There’s a voice inside my head. It ain’t always yelling, not always screaming, but it never shuts up. It’s like a low drone, a hum of doubt that just sits there, always. This voice, it speaks in the language of shame after conviction. It tells me about everything I’ve done, everything I meant to do, even just me existing, all through this twisted looking-glass. It points fingers, picks apart every little thing, and most of the time, it just outright damns me. It whispers stuff like, “You’re broken. Deep down. You don’t deserve this quiet moment, or anyone being nice to you, or even to just breathe, mate.”
For a long while, that voice felt like the only real thing. Before the newspapers, before they stuck me with those labels, both in public and in my own private mess – I was someone who wanted to make things, to help out. I loved being a dad, a partner. I put everything into the community stuff, like the Gowanbank Hub. I really believed in the good I could do. But then things started coming at me, outside stuff, and that charity started to struggle. And when that happened, a different kind of pressure started to build inside me. My whole life, it just began to fall apart.
Then came the Willy Wonka Experience. I honestly wanted to make magic for those kids, to take families somewhere totally made up. I thought these new computer things, the AI, that was the way to do it. Thought it could help me make something nobody had ever seen. I was too big for my boots, I see that now. Maybe a bit daft, definitely just swamped. And when it all went wrong, properly wrong, the world came down on me like a ton of bricks. They called me a con artist. A monster. The shame from all that, it was like being caught in a fire. It didn’t just singe me, no. It burnt me right to the bone.
And what happened after that. Right after all that public humiliation, my own life just went further into a total mess. That chaos, that deep hole I was in, that’s when I made those really bad choices with an old partner. Sending those messages, saying those words. “I am a wolf, you are my prey, I’ll get you.” God, even now, saying them out loud, I feel sick. I meant it like, I’ll win you back, I’ll get you to come back to me. But it don’t matter what I meant. I caused harm. Big harm. I pleaded guilty. I took my sentence. And that truth, that solid, painful truth, it became another voice in my head. A booming, sickening voice of what I had done and what I owed.
The two weights together, the whole world laughing at me and the absolute crushing guilt of hurting someone, it nearly broke me completely. I lost everything that held me together. My kids. My home. My friends. My family. All of it. I was just floating, lost at sea in a mess of my own making. And that shame voice, it was always there, clinging to me. It wasn’t just a feeling anymore. It was how I saw everything, how I saw myself. Every quick look, every whisper I thought I heard, it just proved all those labels were true. My head just played the same old song of how bad I was, over and over.
Trying to put myself back together, trying to feel like a real person again after everyone had slapped a label on me and condemned me. That’s slow work. Proper soul-draining work. It’s like digging through rubble to find something, anything, of who you were before. You gotta pick through all the self-hatred, past all that public crap, trying to find some bit of solid ground. For a long, long time, the shame just told me that ground was rotten, that I wasn’t worth anything.
The very first thing I had to do was hear that voice. Not try and shut it up, cause that just made it shout louder. But really listen. Listen with an honesty that hurt. “Yeah,” I’d say to myself, quiet like. “Yeah, I feel shame after conviction. I feel the crushing weight of what I did. I feel that stinging disappointment I brought on everyone.” But then, this tiny shift happened. I started to separate the feeling of shame from who I am. I started to understand that even if I felt ashamed, I wasn’t just shameful all the way through. My actions, yeah, they were messed up, especially what I did with the domestic abuse. Real messed up. But me, the man, I’m not a lost cause. I ain’t irredeemable.
That’s when the real work started, the spiritual stuff. It’s about slowly, painstakingly, unlearning all that nasty stuff I told myself for years. All that harsh judgment the world piled on me, that just made it worse. It means trying, every single day, to be kind to myself. Not as an excuse for what I did, never that. But cause you can’t grow if you hate yourself. It’s about remembering that everyone, even someone who falls as hard as I did, still has some good in them. It’s about knowing that real healing ain’t about forgetting what happened. It’s about taking it all in. Letting the pain and the lessons become part of me. But not letting them be the whole story of who I am now.
And it means opening up. Being vulnerable. That’s a scary thing, like standing naked in front of everyone. But telling bits of my story, owning what I did, how it really happened. That’s been painful. But it’s also like letting out a breath I’d been holding for years. Shame, it loves the dark. It hides in secrets. When you drag it out into the light, even just a little, it shrinks. It’s like a cut that’s been festering. It can only start to heal if you let it breathe.
That voice of shame after conviction, it’s still there. It probably always will be, buzzing around. But it don’t run the show in my head anymore. It’s a reminder now. A warning. But it’s not the only voice telling the story. I’m learning to let other voices in: the voice that says I’m accountable. The voice that says I can bounce back. The voice of the man who’s actually putting in the hard yards to be better, to fix what he broke where he can, and to live with honesty.
Getting my own worth back. That’s not about trying to prove anything to anyone anymore. It’s about finding that calm, steady feeling inside myself. It’s about knowing that my mistakes, even the really bad ones, don’t just wipe out any good I can do, or my ability to learn, or to actually help someone else. It’s a journey, a long one, away from hating myself and towards a future. A future where that voice in my head, even if it’s still got the scars, speaks with truth. And humility. And a renewed sense of what I’m here for.