I personally have always had a hard time with the celebration and the Holiday of Purim. To start, I never enjoyed going around all over town delivering Mishloach Manos (baskets of food to others) the drinking, or the drunk drivers on the road. The story itself is a violent one. A man kills his wife because she refuses to put on a show for his friends. He selects a new wife who has no choice but to marry him. One group of people blame another group for the problems of the time, leading to a civil war, where the people kill each other in order to stay alive.

As many of you know on June 25th, 2017 I got injured and have been suffering from PCS (post-concussion syndrome). As I struggled to figure out how to take care of the symptoms, I finally took two months to heal, reflect, retreat in order to come up with a plan for going forward.

“There is a knife sticking out of my heart and a constant trickle of blood comes out… every so often the knife gets moved, twisted and the blood gushes out. I do my job at work, take care of what I need to at home, do the shopping and the errands and marvel that no one sees that I am leaving a trail of blood behind me.” This is what a woman at a support group meeting said in explaining what it felt like when her child didn’t let her know that she had given birth.

It has been 9 months since I was hit in the head through no fault of my own. I have been suffering from Post Concussion Syndrome. My symptoms creep up often and I have no control over when they come, how long or how often they occur. What this situation has birthed is a new me, someone who like our ancestors has picked up and moved into a new unknown land.