I entered 2018 with the same energy and zeal. Bipolar was completely in control -or more precisely, it was working for me rather than against me, which is a different thing entirely. It felt as if I was in a continuous, mild hypomanic phase with short periods of mild depression. The mild hypomanic phase does wonders for me. Productivity and creativity reach their optimum level. The brain fires cleanly. The ideas connect. The mornings have purpose. Combined with the almost complete absence of the manic phase’s destruction, 2018 was very productive. One of those years a bipolar person quietly files away as evidence that the condition is not always the enemy.
This year my primary focus was on my children. I worked on my goal of re-establishing a family life. Emotional connection and family life have been the core of my life since childhood -though my concept of family, if I’m honest, was always Papa and me only. Two people. A self-contained world.
Anyway, one of the important goals of this year was to establish a “home” with my two children, in a place of their choice, and live there for the rest of my life. A replica of my childhood’s home. The warmth, the anchor, the one fixed point.
Obviously my first choice was London. They had been living with their mum in Spain.
The children, however, had their own lives, their own rhythms, their own somewhat complicated relationship with the idea of a father who had spent much of their growing years in a different country, on a different time zone, running companies and having breakdowns in roughly equal measure.
My dream of a “home” was vivid and fully furnished in my head. In theirs, it was ;I would slowly come to understand , considerably less urgent. I continued working on the idea nonetheless. Hope is remarkably resistant to evidence.
On the financial front, I had already begun, in late 2018, the process of selling a significant part of my share in the ancestral estate in India. The estate was the funding engine for everything : the children plan, the startups, the eventual departure from India. The extended family responded to the sale with the resentment that is, in such matters, entirely traditional. I was bothered least. I have never been very good at performing the expected emotions for the benefit of people I had already decided were irrelevant.
2018 ended the way it began : stable, productive, purposeful. The Life Roadmap was intact. The engines were running clean.
It would not always be this way.
