confession

 

him

a confession

by Dean

Preface

Names have been changed. Mine hasn't. I'm Dean. Some people would prefer to have forgotten that.

What follows is true in all the ways that matter. Some details have been simplified. The shame hasn't.

1. Before Everything Went Wrong

As a child I had large ambitions. Physics, mathematics, writing, philanthropy — I wanted all of it. I was sociable, I did well at school, I had genuine friends. By any normal measure, I was doing fine.

Somewhere around thirteen, that stopped being true.

What happened was this: during an early attempt at masturbation I accidentally injured my penis. It healed partially but not properly. A classmate — I'll call him CD — saw it one day when we were comparing ourselves, as boys sometimes do, and reacted with undisguised disgust. That reaction lodged in me like a splinter. I was different. I would need surgery to correct it. And surgery cost money I didn't have and couldn't get on the NHS.

I told no one. I was too ashamed, and there was nothing anyone could have done.

The consequence was simple and catastrophic: I decided I could never let anyone get close to me. Any intimacy would end the moment a partner saw what I looked like. The horror on their face would finish me. So the only option was to make sure it never got that far.

I modelled myself on television characters — Columbo, Frank Spencer, Norman Wisdom. Likeable, harmless, entirely asexual. If I played that role convincingly enough, nobody would ask why I wasn't dating.

2. School Falls Apart (1984–1986)

My grades dropped. My parents noticed. They asked what was going on. I told them the lessons were beneath me and the teachers didn't understand me. That kept them quiet for a while.

I needed money for surgery. Surgery required romance. Romance required money. I couldn't see a way out of the circle. Then, in physics class, I thought I'd found one.

I had an idea for a perpetual motion device — a machine that would generate unlimited free energy. If it worked, I'd be rich. Rich enough to fix myself. Rich enough to save the planet, which was also in trouble at the time: the miners' strike, the energy crisis, pollution. I genuinely believed I could solve all of it.

So I stopped studying. If my device succeeded I wouldn't need qualifications. If it failed — well, I preferred not to think about that.

At home, things were difficult. My sister SW was leaving. My father's work was under strain. Money was tight for most families in the recession. But the hardest thing to live with was my other sister.

IW had been adopted later than the rest of us — as a toddler rather than a baby, and after a genuinely terrible start: found by police in her cot, neglected, in a state of serious distress. That beginning left its marks. As a teenager she was violent, aggressive, and frightening. I spent most evenings in my room, hiding. Eventually she was removed from the family and sent to a children's home. Our parents later admitted they didn't think she had ever felt loved by them. The feeling was presumably mutual.

I spent my last year at school trying to build my device and writing letters to Isaac Asimov for advice. I couldn't get his address. School ended. I moved on to A-levels and continued not studying.

3. The Device Fails (1987)

I enrolled in college with no intention of attending properly. My reasoning was binary: either the machine worked, or the future was unliveable. I spent the year sourcing components quietly and assembling the device at home.

The summer I turned seventeen, I finished it. My parents were in bed. I believed I was minutes away from solving everything — the money, the surgery, my isolation, my future.

I switched it on. Nothing happened.

I sat there and thought, clearly and without drama: my life is over.

That was not a metaphor. With no device, no qualifications, no prospects, no money, and a physical problem that ruled out any normal relationship, I genuinely could not construct a version of the future that was worth having. I told no one. I hid it.

4. Breakdown (1988)

The following year at college, my body began to give way. I developed a psychogenic gait disturbance — a neurological response to extreme psychological stress that affects the way you walk. I couldn't balance properly. It was noticeable.

The students who had been friendly stopped being friendly. Several told me directly that they were embarrassed to be seen with me. I began drinking heavily — smuggling vodka into college in my locker and taking swigs during breaks. One afternoon, drunk and dissociated, I was caught masturbating in the college library. Security came. I got away, but after that, people would physically move to avoid me in corridors.

I stopped attending. I lied to my parents about free periods and study days. They both worked during the day and I was quiet in the evenings, so the deception held. I was, by this point, completely alone.

My compulsive behaviour had become severe — masturbating twenty or thirty times a day. During this period the family dog wandered in one day and seemed to look at me with uncomplicated affection. In the state I was in, I responded to that. This happened more than once. I am not proud of it. At some point I became so detached from reality that I believed the dog communicated to me telepathically that we should stop. That is how far gone I was.

5. Early Work, Drinking, and Loss (1990–1993)

College ended and I found work. Around this time I lost my virginity, achieved by keeping the lights off and most of my clothes on. She sensed something was wrong and didn't stay.

