I entered 2026 with some hope. It seemed that my supply line from the estate would be restored, at least partially. It indeed was, and I was relieved. I immediately turned my focus to my nonprofit initiatives ; which I had not been able to do for the last few months, and which, I now realised, I had missed with a fervour that surprised even me.
Since 2023, my main focus had been on my two nonprofits – 4IR 4ALL and BipolarPowered. Two initiatives, one ideological purpose. 4IR 4ALL- making the fourth industrial revolution accessible to the underprivileged, not just the already-privileged. BipolarPowered – because I have spent enough years watching bipolar disorder treated as a liability to be managed, when in the right conditions it is an engine of extraordinary capability.
Both feed my ideological soul and fulfil my ethical purpose. Both had survived, against all odds, every bipolar episode and financial crisis of the last three years. That survival was not accidental. Passion, it turns out, is more durable than stability.
I was back at my desk, reviewing the current conditions of both initiatives, re-engaging, re-energising. Life seemed to be going back to normalcy – mild hypomania, working for long hours, sometimes 30 hours in one stretch.
Again I set aside everything, forgot the financial hardships, and started tunnel-focusing.
It’s at these moments that a bipolar person needs a loving carer. Someone of their own. Someone who will sit across the desk and say – stop. The finances first. The passion can wait 48 hours.
Reviewing and restructuring my finances should have been my absolute first priority after the income was restored. I knew this. And I did the other thing anyway.
The partial restoration of estate income was very short-lived. Within a month, troubles started again. This time it was a complete shutting down – supply line severed, bank accounts frozen. I’m not recording the specifics. They aren’t important to me, and they wouldn’t illuminate anything. The effect is what mattered, and the effect was total.
By now, financial struggle had completely taken over. Life revolved around one question: how to pay the next bill. Not the next month’s bills. The next bill. Singular.
But the biggest surprise – and I say this as a genuine clinical observation, not a complaint; was that my brain had accepted this as normal life.
I was not thinking of making any effort to change it. A person with a functioning mind would immediately start working on finding new income channels. I continued working on my nonprofit initiatives instead. Until the water went above the head.
By the end of March, I had several weeks of unpaid rent. The owner was no longer kind. He shouldn’t be – the man had a business to run and a family to feed, and I was neither paying nor leaving.
I started getting all types of threats – police arrest, seizure of the laptop and devices, eviction.
The laptop threat was the one that landed. I can survive without an address. I cannot survive without the laptop. That machine is the last remaining instrument of everything I intend to do. The thought of losing it jolted me into action in a way that hunger, homelessness, and isolation had not.
I started looking at options. Which is where I discovered just how thoroughly I had dismantled my own safety net.
I had cut ties with my extended family. With older friends. With the entire social architecture of my past life. My professional contacts knew me as a functioning entrepreneur – none of them knew my actual condition. I had been living a solitary life in a foreign country, and the only way anyone could have known was if I had told them. I had chosen not to. That choice, which had felt like dignity, now felt like a trap.
There were 3–4 uni friends I could still approach. I contacted one. He helped – financially. No concern, no questions, no interest in the condition behind the request. Just a transfer. Charity, efficiently administered.
The actual wake-up call came with the other two. I contacted them. They blocked me. Shortly after, the one who had helped also blocked me.
I sat with that for a moment. Blocked. By people I had known for decades. Not argued with, not offended – simply blocked, as one blocks a nuisance.
Whatever they saw in my message, it was not a person they recognised as someone they needed to engage with.
Reality started hitting me, one item at a time. Eviction in a few days. Laptop possibly impounded. No food for 3–4 days. Income gone. Friends gone. Old world gone. New world unaware.
Surviving as a homeless and penniless 60-year-old man in a foreign country, with a painful scrotal hernia, requires one to have nerves made of steel. Or a completely oblivious state of mind.
I have both.
What shall I do? Shall I use my resilience and my ability to be oblivious just to survive?
No. Absolutely not. No more. I will not use my abilities merely to survive. I’ll use them to fulfil my purpose, my drive, my goals. The accident has happened. The engines are being repaired. The journey resumes.
I’ll come out of my shell and shout my condition out.
Yesterday was my first day.
I was unable to find a location I needed to go to, so I entered a coffee shop looking for someone who spoke English. I found a young, handsome man – perhaps from South Africa or Australia ; sitting inside with his partner. He not only gave me directions but came outside and walked me to my destination, about 1 km away. He didn’t have to do that. He did it anyway.
I had been hungry for many days. While walking back, a thought arrived: why not return to the café and ask this young man to buy me food?
I sat with the thought. I don’t know whether it was the hunger, the resolve, or the simple fact of his demonstrated kindness – but I didn’t find much difficulty in accepting it. I went back. He was still there.
I asked if I could speak to him privately for a minute. We sat outside. I explained my situation and asked if he could buy me some food. His reaction was not what I expected . I had anticipated shock, immediate action, the instinctive generosity of someone confronted with visible need. Instead he was calm, almost measured, as if weighing whether to believe me.
Anyway, he finally took me to a nearby convenience store and told me to take whatever I wanted. After paying, he immediately parted ; as if the transaction was complete and he preferred not to extend it.
That was fine. He had done more than enough.
It was the first time in six decades of life that I had approached a stranger for help. The first time I had asked anyone to buy me food.
I had come out of my shell.
The journey resumes.
