The “white rabbit” comes for us all. All over TikTok, people are sharing videos of before and afters in their lives, accompanied by the text along the lines of, “The white rabbit got me.” The videos are set to the same haunting sound of a clock ticking. According to Google Trends, search for the cryptic term spiked rapidly in late November. The “white rabbit” essentially refers to a terrible, or at the very least life-changing, event. People post videos from before that event occurred, then after the “white rabbit got them.” The image of the white rabbit likely goes back to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” the 1865 children’s novel by Lewis Carroll. The book contains a character called the White Rabbit who is obsessed with time. He holds a pocket watch and taps tap on its glass to convey the fact that we’re always running out of time. Once Alice follows him down a rabbit hole, she ends up in a series of life-altering situations. The trend is prompting people to open up about moments from which there was no coming back from. In one TikTok, Kate Johnson, 42, shared a photo of her daughter, Charlotte, smiling while dining out with her next to a clip of Charlotte hugging her brother’s hand from a hospital bed. “The night before the white rabbit got us,” Johnson wrote above the video. “And we will never take a moment for granted again,” she added in the caption. In an interview with TODAY.com, Johnson explained the true meaning of her video and said it was her family’s “‘white rabbit’ event.” “Charlotte suffered a life threatening injury from a jet ski on Labor Day weekend of 2024. She slipped off the back and suffered internal organ damage from the force of the jet’s propulsion,” she said. “Charlotte nearly bled out in the lake and was rushed to the local ER where they life flighted her to a trauma hospital in Minneapolis.” After receiving “four life-saving surgeries,” Johnson says her daughter is now doing better, and she says she took that picture of Charlotte at the restaurant just one day before the accident happened. “Never in a million years would I have thought that she would not be starting her senior year of high school or worse yet, that could have been my last meal with her,” Johnson says. “Our eyes were opened on just how truly fragile life is, especially our daughter’s eyes,” she adds. “She is most definitely viewing life through a whole new lens which even after all she went through, she is truly grateful for.” TikTok user @hellomrswalker has been praising social media users for taking part in the “white rabbit” trend. “Honestly, it just makes me feel a little bit more grateful. It helps me not to complain because there’s some people that’s dealing with really, really, heavy things and you really never know what a person goes through,” she said in one of her videos explaining the trend. Johnson also agrees that there’s a lesson to be learned from the trend. “Life is truly unpredictable. Never take a moment for granted,” she says. “Your life can be going so great and then in an instant, a curve ball is thrown your way that makes you find the strength to pull through it.” This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY: CDC No Longer Recommends 6 Vaccines for All Kids. Will Insurance Still Cover Them? Savannah Guthrie Can’t Talk After Her Surgery — Here’s How She’s Communicating with Her Kids Fun Science Experiments to Help Kids Beat the Winter Blues This story uses functionality that may not work in our app. Click here to open the story in your web browser. ...read more read less