My wages didn't cover my drinking. I borrowed from the bank. When that ran out, I stole — from colleagues, occasionally from strangers. I felt nothing about it. I was numb to consequences.

I moved in with my brother Darren, who had just bought a house with his partner. Darren was the only person in my life I trusted completely. He was my closest friend.

When things became strained between him and his partner, I decided to move out and try to rebuild my life. I had a plan: a computer, a book, programming, sobriety, fitness. I was due to move the following day. I went out that evening for a final drink with some acquaintances.

The phone rang when I got home. Darren was dead.

I spent a week at my parents' house after the funeral. At some point my mother brought me a copy of the Beano — a comic I had read as a young child. I didn't know what to make of it. The grief made everything feel hostile. I tried to put it down to her being overwrought.

My gait worsened. My drinking increased. I went back to work but couldn't function properly. Former flatmates started coming round to my new place and looking at me with expressions I couldn't read. A colleague at work called PH became convinced I was pursuing his girlfriend and wouldn't believe my denials.

One evening a group of people were at my flat. Someone suggested I take LSD. I did. Then, with apparent gravity, they told me they had something important to say — something that would help me. I took it seriously. I braced myself.

What they said was: grow up.

I didn't know what that meant. I still don't, fully. But I said yes, and I tried.

Things disintegrated anyway. I was fired. The people I'd been spending time with turned on me one by one. I had a second breakdown. Complete confusion, complete isolation. My friend JC beat me up. I found this neither surprising nor particularly shocking, which tells you something about where I was.

6. The Wilderness Years (1995–2007)

Years passed in fog. Long stretches of nothing punctuated by episodes of fear.

I was not capable of genuine friendship or relationships. I could mimic the surface behaviours — nodding in the right places, producing appropriate sounds when people spoke — but there was nothing behind it. When people eventually noticed, things collapsed. There was usually fallout.

I occasionally slept with women, always under false pretences. I couldn't explain myself. I kept the lights off when I could.

I lost my job and enrolled at Brighton University. Three years by the sea seemed like a reasonable thing to try.

A girl in one of my lectures flirted with me. We slept together. Within days she was avoiding me. The whispering started almost immediately. I spent my free time in pubs.

An older man showed interest in me. I slept with him to keep his company. The library at the university had internet access and I discovered online trolling, which genuinely amused me. I found other people doing the same in obscure corners of the early web.

I was attacked in the street twice. I frequently heard people comment on my face in sneering tones. Over time I suppressed all facial expression. When I tried going the other way — being expressive — a nurse examining me for concussion called me smarmy. I couldn't win.

I dated a woman called SH for a while. We played chess on our first date. I beat her easily and said something tactless about it. She didn't seem to care. Her friends tried to pressure me into getting a buzz cut. I refused: I had trichotillomania as a teenager and had lost significant hair on one side of my scalp, which I concealed with a comb-over. I didn't want anyone to see it.

One evening I was alone in a car with one of her friends — I'll call him R — who was telling a joke. I could feel where it was heading and knew I was about to fail the social test. In my state, producing a genuine laugh was impossible. A forced one would read as fake. So I sat there expressionless while the punchline landed and he stared at my blank face, visibly furious. Part of me knew I should say something. But what — that I couldn't smile? That I'd had a breakdown? Both paths led to questions I couldn't answer, and those answers led back to my anatomy, which led back to the masturbation, which was not a conversation I wanted to have.

SH and I eventually split. I moved to London. Good money, prostitutes, alcohol. I did this for some time. People kept telling me to grow up. I kept asking them to explain what that meant. Nobody could.

I beat up a friend who I thought had said something disrespectful about Darren.

In the early 2000s I moved flat. There was a spider in the bathroom. I closed the door and used public toilets for the next three years.

7. The Turnaround (2008–2009)

I read about Bitcoin on Slashdot. It had reached ten cents a coin and was apparently no longer worth mining. I moved on without giving it further thought.

More usefully: I came to understand that my medication was working in a way I hadn't grasped. I stopped taking it. Things began to change.

I made a short video — a word game with collision detection — and it found an audience online. I met a woman called TS on Yahoo Chat. She was in a difficult place herself, and we became close. She remains someone I'm grateful for.

It was around this time that I saw a clip of Droopy — the old cartoon dog, expressionless, deadpan, perpetually put-upon — and understood with a shock of recognition that this was the character I had been performing since I was thirteen. I showed it to TS. She confirmed it immediately.

