They Didn’t Kill Me — But I’ll Never Be That Version of Myself Again

They Didn’t Kill Me — But I’ll Never Be That Version of Myself Again

I’m still here.

But I’m not who I was before it happened.

Not even close.

That version of me —

the one who trusted too easily,

the one who thought truth would protect him,

the one who assumed silence would be enough to prove innocence —

he’s gone.

He didn’t survive the smear.

He didn’t make it through the screenshots.

He didn’t outlive the whispers, the erasure, the inbox silence from people who said they cared.

I wish someone had warned me that even survival has casualties.

Because everyone focuses on the fall,

but no one talks about what it means to wake up and not recognise your own emotional architecture anymore.

I don’t laugh the same.

I don’t share the same.

I don’t walk into rooms with the same soft certainty I used to carry.

I don’t believe, blindly, that people are who they present themselves to be.

And it’s not bitterness.

It’s adaptation.

It’s what happens when you’ve been reconstructed by harm.

I survived.

But it wasn’t clean.

And it wasn’t poetic.

It was messy, angry, sharp, fragmented —

and it came at the cost of someone I never got to say goodbye to.

The version of me that didn’t know what public pain felt like.

The version of me who hadn’t been reduced to a name in someone else’s sentence.

The version of me who thought that if you just stayed silent long enough, the truth would eventually reveal itself without you having to fight for it.

He’s not coming back.

And mourning him has been harder than any smear campaign ever was.

That’s the part no one sees.

Not the rage, not the survival —

but the quiet grief for the self you’ll never be again.

And the shame of having to explain that you’re not “still stuck in it” —

you’re just learning how to live differently now,

because the world changed your shape

without your permission.

This isn’t about trauma.

It’s about transformation that was forced,

before I was ready.

But I’m not ashamed of who I am now.

I just wish I’d gotten to become him on my own terms.

Instead, I had to claw him into existence —

out of silence, screenshots, and a refusal to disappear.

This post is for everyone who is still alive,

but not untouched.

Who lived — but lost parts of themselves they can never name aloud.

Who laugh again, yes —

but never in the same register.

This is Post 15.

And I’m not the same.

But I’m still here.

And I’m not writing from the wound —

I’m writing from the scar.