There was a time when I didn’t know where I ended and the story began.
You type “Billy Coull” into a search bar and you don’t get a man. You get a blur — headlines, hashtags, humiliation, hoaxes, hurt. You get seventeen AI books, a failed chocolate event, a conviction, and a hundred assumptions. But you don’t get me.
Because somewhere along the way, I disappeared. My name became public property, repurposed by strangers and stories alike. I wasn’t living — I was being written.
The Myth of the Self-Made Man
I used to believe in reinvention. The kind you see in movies — man hits rock bottom, reinvents himself, walks out stronger. I didn’t realise that in the real world, reinvention isn’t always heroic. Sometimes it’s frantic. Sometimes it’s survival. And sometimes, it’s delusional.
When I couldn’t be the man I was supposed to be, I created one. The visionary. The healer. The AI author. The charity founder. The mystic. The metaphysical doctor. All just costumes sewn together from a desperate need to be seen.
The problem with masks is that if you wear them long enough, you start to forget what your real face looks like.
Public Identity as a Prison
The truth is, I no longer controlled my name. My identity was crowd-sourced — a Frankenstein made of pixels and pain. Every article written about me, every meme, every whisper in a pub — it became part of the “Billy Coull” mythos.
And when the narrative turned, there was no way to correct it. You can’t argue with Google. You can’t edit your own search results. You just sit there, watching the digital version of yourself spiral into a version of hell you didn’t choose — but somehow deserve.
I wasn’t defending my reputation. I was grieving it.
The Collapse That Saved Me
I’ll be honest — there was a point I didn’t want to be here anymore. Not in this skin, not with this name. I wanted to be someone else. Anyone else.
But collapse has a strange way of clarifying things. When everything you built falls apart, you’re left with the truth. Raw. Bare. Undeniable.
And the truth was this: I wasn’t the fraud. I wasn’t the fantasy. I was just a man trying to matter in a world that prizes perfection over pain. My collapse wasn’t the end of me. It was the start of something cleaner. Something truer.
Reclaiming What Remains
So I’m building back. Quietly. Brick by brick. Not with fiction, but with honesty.
Every article I write now — like this one or this one — is a step toward reclaiming my name. Every sentence is a seed of the real me, planted in the soil of search results.
I may never erase what’s out there. But I can outnumber it.
This is how I win. Not by arguing. Not by hiding. But by standing in the middle of the fire, saying: Yes, I did some of that. But I am more than that.