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I panic a lot. I panic so much that my first physical response to any touch is fear. I panic so much that, every morning since December 2023, I bounce out of my bed with tremors in my hands, scouring through my call log and messaging apps to see if there’s “news.”

I started working on my novel in late 2024. The idea had arrived in different fragments across seven years: first, from a dream in 2019, then as a short story idea; and then, later on, as something expansive, so expansive it broke into two novels, both of them somehow different from each other.

I have fallen into what I like to call a “depression inside a depression” a lot of times while writing this novel. At a point (till now), I took a break, while actively conducting research for this novel. Certainly, the subject matter is heavy, but this (or my writing in general) was (is) not the source of my hollowing despair.

You see, I was growing into an anxious wreck because I worried I would die before I finished writing it. I felt it so dangerously close (I still do), not just in time, but in comprehension that it can be me, too. And so I began to sprint through sentences, until one evening in my study, deep in this rigorous write-a-thon, I closed the document, and promised to return back when I got clarity on my mental health, even if it meant putting everything on hold. My short stories and personal essays were not pulled out from this issue; however, I treated them with milder panic, because they could take weeks, or months, or even one year, if I prioritized discipline. But even this doesn’t make sense because I’ve had shorter works stay with me for years.

I do not believe in time as a social construct. The human experience is an endless freewheeling, and how utterly miserable it is to stifle oneself into the monotonous spaces of society. Then again, my fear of time is rather intrinsic than an extrinsic illusion from society. I have confronted mortality in many ways: from reading, from experiencing loved ones almost slip away (or actually slip away) from me, from wading through dangerous illnesses with — what my mother would describe as — “strange names.” I know that death can come at any time. I strongly believe that death can come at any time. It really can be me.

And I am not scared of that transition. I am scared, though, of having not written so much. What, really, is “so much”? I swear, I do not know. This writing is bigger than me. For every time I have tried to unalive myself, I have thought very deeply about my writing (and to be fair, I do not think of anything else, or anyone else, except my parents). It seems as though (and I say this at the risk of sounding grandiose) there’s something I have to say in a way that no one has said yet. And I don’t know what that is.

My friend, J.A.O., tells me that I have gone so deep into the work – so completely – that everything else has become secondary. When asked about my future, I dream a literary future (throngs of published novels, professor-ing in writing, and most importantly, sharing human solace with my readers through these stories), or nothing at all. I have never been consumed by the thought of a life partner, or immense wealth, or whatnot. This is how much I love this craft and feel very married to this craft.

And so I panic because I am acutely aware of my calling to this vocation, but in the grasping of this vocation is also the cognition that anything can happen at any time. And because anything can happen at any time, I have to write all that I can, to hound and ponder over it all, until all is done. But can we write all that we can? How much can we write about this vast human condition? Our lives are so small, so singular, yet, in conjuring or documenting the human condition, we encounter the infinite.

What can I do in my small life? With my years on earth, how much can I possibly write? How can I try to reach the depths of another human being with my stories, because this is the major point of it all? This makes me so furious and foiled, because why do I have to do all of this? Like I said earlier, this is beyond me; it’s bigger, so engulfing, and left for me, I will genuinely opt out of life’s affairs.

There’s something important for me to separate here, even if it feels impossible right now: the value of my work is not dependent on total completion, even if my mind is currently treating it as if it is. It is for this reason I decided I would slow myself and pause my major writing projects; it is for this reason I decided that even if my life ends today, what matters is that I wrote, and that I enjoyed the journey, and that it was true to me. Nothing else.