You can delete the account, but you can't delete the person you built.
Ten years ago I lost 50,000 followers in a single day. At the time, that felt like my entire career.
I wasn't famous. I didn't have a big Instagram, I wasn't touring the world. I was just a producer uploading a new remix to SoundCloud every week, building an audience from nothing. New remix, upload, repeat — slowly proving to myself that I was actually doing something that was going somewhere.
Those 50,000 followers made me feel significant.
Then one of my favourite producers ever — a UK artist I loved — dropped a new track. In my head I thought: if I remix this, maybe it's the perfect way to get noticed. So I made the remix, I was really proud of it, and I put it online. A few people liked it.
The next day I got an email from the artist: take it down. A few hours later the track had disappeared off my SoundCloud. I went to log in — and my account had been terminated. Not just the track. The whole account. Gone.
All that work, gone. I literally felt physically sick — because those numbers meant more to me than numbers. They were proof that someone actually cared. Proof that the thing I was building was going somewhere. And in one day, all that proof just disappeared.
Then something clicked. I could sit there mourning what I'd lost, or I could become the person who could build it again. So I went harder.
This time I made sure I wasn't dependent on one platform. I built backups. And I stopped pretending any of these platforms were mine — because they're not. Instagram isn't yours. TikTok isn't yours. SoundCloud wasn't mine. You're building on borrowed land.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't build there. It just means don't confuse the land with what you build on it. The followers were never the real asset. The account was never the real asset, even though it felt like it. The real asset was the discipline to show up every week and make something.
So if something disappears right now — your account, an opportunity, a gig, the person who believed in you — don't confuse losing that thing with losing yourself. What feels like the end of the world is usually just the end of one version, right before the next one. You can delete the account, but you can't delete the person you built.
