A rapid cycling and deteriorating bipolar disorder, combined with acute financial struggle, didn’t even make me realise that a new year had started. In any other year since 2016, the first day of January was a ritual – the Life Roadmap review, the goal-setting, the energy of a fresh column on the ledger.
In 2025, January 1st arrived and departed like any other forgettable Tuesday.
There was no year-end review. No yearly goal settings. Goals of arranging money to pay bills had quietly, efficiently, and completely overtaken the Life Roadmap. Survival had annexed ambition.
Rapid cycling made things worse -the highs weren’t high enough to plan, and the lows were deep enough to forget that planning existed.
Financial struggles kept rising as revenue from my estate continued to dry up.
By mid-2025, I was struggling to pay for my medications. The medications that had, in 2016, given me back my life ; I was now rationing them.
There is a particular cruelty in that specific reversal that I’ll leave to the reader’s imagination.
I was not able to afford a leased apartment and had to leave in September, shifting to cheap hotel rooms. Sometimes even those were beyond reach, and I spent nights at internet cafes.
By now, a laptop, two small devices, and 2 pairs of jeans were the complete inventory of my earthly possessions.
The ancestral estate that had once funded fifty startups had arrived at this: two pairs of jeans.
Surprisingly, I wasn’t too concerned. That in itself is a clinical observation worth noting . The brain, under sustained bipolar stress and financial battering, simply stops registering alarm at what would terrify a healthy mind.
Every hypomanic phase, however brief, kept dragging me back to the laptop. To the passions. As if the brain had decided: fine, no money, no home, no stability ; but the work continues.
In a strange way, it did.
One thing I had never had problems with was my physical health. Gym since my university days, reasonable diet, no serious illnesses in six decades.
But now I had one major issue : Scrotal Hernia. It had started in 2023 but by now had become very painful, and very inconvenient for a man whose life involved a great deal of walking unfamiliar streets.
The hernia announced itself dramatically one afternoon. While passing through a street in an unfamiliar locality, I suddenly felt a killing pain and simply could not stand. I sat down on the pavement. A sixty-year-old man sitting on a Saigon pavement, in a district where only locals lived and almost no one spoke English, waiting for the pain to subside.
But it kept increasing. It had happened before. I knew the only solution was to lie down for 1–2 hours in a specific position. The problem was finding somewhere to lie down.
I had some local currency in my wallet for a hotel room ; but the language was the barrier. I noticed a young man passing by who looked like a uni student. I waved him over. He knew some English and, without hesitation, took me to a local dingy hotel just a few metres away.
These types of hotels rent rooms by the hour, catering to a clientele whose requirements I will not elaborate upon.
The student helped me book a tiny windowless room for two hours. As soon as I lay down, I fell into a deep sleep and woke up 8 hours later. It was already morning.
The owner, luckily, knew some English. He could have charged me for 8 hours at the hourly rate. Instead, he charged me the daily rate – considerably less. I was struck, not for the first time in Vietnam, by an act of simple fairness from someone with every commercial reason to do otherwise.
The hotel had a 24-hour café on the ground floor. I sat there. I noticed the entire operation was being managed by a small family of four; including two small children , without any staff except a single waitress in the café.
The café was busy. All four of them were working as waiting staff. I watched them for a while, their quiet efficiency, their warmth with customers, the children weaving between tables. I was very impressed.
I started contemplating whether to stay for a few nights. I had already checked out from the previous hotel. Everything I owned ; laptop, two devices, one extra pair of jeans, one shirt , was in my backpack. I had no strong reason to go anywhere else.
And then came the reason that made the decision immediately: their six-month-old son.
He was sitting behind the reception counter, doing what six-month-old sons do – smiling at everyone with the absolute confidence of someone who has never been disappointed by the world.
He was impossible to resist.
I told the owner I’d pay daily, every morning, and stay a few days.
Those few days turned into months. And daily advance payments turned into weeks of dues.
The owner, to his considerable credit, moved me from the windowless room to a larger one with a balcony. The stay gave me a sense of stability- fragile, precarious, entirely dependent on a Vietnamese family’s patience , but stability nonetheless. And I continued.
