"I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning,” said Alice a little timidly; “but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.

~ Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that I am not the same person who went home a month ago. The things that bothered me before seemed so trivial in comparison to what confronted me now, not because they were trivial in any way, but I realized how trivial they can be in the grander scheme of things. In one case thankfully it did not lead to the worst and in another I can only pray that it doesn't. While I cannot speak of the second as it is not my own matter, the first was a health scare. A rather minor thing as it turned out but initially when I was really poorly and my imagination went a bit wild as it is wont to do, as you my dear reader knows better than anyone else, it struck me how very insignificant, even petty, everything else can seem if one's body doesn't feel right. I thought about how people with severe or chronic health problems might be forced to live life and nothing I was suffering in imagination or in reality could be even close to that experience.

I guess I was also made very vulnerable during this period, exposed to fears and insecurities that were lying dormant in me for a very long time. A bit like a person whose world turned upside down in an earthquake a very long time ago might feel when the earth suddenly seems to shake with tremors. Though one had almost forgotten the shock and horror of that distant time, it all comes tumbling back. But more than that what comes back is a sense of unstable ground, a sense of a shaky foothold in the world, a sense that one is not destined to let go of one's guard or be at ease, a sense that one must forever be conscious of one's place… or one will be reminded yet again.