A few years ago, while I was in the middle of breast cancer treatment, something happened that I didn’t fully realize until much later.
My web hosting provider had turned off my space.
All of my website, my art site, my photography site, my blog, and others, everything I had built over the years was suddenly gone. And I had no idea.
At first, I didn’t think much of it. One day, I went to look for something on one of my sites and noticed it wasn’t available. But outages happen sometimes, so I assumed it was temporary. I also believed I was on autopay, so it never crossed my mind that something could be seriously wrong.
Then, later on, I really needed something from one of my sites. I went looking for it again, and this time, it was clear.
It was gone.
I called my hosting provider, and that’s when they gave me the news. They had tried to process a payment, but no card was attached to my account, so they shut everything down. I told them I could pay now, but by then, it was too late. They said my sites had been written over and could not be restored.
They reopened my hosting and spent days trying to roll back to an earlier backup, some moment in time where maybe pieces of my work still existed. They tried. I waited. And eventually, I had to accept it.
So much was lost: images, words from my blog, years of creative work, documentation of my journey, memories I could never fully recreate. I sat there stunned and heartbroken at the loss. I knew I would have to start over from scratch.
But I simply was not in the mental or emotional space to rebuild anything then. I was still healing. Surviving. Processing. And the idea of coding new websites felt overwhelming and impossible.
Fast forward to now, a new year, and a new season.
I’ve been feeling strong enough to try again.
I called the hosting company back with a list of errors I couldn’t fix on my own. They helped clear enough of the damage that I could finally get back into the back end of my sites and see what was left. To my relief, I was able to recover enough to begin rebuilding.
For the past while, I’ve been working quietly behind the scenes, buried in code, layouts, broken links, and design decisions, rebuilding not just one site, but two.
Tonight, I’m excited to say:
My art site is back up and running.
My photography site is live again, too.
The photography site is still very bare bones, and there is much more to build. My art site currently has just a few pieces on it, but it exists again. It is alive again. And that feels like a small miracle.
I feel exhausted but deeply happy.
Sometimes rebuilding is part of becoming.
And I’m grateful to be here, rebuilding, creating, and moving forward.