You imagine the moment as cinematic. A matchstick. A blaze. You walk away from the fire like a phoenix in slow motion.
But that’s not how it happens.
Burning your old life isn’t beautiful. It’s brutal.
They never tell you about the smell of it—the stink of everything you built, melting. Your name, your dreams, your sense of control. You don’t walk away with wings. You crawl away with nothing.
Ashes Are Honest
There is no script when you lose everything. Just silence. The kind of silence that forces you to hear your heartbeat for the first time. The kind that strips away every false identity you ever performed just to survive.
For me, it came after the headlines. After the mockery. After the collapse. I was no longer “Billy Coull the creator,” or “Billy Coull the scam.” I wasn’t anything. Not even to myself.
And that’s where something real begins.
Death Before Rebirth
No one talks about the space between identities. The spiritual void. The days where your voice trembles. The moments where your hands shake writing your own name.
You can’t skip this part. If you do, you rebuild the same mask, just with different makeup. You become another costume version of yourself.
But if you stay in the ashes long enough, you start to see the pieces that survived the fire—truth, sorrow, forgiveness, self.
What Grows After Fire
The sacred thing about burning your old life is that nothing false comes back. You don’t just get a second chance. You get something rarer: a self you don’t have to perform anymore.
And no, it doesn’t make you invincible.
But it makes you real.