A month or two ago, I woke up at 3:00 AM to a notification nobody wants to see: I was locked out of all my Meta accounts.

The automated flags cited “suspicious activity” and “community standards violations.” I hadn't posted anything particularly unusual, just my usual artwork and personal updates.

Eventually, I managed to get back into my accounts. But the whole experience stuck with me.

For a little while, years of posts, friendships, followers, artwork, and connections were suddenly inaccessible. It was a reminder of something that's easy to forget when we spend so much of our lives online:

We don't really own our social media audiences.

We borrow them.

I love social media. I've built incredible friendships and found a genuinely supportive artistic community there. I still use Facebook, Instagram, X, Threads, and Bluesky, and I don't plan on abandoning social media.

But I've started looking at it differently.

Algorithms change. Rules change. Reach disappears. Accounts get flagged. Platforms change how links work, what gets seen, and how creators are allowed to reach the people who chose to follow them.

At the end of the day, we're building on somebody else's property.

When I originally wrote about getting locked out, I said I needed to start taking my own website and newsletter more seriously.

Since then, I have.

It's still small. I'm approaching 20 subscribers as I write this, which can feel tiny when we're used to social media numbers where everything is measured in hundreds, thousands, or millions.

But I've learned to look at those numbers differently.

Imagine having a little shop or an art booth and 20 people walked through the door because they genuinely wanted to see what you were creating.

Twenty people suddenly doesn't feel so small.

Each subscriber is an actual person who decided my writing and artwork were worth inviting into their inbox. That's something I don't want to lose sight of while chasing bigger numbers.

So I'm still going to use social media. I'm still going to post my artwork, ramble about whatever is on my mind, share my writing, and probably complain about algorithms from time to time.

But I want social media to become the place where people discover my work instead of the place where my entire creative existence lives.

This website is my home.

Social media is just one of the roads that leads here.

If you enjoy my artwork, writing, thoughts on creativity, witchcraft, life, or whatever strange subject I wander into next, I'd love for you to subscribe.

The blog and newsletter are free, and I'm not going to flood your inbox. I generally send out one or two emails a week with new posts and updates.

I'm slowly building something here that doesn't depend entirely on whether an algorithm decides I'm worth showing to people that day.

And after waking up at 3:00 AM thinking years of connections might have disappeared overnight, that feels a lot more important than it used to.