One night I went to sleep as a full-time creator with a community I had spent six and a half years building. When I woke up, my Instagram account was gone. Not hacked, not suspended with a warning. Gone. Every photo, every story highlight, every conversation in the messages, the entire archive of the life I had been documenting since I first left the Netherlands with a one-way ticket.
I will not pretend I handled it gracefully. There was panic, there were tears, there were frantic forms filled in at three in the morning addressed to a company that does not answer. But somewhere in those first days a colder and more useful thought arrived: I had built my entire career on land I did not own. Every creator does. We pour years into platforms that can erase us by accident, by algorithm, by a moderation system with no appeal, and we call that a business.
Here is what survived the deletion. My skills survived. Nobody could delete ten years of learning to film, write and tell stories. My relationships survived, the real ones, the people who had my email and my phone number. And the work itself survived, because the films lived on more than one platform and the stories lived in me. What died was the number, and the number, it turns out, was never the career. It was the scoreboard.
This website exists partly because of that night. So does my email list, Letters From The Road, which no platform can take from me, and which I would gently push you to build your own version of if you are a creator reading this. Own your house. Visit the rented rooms. I still use social media every day and I am grateful for what it gave me, but I will never again confuse it with the foundation. The foundation is the craft, the people and the things with your own name on the door.