I remember the silence first.
The kind that hangs in a warehouse after the crowd leaves.
Confetti on the ground. Cardboard trees bent like broken promises.
And me—standing in the middle of it all, covered in the noise of what had just collapsed.
They called it carnage.
They called me the villain.
The man who scammed families, ruined childhoods, and turned magic into a joke.
What they didn’t see—
was that I cried behind the curtain before the first ticket was scanned.
Not because I knew it was going to fail.
But because I was proud.
Because I’d made something from scratch.
Because I believed it might be beautiful.
But beauty doesn’t survive expectation.
And when the lights went up and the internet turned its gaze,
they weren’t just critiquing the show.
They were dismantling me.
They say I created a disaster.
And they’re not entirely wrong.
But what they miss—what they always miss—is why.
I didn’t come from money.
I didn’t come from stability.
I came from locked cupboards, bruised silence, and the kind of childhood that teaches you to imagine your way out or die trying.
So I imagined big.
Too big, maybe.
I wasn’t trying to scam anyone.
I was trying to build wonder out of cardboard and code.
I was trying to disrupt a stale model, do something different, create the kind of world I wished someone had made for me when I was seven years old and afraid of the dark.
But the dream outpaced the structure.
And when things crumbled, they didn’t just collapse on a stage.
They collapsed on me.
And my name became a punchline.
They say I used AI to lie.
No.
I used AI to write magic—clumsily, yes—but not deceitfully.
The scripts were guided, edited, and human.
But I see now how they read. I see how they felt.
And I see why people felt betrayed.
What I don’t accept is the story that paints me as cold.
As if I stood there, laughing.
As if I wasn’t breaking on the inside while trying to hold it all together.
I didn’t hide behind technology.
I got swallowed by it.
They say it was a scam.
It was a failure.
A spectacular, heartbreaking, flaming wreck of a failure.
But it wasn’t a con.
Do you know what it feels like to hold refund forms in one hand and headlines in the other?
To wake up with thousands of people laughing at your downfall before you’ve even had a chance to apologise?
I do.
And it’s lonely.
Even lonelier than the cupboard I used to be locked in.
Because at least back then, no one knew I was suffering.
Now the whole world watches.
But I didn’t disappear.
They forgot what fire can do.
It burns, yes.
But it also refines.
It reveals.
It forces you to decide: become ash or become something more.
I didn’t let that night define me.
I let it forge me.
Since then, I’ve been rebuilding.
Not in secret—but in silence.
Writing music. Writing letters. Writing truth.
Not for applause.
For redemption on my own terms.
What they got wrong… is thinking that moment was my end.
It was my beginning.
The night the show collapsed was the night I realised I couldn’t rely on illusion anymore.
Not in business.
Not in my public image.
Not in my soul.
That failure stripped me bare.
And from that, I began to sing differently.
To tell the truth differently.
To stand differently.
So no, I didn’t scam anyone.
But I did dream too fast.
And when the walls came down, I stood there.
Not fleeing.
Not hid