I’m not some polished narrator. I’m a bloke who’s been dragged through the mud and left wondering who I even am anymore. My past isn’t packed away in some box under the bed – it’s plastered across every search result, every social feed, every idle whisper in a pub conversation. It isn’t just history, it’s a thing that breathes and follows me around like a bad smell.
I used to think that if you did your time, made your apologies, and tried to live better, the world would let you carry on. But the internet does not forget. It files away every stumble, every foolish thing you said or did. And when someone Googles your name, they get the worst hits first. That photo from years back when I was on a different path. That old lawsuit nobody remembers until someone stumbles on it again. Even things I’d written in private – pages about dark ideas or half formed theories – got dragged out and mocked. It felt like my name was a cage, and all those old versions of me were locked inside.
When the Wonka story blew up, I wasn’t ready. One minute I was just another face on a project, the next I was a headline that defined me. All the stuff I thought I’d buried – legal scraps, accusations I’d denied, wild rumours about me writing conspiracy tracts with a robot – it all jumped back into my life. I felt split in two. The Billy people saw in the news, and the Billy I knew when I looked in the mirror.
I wake up some mornings and I barely recognise the guy putting on the kettle. There’s a voice in my head that asks “Have they Googled me yet today?” It’s like every new chance at work or friendship comes with a weighty footnote: past disaster ahead. You learn to steel yourself. You learn to keep your shoulders squared even when the screen lights up with another nasty headline.
But you also learn that you can’t live for that screen. My real self is in the small stuff – the late night messages to my kids, the quiet walks where I let my mind wander, the odd email to someone I wronged, just to say I’m sorry. I’m trying to build a new story, one post, one honest moment, one plain spoken truth at a time. I write when I can, not because I want applause, but because I need to remind myself who I am now, not who I was then.
It’s slow. It’s messy. Some days it feels pointless. But each time I show up – writing something honest, owning my screw ups out loud, admitting I still get scared – I add another line to my present self. And maybe over time those lines will stack up and drown out the noise of old failures.
At the end of the day I know the internet will keep its memory. It will keep the receipts. But I get to decide what I post next. I get to choose what chapters come after the fall. And so I’m trying to live from shame into shape, forging a man who stands on lessons not regrets, who looks forward even when the past is shouting behind him. That is the only way I know to keep breathing with all that weight on my back.