new way of being, I’ll need to imagine a different life for myself – one with beauty and hope. I have to. I know that if I give into my lizard brain, that’ll be the end of the Cherie I strive to be. I’ll become a hunted reptile wearing a human-suit. And I want to be her, the Cherie I’ve worked so hard at. I’ll be damned if I give her up now.

Like breathing, like eating, I need to open-up space for beauty in this new reality. I need to re-purpose the blood currently flooding into my lizard brain towards the part of me that conceives of joy, or I’ll break. I just will. In sum: I need to slither out from under my dark, cool rock where I’ve been living in the past couple weeks and warm myself in the demanding heat of creation.

Will you join me in taking your dream out of isolation and exposing it to this brave new world? I don’t want to do it by myself. I will, because I think it’s either that or cleaning my bathroom, but I’d rather not do it alone.

For what dream are you willing to leave your shelter?