As you’ll recall, I foolishly anticipated that I’d probably be done by last month. That didn’t happen. I had hoped for my next update to be the good news of sending my book for self-publishing and delayed writing this in the hopes of doing just that, but . . . I can’t and I feel I owe people who are wondering why I just suddenly became silent an explanation and clarification.

Last month on the 8th, my grandfather passed away. This would now be my second grandfather to do so. So, I’ve now lost both my grandparents on my mother’s side and my grandfather on my father’s side. My mother was a wreck and I went through a mild depression. The death wasn’t unexpected, due to his failing health for years, and he lived a good, long life up to age 94 but it takes awhile to sink in. I had to suddenly do all the religious customs because doing otherwise is seen as disrespectful to my grandfather’s memory and my mother was already in shambles so I didn’t want to add to her grief. My mother was even more of a wreck at the actual funeral. My siblings and I did the best we could to comfort her. To put it mildly, it was emotionally exhausting from beginning to end and there was just no time for me to even put any thought into writing when that was going on. A bit before this happened, a close friend told me that he was going to need surgery to remove half his thyroid because it may have cancer and had grown too big regardless. He had the surgery yesterday and got back to me last night; they still may need to do a second surgery in case the thyroid they removed is found to have cancer in it. Admittedly, I don’t understand the exact process well enough, but I was feeling paranoid that he could also die on me, even if I knew such paranoia was only due to emotional grief likely influenced by my grandfather passing away. Yet another close friend is in dire economic straits and I’m concerned, but I’ll spare the details of that one.

For most of last month, I tried writing, I felt pissed off at myself for failing yet another deadline after failing the one in June, but I just couldn’t. My family took a 10-day trip, which I refused to go along with, and I just felt far too exhausted emotionally and physically to do much of anything. I felt emotional and physical exhaustion because I had been so demanding of myself to finish on time, but it felt like I just collapsed inward from emotional exhaustion due to all these competing factors and my own ire at myself. I had to focus on self-care, because everything was tiring me out. I felt horrible because it seemed at one point like I was making excuses, but the more rational part of my brain shut that thought down by repudiating it with the argument that such a sentiment was mere self-loathing and demanded I focus on my emotional health instead of being stuck with highly flawed reasoning. I had to take a break for those ten days and just watch some anime, listen to music, and read something unrelated to the topics I’d been writing about to calm myself. It was wrong for me to feel self-contempt for doing this, I had to remind myself of that and remember that I’m just a fallible human being who makes mistakes. Therefore, falling short sometimes, even for prolonged periods in this case due to the circumstances, is okay.

I became preoccupied with rather silly quibbles online too. I sometimes don’t know what the most effective way to change people’s minds is and so I try to push back against many Christian and Islamic apologists online. I try to push back against Hindus who express falsehoods, anti-Muslim bigotry, or nonsensical beliefs too. I’m honestly feeling cynical about the future of Hinduism. At this point, they’re adapting and becoming more like the Abrahamic faiths in their views of women’s sexuality, their views on blasphemy (borrowing, of all things, “phobia” of Hinduism which just reeks of desperation for Abrahamic values similar to Islam’s idiotic Islamophobia), and worst of all, proselytizing Ex-Muslims online similar to born-again Christians. I’ve seen many denounce atheism now despite the fact Hinduism literally created atheism from an anti-theist perspective in 600 BCE. The earliest atheists were from Sanatana Dharma including the Vedic branch of Hinduism and yet many Hindus of India reject this entirely in order to be more “respectable” to the cult of death of Abrahamic theology.

Nevertheless, I did return to writing shortly after and I’ve finished yet another chapter but . . . well, I expected to write 15-20 pages and found it to be 63 pages. This means I’m only left with 6 pages to keep to the limit of 828 pages for the physical edition of Amazon’s Self-Publishing Content guidelines. As such, I will regrettably have to remove a large portion of the Preface from the physical version because I need space for the final chapter that needs to be written. I’ve already written the conclusion, I just need to write the penultimate chapter and I should be finished. I’m hoping there’ll be no more time lapsed in finishing. It’s amazing how quickly an entire month’s worth of time is consumed and spent. I decided to take yesterday and today off to keep myself from burnout again. I’ve found that paradoxically giving myself a break each hour has made me more productive. It’s similar to the pomodoro technique, but with more time working. I’ll rest easy for a few days and then work to finish it. I strive onwards for completion of this project, it is the hardest project I’ve ever undertaken in my life, and it feels very satisfying.