There’s a sound I still hear sometimes.
Not the laughter.
Not the outrage.
Just the moment the doors opened in that warehouse in Glasgow—
and the silence that followed.
It wasn’t disappointment.
It was something colder.
Recognition.
That what people hoped for wasn’t there.
That what I promised—wasn’t real enough to hold them.
And then came the fire.
I’ve been called a lot of things since that day.
Scammer.
Monster.
Punchline.
“Billy Coull” became a cautionary tale,
a meme,
a man flattened into a single frame.
But that wasn’t the whole story.
And I’m not here to fight the headlines.
I’m here to stand beside them—
and show you the wreckage they left out.
The Willy’s Chocolate Experience was a failure.
No excuses.
No spin.
It was mine.
A dream too big, too fast, and without enough ground underneath it.
People brought their families.
They expected magic.
And they walked into a warehouse of broken illusions.
For that—I take full responsibility.
But what they didn’t see
was how I broke after it did.
Some things collapse quietly.
Friends stop answering.
Family steps back.
You become a headline instead of a person.
And every time you try to explain,
it sounds like a trick.
So I stopped talking.
I sat in the backlash.
The loss.
The truth.
And it hurt.
Not just because I failed—
but because in all the noise,
no one saw that I was still trying to be human.
I leaned too hard on technology.
Used AI to help shape scripts, fill gaps, keep up.
My dyslexia made me rely on it like scaffolding.
But a story written by a machine
will never understand the look on a child’s face
when the magic isn’t there.
I thought the tools would save me.
They didn’t.
They widened the gap between the dream and the delivery.
And I fell through it.
What I learned—
the hard way—
is that vision is nothing without bones.
It’s not enough to believe.
You need a plan.
Structure.
People you trust to say, “This isn’t ready,”
before strangers scream it louder.
And most of all—
when you invite people into your imagination,
you owe them something real.
The truth is, I was overreaching.
I was desperate to create something magical—
to prove something.
Maybe to the world.
Maybe to myself.
I don’t know anymore.
But I do know this:
The pain that came after changed me.
I’ve been rebuilding quietly.
Not for show.
For survival.
Every day I live with the echoes of what went wrong—
not just the project,
but the person I was when it failed.
Redemption isn’t about press.
It’s not about proving I’m good.
It’s about becoming someone
who won’t burn people again chasing light.
I’m creating now with slower hands.
More structure.
More listening.
Not chasing applause—
but building with integrity.
Because trust, once broken, isn’t repaired with words.
It’s earned through consistent humility
and work that holds.
So here I am.
Still standing.
No promises.
No PR campaign.
Just a man with burnt fingers,
quiet plans,
and a name that still stings when you say it out loud.
But I’m not walking back to who I was.
I’m walking toward who I might finally become—
one scarred, deliberate step at a time.