They didn’t say it outright.
But it was there—in the silence.
In the way people stopped replying.
In the way journalists used my name like poison.
In the way the internet started referring to me in the past tense.
They wanted me gone.
Not imprisoned. Not punished.
Just… erased.
And I almost gave them what they wanted.
There were days I didn’t speak.
Days I didn’t eat.
Days I stared at my own name like it belonged to someone else—
someone who ruined everything.
But something kept me breathing.
Kept me typing.
Kept me putting words into a world that only wanted my absence.
I wrote because silence was the heaviest part.
The shame wasn’t just in what they said.
It was in what they never asked.
No one wanted context.
No one wanted confession without spectacle.
They wanted me to vanish into the mess.
To become another cautionary tale.
To sit in the rubble and rot.
But I wrote instead.
I wrote to reclaim meaning.
To take the narrative out of the hands of strangers
and place it—however flawed—back into mine.
Writing didn’t save me.
It didn’t fix it.
It didn’t silence the headlines or erase the mistakes.
But it reminded me that I was still alive.
That I was still in here—beneath the noise, beneath the judgement, beneath the myth.
What they got wrong is assuming shame would silence me.
It didn’t.
Shame gave me language.
It gave me metaphors.
It gave me letters.
It gave me a mirror.
And through writing, I began to see myself clearly—
not the version they built online,
but the version still trying to make sense of who he became and how.
So no, I didn’t disappear.
I transformed.
Not cleanly.
Not beautifully.
But truthfully.
And the words became the proof.
So when they say I vanished—
correct them.
Say I wrote.