I joined a gym, stopped drinking, and lost seven stone. People began to notice me in ways they hadn't before. I heard people listening at my door.

Then I became convinced there was a television programme being made about me, which led to my first sectioning. After I was released I believed I was participating in a global competition where the prize justified physical danger. When outpatient contact felt like surveillance I couldn't escape, I punched someone to force a second admission. I was sectioned again. I needed to be.

8. Hospital (2020)

I was diagnosed with pancreatitis. Alcohol-related, almost certainly. I had been drinking heavily for decades because it suppressed the noise in my head.

I spent three years in hospital on a drip.

The nursing staff were kind to me. That kindness did something to me that the medication and the sectioning hadn't managed. I came out of it different.

9. Pimlico and a New Idea (2024)

I moved to Pimlico and tried again to make connections.

Something shifted around this time. I had always believed that when people seemed to be talking about me, I was experiencing paranoia. Then I realised they actually were talking about me — not because I was special, but because people talk about each other. That is what humans do. I had just been excluded from it for so long that I'd forgotten it was normal.

Being included in ordinary gossip for the first time was genuinely disorienting. I sat alone for several weeks, thinking it over.

10. Understanding (2025)

I started to reconstruct what other people had likely been thinking during the years of my breakdown — not knowing I was ill, watching me behave the way I was behaving.

The conclusion was uncomfortable: they had been trying to make sense of me in exactly the same way I had been trying to make sense of them. The difference was that their behaviour was broadly explicable, and mine wasn't. I just hadn't been able to see that.

People had told me directly that something felt wrong about me, even if they couldn't name it. I had always taken this as hostility. It was often just accurate observation.

While I had been spending my teenage years thinking about the angle of my right foot and trying to seem normal, my peers had been doing something else entirely: developing tastes, building identities, signalling those identities to each other, forming bonds. I had been absent from all of that. When I later tried to join social groups without having gone through any of that process, people sensed the gap. The result was exactly what you'd expect.

I also started to feel genuine preferences about who I spent time with — something I had never experienced before. Previously I had attached myself to whoever was nearby, with no sense of compatibility. People had noticed this. Comments like "what are you doing here" or "what sort of man are you" were attempts to express, however clumsily, that my presence didn't make sense to them because I showed no sign of actually liking them or finding them interesting.

I had always assumed people's hostility came from nowhere. It didn't.

My humour, which I had always deployed as a kind of dry understatement, had frequently been read as aggression. I watched my father do the same thing with my mother once and spent a moment confused — then realised he was joking. Then realised I do exactly that, and that other people had been reading it as genuine nastiness for thirty years. This explained the comment, delivered to me more than once, that I had the personality of a malignant tumour.

Then I let myself think about the thefts. The assaults. The woman I had hit harder than intended during what I had understood as rough-housing. The friend whose joke I had sat through without reacting. The partners who had described me as brooding or mysterious, then fled within hours of getting close. The way SH had probably interpreted my confession that I played mind games — which I meant as a description of my own psychology, not as an admission of deliberate cruelty.

To them, I had been the monster.

I sat with that for a long time.

11. The Gym (2026)

I went to the gym recently. While I was getting changed, a man glanced at me with what I read as wariness. My first instinct was the familiar one: is it starting again?

The following day I was struggling with a piece of equipment. A man came over and told me I needed to use the correct technique.

I said: "Oh, there's a technique to it, is there."

He looked at me strangely and said yes, there's a technique to everything. But his manner had already changed.

He thought I was being sarcastic. He thought I was dismissing him.

That was the moment everything became clear. For three decades I had believed the world was hostile to me. The truth was that for three decades the world had believed I was hostile to it. I had been giving off signals I wasn't aware of — dry, flat, deadpan responses that read as contempt. They responded accordingly. I responded to their response. The circle had been spinning since I was thirteen.

All those years. All that waste.

But also: not everyone had read me that way. Some people had given me the benefit of the doubt. Those were my friends. Some of them may even have defended me in conversations I never knew about. The thought is unexpectedly moving.

Finally

I am better. The drinking is gone. The paranoia is fading. The shame is still there but it has changed shape — it belongs to specific things now, not to everything.

I cannot blame people for how they treated me. Given what they were seeing, their reactions made sense. I was difficult, erratic, sometimes dangerous, and I showed no sign of knowing it.

My life has been unusual in ways I didn't choose and didn't understand. That's the most honest thing I can say about it.

My name is Dean.