Happy New Year, fellows! At least, I hope that this new year will indeed be a little happier than the last, for all of us just hanging on.

I'm well aware that it has been almost 1 year since I last posted. Unfortunately I don't expect to become more active any time soon. Last year I came down with a Mystery Illness, just two weeks after posting The King's Eyes. I've seen about half a dozen doctors and they don't know what's going on. I think it's so ironic that my body broke down just when I had decided to take a break from writing and focus more on health and life. I suppose by that time it had been just a little too late.

In my last blog post, I remember saying that I was very burnt out, and that's the reason I've decided to take a step back from producing more original writing. Now that I look back on that time, I think what I was feeling was my body slowly slipping into a state that made me vulnerable to the Mystery Illness. But I had misinterpreted it as a mix of stress, anxiety, and a bit of depression. 2022 all the way to early 2024 had been a rollercoaster ride of instability in my home and family life, and very dear relatives passing away suddenly. Then in January 2024, when we learned that one of my cousins had a brain tumour, I felt so so down about everything. The sluggishness and lethargy and unenthusiasm I felt about my life seemed to stem from all of these events. And perhaps it did. But I also think that I had been terribly negligent of my physical health since I started working from home in 2020, and perhaps that, more than anything, was what was contributing to my overall unwellness the most.

The rest of the year wasn't much better, sadly. The cousin passed away within two months. My grandfather also passed away in September. My own illness is quite relentless, making even my comfortable software development job feel like a chore. Every day I'm afraid I'm never going to get better, or that this is a very serious disease, or I will forever be in medical limbo. Or perhaps all three.

I don't want to be a downer at the beginning of the year, but I think it's safe to say that so many of us are greeting 2025 with something like a worn-down, desperate hope. It's one of those times when denying the challenges I'm facing just feels like toxic positivity.

So where does that leave me? Well, I'm focusing this year on getting my health back on track. I don't know how long that's going to take. Maybe another full year. Maybe more. I don't know. One sliver of hope I've been hanging onto is that despite the ineffectiveness of the medical community, my symptoms seem to be improving on their own, albeit very slowly. Thank God for that -- and I mean that, because there's really no one else to thank.

In the meantime, whenever I feel well enough to channel my creative juices somewhere, I've resorted to going back to my roots: writing fanfiction. I'm hoping it will help exercise my creative muscles so they don't go stale, give me a way to spend time doing something I love in the midst of this dreariness, all the while not being very demanding or mentally exhausting.

I can't make any promises, but if I do beat the Mystery Illness, the first thing I'm planning to do is to rewrite The King's Eyes. I think I was rushing to release it because I was feeling my body start to give out, but the quality of the writing could be better. It also didn't help that I used ProWriting Aid to do the copyedits, which might be why so many of my sentences feel stilted. Alas.

Well, that's all for now. I hope you're all doing well. And if not, I wish you strength and hope in your own journey of getting better.