From Data Dreams to Schizophrenia

Prologue – The Moment It All Collapsed
19th October 2024, my son’s sixth birthday, I parked outside the gate, engine idling. On the seat beside me was a paper bag: pierogi and a slice of birthday cake, carefully packed. His favourite. I set it by the gate and waited.
This didn’t happen all at once. I’d been losing contact since 2022, when the divorce process began and visits shifted to short, supervised slots through social services. What used to be easy between us turned into schedules and forms.
June 2024 was the last time I saw him. He looked at me with fear. He said he didn’t want to go to the US. In his words, he’d heard I would take him away. He wouldn’t go to the playground with me. I saw then that the pressure was too much for him. He was a child in the middle of adult conflict.
I stepped back. I stopped pushing for time. I pulled myself out of his routine to reduce the noise around him. I hoped space would help.
On his birthday, I still came. I left the food by the gate and waited in the car. His grandfather came out, saw the bag, and threw it into my windscreen. The food slid down the glass. I stayed still and breathed.
That was my last attempt to see my son.
Three days later, before another planned contact, I called the police. They couldn’t help. I shut down in the back of their car for over an hour. On 22 October 2024, in Poland, I was admitted to a psychiatric ward for the fourth time. I spent two months in hospital; the medication helped me sleep and settle. Doctors later described the illness as paranoid schizophrenia.
Mental illness doesn’t knock. It just takes.
This wasn’t the start of my story. It was the breaking point.
I’d spent twenty years climbing through IT, Business Intelligence, and Power BI – from a boy in Poland with a Commodore 64 to a consultant in the UK, earning at peak £750/day; from delivering pizzas to pay for Microsoft exams to speaking at BI conferences. Then the illness took hold.
This book isn’t only about that fall. It’s about the climb before it – the work, the luck, the belief that data and clear pictures could change a life. For a time, they did.
I have to begin here because this is where everything I built – my identity, my career, my family life – came undone. To understand the journey, you need to see what it cost.
From here, we go back to the start.