I Lost My Voice in 30 Hours

Yesterday, I lost my Medium account.

Not a password. Not a login. A history.

Months of effort disappeared in a single night. Hundreds of posts. Countless revisions. Late hours spent wrestling ideas into sentences. What vanished was not just content but continuity. Writing is accumulation. Each piece leans on the last. When that structure collapses, the loss feels physical.

People say it’s “just a platform,” but that’s a lie we tell ourselves to survive. It wasn’t just a platform. It was where my thoughts learned how to stand. It was proof that I showed up even when nobody was watching. Losing it felt like being pulled out of a life I had built brick by brick and dropped into a desert with no map and no water, only the memory of shade.

Today, something else happened. Vocal Media didn’t erase my work or remove my account. They took my ability to comment. I can still read everything. I can still feel everything. But I cannot respond.

If losing Medium felt like displacement, this felt like mutilation. Not silence by absence, but silence by design. Like cutting out someone’s tongue and telling them to keep listening. The mind remains intact. The emotions remain loud. Only the channel is severed.

For a writer, expression is not optional. It is oxygen. To be present and unheard, to witness conversations you can never enter, is a specific kind of punishment. A quiet cruelty that doesn’t announce itself but settles heavy in the chest and stays there.

I am still full of words. That’s the cruel part. The thoughts arrive the same way they always have, steady and insistent. The need to connect hasn’t weakened. Only the door has been locked from the outside. I am present, aware, and silenced, standing close enough to conversations to hear every word but never allowed to step in.

Platforms like to speak the language of community, but the power lives elsewhere. Years of labor can disappear through automated decisions. Voices can be limited without explanation. Writers invest their lives, their nights, their attention. Platforms hold the switch, and they rarely feel the dark when they flip it.

What hurts most is not the silence itself, but the contradiction it creates. I am still a writer. The impulse to respond, to engage, to shape thought into language has not left me. Yet the channels that once carried my voice are closed, and the loss came so easily. Months of discipline undone overnight. A reminder of how disposable a writer becomes once a system decides so.

This is a strange exile. I am not banned from thinking, only from being visible. No appeal can restore the time. No explanation can give back the nights I stayed awake, believing this work mattered enough to last.

Right now, I feel stripped. Not of talent, not of desire, but of place. Writing needs somewhere to land, and today my words feel homeless.

Still, something refuses to die. I didn’t lose my voice. It was taken from the room, not from my body. I am still breathing sentences, still thinking in paragraphs. The work may be gone from the screen, but the struggle that shaped it remains. The discipline remains. The hunger remains.

This moment has burned away illusion. Nothing digital is permanent. No audience is guaranteed. What survives is the act itself. Writing not for reach or approval, but because silence would be worse.

If this is the desert, then I will write in the sand and dig until something grows. I have been reset to zero, but zero is not nothing. It is ground.

I didn’t disappear.

I was erased.

There’s a difference.

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Right now, I am in shock. Not the loud kind. The quiet kind where even emotions refuse to line up into sentences. I don’t fully know how to explain what I feel, and maybe I don’t need to. I keep telling myself this is part of life, that maybe this was supposed to happen, that maybe acceptance is the only thing left. So I say it’s okay, even when I don’t believe it yet.

The hardest part is trust. I no longer know how to trust platforms that are not in our control. I invested my time there. More than time, I invested choice. I stepped away from hospital training and hospital house jobs so I could give myself fully to writing, so I could learn, grow, and give my voice to the world. I believed that if I showed up every day, something would eventually hold.

For the last six months, I did find a voice. Small, fragile, but real. And now it feels like it has been drowned.

With Vocal Media, I wasn’t only thinking about writing. I was thinking ahead. About building my own website. About moving everything there eventually. About earning something from this work, not wealth, just sustenance, enough to stand on my own feet and keep going. I’m not ashamed to say that. Writing also needs survival. But all of that planning feels dead now. Not paused. Dead. And with it, I feel like I have disappeared too.

I don’t even know how to explain this to my friends. Or at home. They trusted me. They believed I was building a future in writing. They saw the hours. Ten to twelve hours every day, almost without a break, active on Medium and Vocal Media. And in less than thirty hours, everything collapsed. Yesterday, Medium. Today, Vocal. One and a half days was all it took to erase what felt like a life.

Losing the ability to comment is not a small thing. On Vocal Media, everyone knows this. If you don’t interact, if you don’t respond, the platform doesn’t give you reach. Community is not optional there. It is survival. Commenting was how I listened, how I connected, how I told other writers that their voices mattered. Losing that means losing visibility, momentum, and belonging all at once.

Yes, I submitted a request to Vocal Media. But I am not hopeful. Not even slightly. I am a free member, and experience has taught me how this goes. I’ve seen others lose basic functions without response. I know people who were VocalPlus members and still heard nothing back. I lost commenting access on a previous account the same way, and to this day, that account still cannot comment. Now this one too.

So I’m left asking a question I never thought I’d have to ask: what do I do next?

I have no income right now. I stepped away from work to invest fully in these platforms, believing effort would turn into opportunity. Instead, I am left with nothing tangible. No access. No stability. Just exhaustion and uncertainty.

I didn’t stop writing.

The ground was pulled out from under me while I was standing still.

And I’m still here, trying to understand how a future disappears this quickly, and how a person is supposed to explain that loss to the people who believed in them.

*******

I don’t know if it’s right or wrong to say this, but if you see my like on your work, know that it means I’m still here, still active, still doing my best. I don’t have the strength right now to take another step or create another account.