Marked for Life: The Permanent Stain of a Conviction for Deception

I have spent a good part of my life being told who or what I am, and what I am not.

I’ve added a few new adjectives to my identity in the past month: abhorrent, irredeemable, unrepentant, irreformable – they join a long list of other labels that have been attached to my person over the years – fraud, subhuman, liar, thief, bad mother. It’s hard to not let them seep into your skin.

No matter how much armour I put on, my skin still manages to soak up every single thing people throw at me. It all nestles deep in my pores, imprinting on my body like amateur tattoos that friends give each other in high school. And then somehow it permeates your heart and becomes a part of your identity – there’s an inevitability to it – unavoidable, inescapable.

And in the midnight hours as bony fingers trace war wounds on my skin, they skim across the laundry list of permanent words that came in the form of a conviction—the kind the state hands down with a gavel and a sermon. The kind that don’t just live on a piece of paper or in a courtroom transcript—the kind that latch on, and suck the life blood from your body like dirty, rotten leeches. These words were gifted me by a judge who read out my sins like he was telling a bedtime story: his voice calm, clinical, full of false certainty. He didn’t know me – not the real me, not the me that exists outside the hallowed halls of so-called justice. He didn’t want to, couldn’t, that’s not how this shit works. But still, he told a version of me to a packed room, and somehow that version stuck harder to my skin than the truth ever could.

In fact, his certain words echoed louder than my own. Louder than those of the people who love me. They crawled inside my ears like slimy worms ready to feast on my flesh and coiled up, nestling somewhere behind my ribs.

“You are a danger.”

“You are beyond repair.”

“You are disposable.”

Even as I stood there in the docks, back straight, jaw clenched, trying to hold on to my sense of self, I felt something shifting. I felt my body changing. I felt my body getting heavier under the weight of those words. I felt my spine adjusting and my skin beginning to crawl. I felt my shoulders hunch and my fists clench, my jaw tighten and my brows furrow. You can’t fight a story that’s already been published, already footnoted, already archived in the state’s records?

I didn’t let those words eat my flesh, not at first anyway, but like acid, they sizzled and chewed at the edges. Soft parts first. The places I thought were the toughest—my sense of self, my knowing, my pride—they corroded slow and quiet. I didn’t always feel it happening. At the time it was just a a sting, a small burn I thought I could ignore. But then it spread. Through muscle, through memory, into my bones. Until one day I realised I was walking around held together by nothing but sheer will and scar tissue.

At night, in the stillness—on a plastic mattress under the eternally buzzing light, in the silence after another unanswered phone call—I would start to feel those words burrow in. Not because I welcomed them. Not because I accepted them. Not because they were true. But because repetition is powerful. And isolation is fertile ground.

It didn’t matter how loudly I protested the conviction, when the world only listens to judges and juries. It didn’t matter how many times I tried to rewrite the script when the state had already bound it, stamped it, and shelved it.

Even now, no matter how much I fight it—no matter how deeply I resist becoming what they say I am—there’s a part of me that continues to carry those words like scars. I don’t want them. But they’re there. Invisible to most, but not to me. I feel them when I speak. When I parent. When I try to love and be loved.

This system, these people, they don’t just punish you with time. They punish you with language. With definitions. With stories about yourself that you didn’t write but are forced to live inside. And after a while, it gets harder to remember who you were before they named you.

And maybe that’s the hardest part—knowing that no matter how much you resist, how much you claw your way back to yourself, there are stories about you already out in the world that you didn’t write, but that everyone else reads as gospel. You open your mouth to speak your truth, but it doesn’t matter. Not really. Because by the time you get to the sentence, the world has already decided the ending. And when the conviction they gave you is for deception, there’s no blank slate to return to. There’s no presumption of innocence waiting to hold you. There’s only the echo of those names—fraud, liar, cheater—and the impossible weight of trying to speak your truth from beneath them.

A conviction for deception doesn’t end when the sentence does. It doesn’t stay locked inside a courtroom or sealed in a file. It bleeds. It follows. It clings. It becomes the lens through which everything you say, everything you are, is filtered. People don’t see you. They see the label. The stain. The word liar stitched into your skin like a birthmark you never chose. And from that point on, you’re not defending yourself from a place of innocence—you’re already guilty in their eyes. The words don’t even need to be said aloud. Fraud. Liar. Cheater. You hear them in the way people pause before responding, in the raised brows, in the long silences that say more than any accusation ever could.

And you start to realise that truth—your truth—doesn’t travel far when it’s spoken from the mouth of someone marked by dishonesty. It’s like trying to shout through a wall while they stand on the other side with earmuffs on, already convinced you’ve got nothing real to say. You try to tell your story, but it doesn’t land. It ricochets. It evaporates. Because people don’t hear what you say—they hear who they think you are.

This isn’t just about reputation. It’s about survival. It’s about how even a whisper of accusation can metastasise when it lands on a body already scarred by judgment. When you’ve been convicted of deception, you don’t get the luxury of being misunderstood. Misunderstanding becomes a weapon. Every misstep becomes confirmation. Every breath you take is up for cross-examination.

And the worst part? It doesn’t matter how much you’ve changed, or how deeply you’ve reckoned with yourself. The story they’ve written about you is already out there—bound, footnoted, shelved in public record. It becomes the primary source. Your voice becomes a footnote. A rebuttal. An appendix no one reads. You learn quickly that people believe the story that flatters their certainty, not the one that complicates it. And nothing makes people more certain than a conviction.

They say they love a redemption arc—but not yours. Not ours. Because redemption requires belief. And belief requires trust. And trust? That’s a door that never stays open for people like us. Not when the first thing they see is your record, your past, your supposed lies. Even when you’re telling the truth, you’re already losing.

This isn’t justice. This is exile dressed in legal language. This is a life sentence passed down not by a judge, but by every person who refuses to see you beyond the worst version of your story. And when that’s the world you live in, speaking your truth doesn’t feel brave—it feels like screaming into a void, hoping someone, somewhere, still believes you exist beyond the words used to bury you.