By now I was already in a deep depression phase. A massive one. The kind from the pre-2016 era. The ones I had spent seven years convincing myself I had left behind forever.
I hadn’t.
And it is in the depressive phase that one needs emotional support the most. Not professional support ; human support. Someone who knows your name and asks how you are and means it.
Here I was, all alone in a high-rise apartment in a country where people had not the slightest idea of mental health. Not because they are unkind; they are not. But mental health as a concept, as a vocabulary, as something a person could visibly suffer from and receive acknowledgement for, simply did not exist in the social fabric around me.
I withdrew myself completely.
It was during this hermit period that, for the first time, I thought of something I had never thought before. I don’t want to go deep into it here.
What I will say is that the building was managed by Savills ; the British property management company , and they, of course, understood mental health. I got support from them. I am grateful for that.
This incident had a very traumatic effect on my already mangled brain.
I developed intense claustrophobia. An acute fear of being alone ; not merely loneliness, but a visceral, physical terror of enclosed spaces and solitude that had never been part of my condition before. A new symptom, arriving uninvited, adding itself to an already crowded diagnosis.
I always keep my work hours synced with London, which is night here in Vietnam. I work from home. Now, with the claustrophobia, working from home had become impossible too.
A locked apartment at 2 AM is not the ideal environment for someone who has developed an acute fear of locked apartments.
So I started working in 24-hour coffee shops – the kind generally meant for work and study purposes, populated at 3 AM by students on deadlines and freelancers on caffeine.
Being surrounded by people gave immense calm, but momentarily only. The fear followed me back every time. Meanwhile, the depression, already severe, kept worsening.
At one stage I was on 60 mg of Lexapro every day. For context , I had started in 2016 on 10 mg.
By March I had completely lost my mind. Some expats did try to help me, but by that time I had already reached the stage where I was completely oblivious of my surroundings and didn’t understand what was happening around me. I was present in body only.
My apartment lease was due for renewal in April. Of course I didn’t renew it. Not because of financial problems ; I had none. Thanks to feudalism. I simply left everything in the apartment and walked away. My belongings, my papers. The building management eventually intervened, packed everything, and put it in storage. I never went to see it. As far as my oblivious brain was concerned, those objects belonged to a different person.
So now I was officially homeless. The underlying cause was not financial difficulty but the newly developed claustrophobia ; and I was already so oblivious that neither the cause nor the effect registered as problems worth solving.
Though the time was not far when I’d earn both titles : homeless and penniless. One down.
By the end of August, my depression started subsidising. I felt the shift in the way I always feel these shifts first ; not as a thought, but as a perception. I noticed that one of my shoes was completely torn. I took a picture of the shoes, threw them, and bought new ones.
In the shoe shop, the sales girl told me I was smelling bad. Many may have told me earlier ; I couldn’t say. Her comment was the first one that actually reached me. And not only that ; I too could smell it. The self-awareness was returning.
Good sign.
The depressive phase was slowly dissolving into a hypomanic phase. By the end of September I was almost fully aware of my condition and my surroundings. The fog was lifting. I could see the room again.
I moved into a farmhouse resort in a nearby village. Instead of rooms, there were straw huts with small verandahs facing a beautiful garden. Everything was close to nature. No traffic. No noise. No high-rise walls pressing inward.
The place immediately started having a very calming effect. The family who owned and managed the resort lived on the farm too. They were very kind. Interacting with them gave me some semblance of human connection – the first real human warmth I had felt in months. It was enough. For now, it was enough.
