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  "description": "Reinventing yourself after trauma - and what it means to seek absolution from the person you had to become to survive.",
  "path": "/blog/art-of-absolution/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-14T23:09:00.000Z",
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  "tags": [
    "CHILDHOOD",
    "MENTAL HEALTH",
    "PERSONAL",
    "PSYCHOLOGY",
    "TRANSITIVE",
    "INTROSPECTIVE"
  ],
  "textContent": "To shamelessly quote a section from my book (Art of Absolution): I found myself in an abandoned school playground; my old school playground to be precise. In the centre stood a door, just a door, no walls, no room, just a large wooden door. It was raining. Countless children’s faces watched me from the windows of the school. I opened the door; but creaks portrayed a door not opened for a very long time and revealed was nothing but darkness. Only with the flash of lightning from behind me did the true distance of the hall unveil itself. A series of dead dried up plants housed in oversized pots cut lengthy distorted shadows across the unadorned walls. There was a stale dampness in the whispering air that shivered my spine and moistened my palms. To the far right-hand side of the hallway however came something curious – with every flash of lightning this far wall remained seductively in darkness. I moved slowly towards the wall on my right. I floated my fingers over the light switch, debating whether I truly desired to know what waited in the corner. The ominous atmosphere turned electric, the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck erected in fright. The eerie isolated confusion excited me. The foreboding silence screamed in my ears. I inhaled deeply and flicked the switch. On flared the light bulb with an echoing ping. Nothing there; not a thing! Only as I turned to leave did I notice I wasn’t alone; there was a small boy cowardly curled up in the corner behind the door. To my accepting disbelief, the boy was clearly me as a child, dressed in the same ghastly cardigan that my mother would dress me in.A releasing thrill of madness befell me as I seized an oversized plant pot and proceeded to strike it over the boy’s skull, over and over again. An energetic flash of ecstasy excited every vein in my body with each crack and crushing of his collapsing skull. I laughed hysterically as my eyes were electrified by the sight of his skull cracking like an eggshell. He didn’t even put up a fight; his limp and lifeless body burdened no more by a retarded, rejected, pathetic lump of unlovable shit! I bring it up because it tends to prompt the question – and by question I mean the handful of people who’ve actually read it – of how much of the book is true. The domestic abuse material is largely invented, built from things previous partners had described, and with my own struggles with memory, the book’s premise became – what if these things had been done by me, but my own memory had blocked them out? For anyone who hasn’t read it, I don’t want to spoil the entire plot here, but this part, the dream, I wanted to explain, because this part is real. Something happened when I was younger that I cannot live with. So, I dealt with this by inventing a new me. I created a new personality, and everything that could be linked to the old me was cut, – my possessions, my taste in music, in film, my hobbies, my friends. I then fantasised about the old pathetic me being murdered, I would often fantasise graphically about killing the old me myself. I loathed the old me with immeasurable hatred, for reasons I believe are to assist in my dissociation from certain memories – the child, essentially, becoming the scapegoat to himself, to myself. I cut away anybody or anything that related to that memory, for whilst no memory is held of it, by me or anybody else, the existence of that reality becomes dismissible. But it is still always there, whilst I am dancing in ignorance, it is there. I can feel its presence, like a reality I am ignoring, just ticking away, in the background. Like my corpse is just right there, all this time, under the floorboards below where I stand, waiting patiently. I find myself much older now, and I’m sorry. I am sorry I murdered the old me, his innocence gutted out across the chopping board of my past to give way to this new me, this dead-inside shadow, like a fictional character who was created, not born, with all my fake interests and dreams, my fake quirks and traits. Like Frankenstein’s Monster, I am nothing but a conception from that of what I killed. And now, in the cracks of this carefully curated personality, guilt seeps through and chips parts off. Whose life did I take? Who am I inhabiting? And curiously, who was I meant to become? Because whoever that child was, it’s not me. My other problem, is that this appears to not only still be happening, but it is gaining momentum. Every version of me now comes with an expiry date, and once that date passes, I want nothing to do with him. I don’t grow out of who I was, I abandon him. It used to take years before a version of me became something I’d rather forget, now it takes weeks, sometimes days. I can look back at something I made recently, something I was proud of, and I need to either change it or delete it. The book I quoted above was to be my magnum opus, but even that is currently one bad afternoon away from existence as my cursor hovers over the delete button. There’s usually a thread, when people talk about their pasts, they may cringe, they might laugh, but there’s still a sense of continuity, that it belongs to them, a timeline, however messy, that still connects. But mine doesn’t, it’s a pile of discarded versions of myself, each one sealed off and left behind, like rooms in a house I no longer enter, and the further back I go, the less accessible those rooms become. Large parts of my childhood are just missing, quietly absent, like files that were never saved properly, but then, every now and then, something forces a door open, – usually people. I’ll see someone from my past, – an old colleague, a family member – and there’s this immediate physical panic. And not because of them, I’m not afraid of them, but because they connect to a version of me that I’ve long since detached from, and in that moment, the past stops being abstract and becomes real again. It’s no longer something I can file away as “not me”, because there they are, holding proof that it was, that I was. I’ve abandoned friends and family members because of this, leaving me in an utterly lonesome existence, and for somebody that pathetically worries daily about how they’ll be remembered, at this rate, I won’t be remembered at all. For my life, in practice, is being erased faster than I can now write it. And if every version of me gets rejected, eventually, then what exactly is the current version waiting for? Because he’s not exempt, just early. But no matter how thoroughly you remove something, it doesn’t actually stop existing, it just stops being acknowledged, and I think that’s the part that lingers, not the memories, but the sense that there’s something unaccounted for, something still present in the background, waiting. I don’t think this is really about the past. It feels like it is, because that’s where all the discomfort points, but the actual problem seems to be happening in the present. It’s the way the present version of me relates to the previous one, and the fact that the relationship is always the same. Rejection, distance, replacement, there’s no continuity, only succession, and the pace of that succession is increasing. Which leaves me in a slightly unmanageable position, because if I follow that pattern forward, there’s an obvious endpoint – a version of me that can’t even tolerate being himself in real time. Where the gap between “who I am” and “who I was five minutes ago” is enough to trigger the same detachment. And whilst I’m drowning in my own hatred, I am told I need closure, as though some neat psychological Tupperware seal can just be snapped over the leftovers of an unwanted experience. Obviously, I understand the concept of closure, and my criticism would normally be for the often disregard of whether the provisional enthusiasm can even withstand the administrative cost of such a proposal, because once a memory acquires a folder, it also acquires a posture, and suddenly, like toddlers, it learns to run before it learns to walk. But this is different. I already did the closure, it’s just that, I closed the door with myself still inside. :: REFERENCES :: The Art of Absolution – …/art/about.html",
  "title": "ART OF ABSOLUTION",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-10T21:36:23.000Z"
}