Apsara's Interlude #1: A Break Between Acts
A Message Rather Than A Regularly Scheduled Musing
A Message From A Muse
Something That’s Been On My Spirit
First, I’ll start us off with a lesson in Vedic astrology and numerology
So many numbers are considered significant predictors of you—your motivations, personality, life path—from your ruling number to your destiny number to your name number. I’m still new to this field of study, but as a visual person, I’ve always been fascinated by numbers and the patterns they form in my mind.
One, three, seven, twelve, fourteen, seventeen, twenty-six, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty-two.
In my mind’s eye, these numbers connect in fractal shapes that mean nothing as a whole, just a random assortment of ages and years. But when you stop to reflect on the life lived at these ages, certain stories seem to recur.
Numerologically, 2025, when broken down as 2+0+2+5=9, has been a “nine” year, bringing themes of completion, transformation, and letting go.
On a personal level, 2025 marked my 28th year, 2+8=10, and 1+0=1, a “one” year: the year of new beginnings, individuality, leadership, and planting seeds for the future.
At the beginning of 2025, I decided to change my name and took steps to make it legally binding.
2025 was the year I stopped running—from my body, my emotions, my friends, my family, my self-destructive tendencies. I stopped running from myself.
In May, I lost my last remaining grandparent, and as she was dying, I stayed thousands of miles away, unable to say goodbye because a life demanded to be lived here, in this country that has broken my heart more times than I care to count.
I spent the remainder of the year fulfilling a childhood dream of becoming breathtakingly inhumane. I let people love me in whatever way they could, took what they offered, and decided whether it was enough. I demanded to treat myself with a seriousness I had never been afforded, and I learned that too often people—myself included—take what I say with a grain of salt when it is owed an ocean.
This year, I was brave. So unbelievably courageous.
But 2025 wasn’t just a year of ones.
It marked three years of treatment for my autoimmune disorder—now, I’m a handful of surgeries from being free of chronic pain.
It marked seven years since my former fiancé and I broke up.
It marked ten years since I graduated high school by the skin of my teeth.
It marked thirteen years since the death of my mother’s eldest sister, whose passing became the catalyst for my choosing to live despite worsening suicidal ideation.
It marked twenty-eight years of life—four whole cycles of seven, the number of deep thinking, intuition, spirituality and the relentless search for truth.
So why am I telling you this?
I don’t know. I’ve just been thinking about numbers lately.
They seem to follow me everywhere. Or maybe my mind seeks them out while they mind their own business.
I keep reading their fractal patterns like tea leaves at the bottom of my cup, hoping to glean from their arches and intersections some semblance of what it’s all for.
My mother tells me I think too much. What did she expect from a child raised on Animal Planet and encyclopedias as recreational reading?
She says that because I was born on the seventeenth, my destiny number is eight: the number of balance, of infinities, of Shani—Saturn’s Vedic counterpart, the Lord of Time and Karma. She says nothing good comes from being trapped in my head, that I must trust in God’s plan, because Number Eights are fated to live complicated lives that get better with age.
Begrudgingly, I admit she’s right. My mother has been right about a lot.
Not about being stuck in my head; I’m pretty fascinated by the worlds behind my eyes and between my ears—they’re marvellously terrifying places.
No, she’s right that my life has gotten markedly better the older I’ve gotten.
Just as 2025 marked many firsts, it also marked an end.
I said in my very first Substack that I couldn’t wait for the person I was becoming to lay me to rest and mourn who I used to be. I didn’t know whether it would be worth it, but I hoped it would be.
Almost a year later, I tell you: it was.
I have mourned myself. I am mourning myself continuously. There is an ever-present grief in knowing that with each day, I become more myself, and the past versions of me never got to experience the depth of love and compassion I now hold. I weep for their self-hatred. I rage at how others hurt me, and how I hurt myself. I make peace with the choices that brought me to a stillness where I wake each morning knowing my life is the best it’s ever been—and it’s only getting better.
That’s why I wrote the last fifteen newsletters. Each was a glance at a different chapter of my memoir, Spite—the story I wrote to memorialise the person I used to be.
When I first toyed with writing a memoir about how anger allowed me to live past the age I thought I’d kill myself, I began with a line in my notes app: “There’s something strange about having hope that we don’t talk about: that it feels stupid.”
Two and a half years later, while the intensity has ebbed, I still sometimes feel stupid for remaining hopeful. I try to mask it, rationalise it, make peace with it—but I can’t erase the foolishness. No matter how many times I read the fractals or pester my tarot cards, they say the same thing: You’re on the right path. Be patient. Don’t lose sight of your priorities.
So here are my priorities.
I’m going to take some time for myself in the coming months.
Between the fifteen newsletters, this interlude, editing the memoir, and contributing to two books coming out in 2026, I’ve written well over a hundred thousand words. I’m tired.
I am done resting on my laurels.
At the risk of sounding even cockier than usual—a near-impossible task for anyone but a girl who calls herself a Godling—I’ve been phoning it in a likkle bit.
2025 repeatedly showed me I had gotten too comfortable for my own good, and that comfort had begun to border on stagnation. Not materially, but figuratively.
Despite all I’ve done and achieved, I didn’t have to try much this year—which is an achievement of its own, a lesson in being still and letting others do their part. But if I am to build a life that enables me to receive all I am owed, I need to be far more… indisputable.
I want the bestsellers. I want the PEGOT. I want the standing ovations and tearful applause. I want a mantelpiece like Atlas, shouldering the weight of my accolades. I want to wake in a house whose silence begs to be broken. I want to be a mom, watching my children play with the dog, amazed that this is my life. I want the kind of romance that—word to Gigi Perez—makes me glad nobody else worked out. I want to grow old with my beloveds, so old that I lose track of years and keep time in memories. I want to hope, and have my hopes proven right over and over, no matter how stupid I feel.
And if I want those things, I must be willing to try in earnest without burning myself out in the process.
I won’t be sharing as much of myself with you, at least not for a while.
I wrote my first fifteen newsletters as personal essays on purpose—partly so readers would know what awaited them in my memoir, but mainly as an exercise in exposure therapy.
Spite is a book about some of the darkest moments of my life and the choices I made to survive them. It’s a memoir for those who found peace and power through living out spite when they had nothing else. It’s also deeply vulnerable, sharing explicit details both heartwarming and heartbreaking. As someone who signed with her agent to write an epic fantasy, the thought of a memoir was daunting—it’s all fun and games until you realise your mom might read about your first time at an orgy—but I did it. And here we are.
I’ve done all I can with the memoir for now. I’ve given readers a gentle introduction to the stories that await them. Now, I want to turn my attention back to the world beyond me.
I miss speaking about society and culture. I miss studying how we live today and how our choices are shaped by the incalculable lives that came before us. I miss interviewing cool people about their art.
I want to know why they wrote what they wrote, produced what they produced. I want to understand the choices that brought their visions to life. I want to learn how they plan to keep creating, especially if I get a sneak peek before everyone else. Perks of being a princess, y’know?
I’ll still write about myself sporadically, because ultimately, everything I do—the stories, the art, the conversations I curate—is about me.
My greatest masterpiece is a life, my life; a work of art made for the express purpose of knowing myself more intimately.
So thank you, dear stranger, for bearing witness to me becoming myself. It means the world.
I’ll see you again soon.
With love,
~ Mohini