The morning of February 2020 saw a beaming me alighting from a plane at the international airport of Ho Chi Minh City-Saigon. I had taken a week’s stopover in Vietnam for preliminary preparations to establish an offshore development centre to replace the one in India.
A technical visit. Routine, purposeful, time-bound. I would be back on a plane within the week.
Though I could never quite understand myself why I was so keen to cut even professional ties with my country of birth. That question I’ll leave open, as I have been leaving it open for years.
Four days into my stopover, something happened that would put me completely off the rail and cause a major relapse.
One morning, the streets were suddenly swarmed by vehicles that looked governmental, blaring something I obviously didn’t understand. I murmured, funnily enough ; what, did the Americans suddenly decide to take revenge for 1975’s humiliation? Nah. It was something worse.
Covid-19.
Not only was I unable to fly out ; I was imprisoned inside a service apartment. Of course it was not only me. The entire population was imprisoned. Not only in Vietnam but all over the world. A billion people locked inside four walls. And no one revolted. I found that last part almost as remarkable as the virus itself. A billion people, and not one serious organised revolt.
Governments had discovered, accidentally, the full extent of what populations would silently absorb. A useful lesson. For them, not for us.
This was the beginning of my deterioration.
The Covid-19 lockdowns came in two phases. There was definitely a period when I had the opportunity to fly out. But Europe’s condition was horrible, the uncertainty was global, and Vietnam ; whatever its limitations as an accidental home , was at least functioning.
I decided to stay. The world had changed in ways that weren’t yet fully legible. Estonia could wait.
By the end of 2020, I started noticing a change in my bipolar cycles. A very significant change in the hypomanic phase-it slowly became more intense, bordering on hypermania.
The mild, productive hum of 2018 and 2019 was shifting register. Getting louder. The difference between hypomania and hypermania is not merely one of degree ; it is one of control. In hypomania, I am the driver. In hypermania, I am a very enthusiastic passenger who has convinced himself he is still driving.
But I was still stable enough to notice these changes. That, as anyone who has been through a full manic episode will confirm, is the last faculty to go before the real destruction begins.
On the professional front, there was no movement. Lockdown had frozen everything. The offshore development centre plan was on ice. The Estonia plan was on ice. Everything was on ice. Covid-19 had achieved what no personal crisis had ever quite managed -it had temporarily stopped me from doing things.
Temporarily.
