On digital loss, the stories we build online, and what survives when you’re deleted.
Something happened this afternoon that I think you’ll understand in a way most people in my offline life won’t. I discovered that my entire YouTube channel had been hacked and deleted.
364 videos. Many subscribers.
Years of work. Conversations, essays, arguments, observations, deep dives into art history and human behavior. I reflected on masterpieces and the strange, stubborn ways people make meaning in their lives. Things I said on good days and hard ones. Other videos covered what someone in the comments once told me they needed to hear and I addressed it.
Gone. All of it. On a random Friday afternoon.
The Specific Grief of Being Deleted
Here’s the thing about losing something digital. The world won’t rush to comfort you. I know that well enough to not really ask for it.
There’s no wreckage. No smoke or physical evidence of what’s been taken. You can’t point to an empty shelf or a charred wall and say, look, something was here. You just know it was there and how long it took to build. There’s a particular vertigo of watching something real disappear without leaving a trace in the physical world.
I’ve sat with real loss. I know the difference. And I’m not going to pretend this is the same thing.
But I want to push back, gently and precisely, on the instinct to minimize it. Because when we lose something digital, there’s a tendency, even our own instinct, to feel embarrassed by how much it hurts. It’s just the internet. It’s just a YouTube channel. At least it wasn’t something real.
Except it was real.
Every video was a decision. A prepared thought. A moment of showing up and saying: this matters enough to discuss. Each one took time. Research. The courage, however small, to press record and say something you believed. 364 times, I did that. And whatever the algorithm thought of it, whatever view counts suggested, those videos existed. They were real. And some faceless, predatory actor who’s probably never created anything like my YouTube channel, decided to take them.
That’s a loss worth mentioning.
What We Actually Build Online
When we talk about building a following or a channel or a platform, we use the language of construction. We say building. But what we’re really doing is something closer to what I think of as depositing. We’re depositing ourselves. Incrementally. Piece by piece. We deposit our thinking, our evolving perspective, our preoccupations, our humor, the questions we can’t stop returning to.
Over time, if you’re honest in what you create, a channel becomes something like a record. It’s not a performance, really. But it records important moments with grit a highlight reel can’t capture.
My 364 videos were a record of how I think. How I’ve changed. What I’ve cared about and why. There were videos in that channel from years ago that I look back on and cringe a little, not because they were wrong, but because they were earlier versions of a thought I’ve since refined. And that cringe matters, it’s evidence of growth.
When those videos disappear, it’s not just the content that goes. It’s the trail. The record of becoming. The proof that thinking is not a fixed thing but a living, moving one.
I love art and I write about it. Separately, in my work life, I also mediate conflict between people who have, in almost every case, built a story so airtight that they’ve forgotten it’s a story. One of the things I’ve learned, sitting in those rooms, watching people fight for the version of truth they need most, is that narrative is not decoration. Narrative is structure. It’s how we hold ourselves together.
My channel was narrative and structure. And somebody dismantled it in the time it took me to make coffee.
How This Happens (And Why It Keeps Happening)
I want to be transparent about what I know and don’t know.
What I know: my YouTube channel, 364 videos, I forgot how many subscribers and years in the making, was hacked and deleted. This is not a glitch or a misunderstanding with a platform. It was an act of deliberate intrusion.
What I’m learning: this happens with staggering frequency to independent creators. Hackers target mid-sized channels with particular precision. Not the mega-channels with legal teams and dedicated platform support – the builders and independents. These are people creating videos out of genuine love for the work, without a corporation backing them up. We’re the easiest targets because we have few resources to fight back. And the platforms, for all their billions, offer us almost nothing in the way of protection or swift recourse.
What I don’t know: how exactly this happened. Whether any of it’s recoverable. I’m working through the YouTube process and I’m holding out some hope, but I’ve also made peace with the possibility that it’s simply gone.
The Bigger Picture (Because There Always Is One)
Here’s what I’ll tell you, because I believe in honesty over performance. This isn’t the hardest thing happening in my life right now. Not even close.
I’m going through a divorce. Last week, the man I’m divorcing nearly died when doctors found a large malignant tumor in his chest. I have two adult children, one in college, one in medical school, who are navigating their own enormous lives. I run a business. I write. I mediate other people’s pain. I’m in the middle of writing a novel that I care about deeply and am determined to finish.
All of these things are true at once. All of them are happening simultaneously, the way life tends to do things. Everything is one at a time, in manageable waves. But sometimes it feels all at once, stacked and overlapping, demanding my full attention in every direction.
So when I tell you that losing my YouTube channel still managed to land this afternoon, that it still carved out its own particular piece of hurt, I hope you’ll believe me that I know exactly how to put it in perspective. I’ve had a lot of practice.
And I also know this: the size of a loss is not diminished by the existence of larger ones. Grief doesn’t work on a scale where the smaller weights disappear. They all sit there asking to be acknowledged. And the ones we dismiss without acknowledgment, the ones we’re embarrassed to mourn because they seem too small, too digital, too trivial, those have a way of turning up later, asking for their due.
So I’m giving this one its due. Today, in this post. And then I’m moving on.
What Doesn’t Get Deleted
Here’s what I keep coming back to, and I say this as someone who thinks about narrative for a living: The ideas don’t live in the files.
A hacker can delete a channel. They cannot delete the thinking that built it. The years of curiosity that drove those 364 videos into existence remain. Hackers can’t reach into the minds of everyone who watched and take back whatever shifted in them. Nobody can undo a conversation that started because of something I may have said on camera.
That’s not wishful thinking. It’s just how creation works. I’ve been LadyKflo for a long time now. This blog, this writing, this relentless need to examine how people behave and why, it’s never been a platform strategy. It’s a compulsion. It’s who I am. And who I am does not get deleted when a server gets wiped.
I’ll rebuild the channel. Or I won’t. I’ll find another way to reach people. There are, as it turns out, a number of things I’m rebuilding right now. And I’ve discovered I’m better at it than I thought.
What I know for certain is this: I will keep writing and showing up in whatever form that takes. I’ve wanted to write a novel since I read my first one as a child. Doing it now feels like coming home.
