I Deleted 16 Years and Built My Own Door.

On Facebook, silence, survival, and why I only want people here who actually chose to walk through.

Welcome. If you're reading this, you came here on purpose. You typed something into a search bar, or someone shared a link, or you followed a trail that led you here. You weren't scrolling past me. You weren't served my face by an algorithm. You chose to open this door.

That matters more to me than I can explain right now. But I'm going to try.

2008

I made my Facebook account in 2008. I was young, and the internet felt like this wild, open, exciting thing; a place to connect with my friends in school and church, to share, to be seen. And for a long time, it was. I built a life on that page. Photos, updates, friendships, businesses, versions of myself from across almost two decades.

I recently deleted all of it. Permanently.

Not deactivated. Not on a break. Gone.

What Sixteen Years of Public Life Actually Felt Like

At some point (and I couldn't tell you exactly when) Facebook stopped feeling like a place I belonged to and started feeling like a place that belonged to everyone else. Like an open gate that anyone could walk through, uninvited, and say whatever they wanted about me, to me, at me.

I want to be honest about what that looked like in practice, because I think a lot of people feel this but don't say it.

My life was falling apart in ways I'm not ready to fully name here, and maybe I never will be. Things ended. Things collapsed. And the people who wanted to make sure I felt it knew exactly where to find me. Online, they had access. They could comment. They could message. They could make sure I knew they were watching.

"I found myself wishing there was no comment section. No inbox. No way in. I wanted to exist online without being reachable by people who wanted to hurt me."

And then there was the quieter, slower kind of harm. Just the feeling of being watched and judged by people who knew me. The ones who weren't attacking me but were just... observing. Waiting to see what I'd do next. Forming opinions. I couldn't post anything without feeling like I was being evaluated. Like every photo, every update, every expression of who I was becoming had to pass through some invisible committee before it was allowed to exist.

That's not self-expression. That's performing. And I was exhausted.

The Silence After

When I deleted it, I went quiet for a while. Not just online, inside, too. I isolated. I pulled back from the idea of connecting with people at all, because connection had started to feel like exposure, and exposure had started to feel like danger.

I want to be honest about that period too, because I think the redemption arc only makes sense if you understand how low the low actually was. I wasn't just taking a social media break. I was genuinely questioning whether I wanted to be seen at all. Whether the version of me that the world had access to was someone worth seeing.

Months passed. Slowly, things shifted. Not because the external circumstances got easier. Some of them got harder, actually. But something inside me started to clarify.

I started figuring out who I was. Not who I had been in a relationship, or in an agency, or in someone else's idea of who I should be. Who I actually am.

Why I Built This Space Instead

When I decided I wanted to come back to express myself, to share my work, to exist publicly again, I knew I couldn't go back to the open gate. I needed something different. Something that was mine in a way Facebook never was.

So I built this website.

And the thing that makes it different from every social media platform I've ever been on is this: nobody ends up here by accident. There's no algorithm feeding you my content whether you asked for it or not. There's no comment section full of people who followed me in 2014 and feel entitled to an opinion on who I am in 2026.

If you're here, you came. You sought this out. You wanted to know what I had to say. That changes everything about how I'm able to speak.

"This isn't a public square. It's my living room. And I only open the door for people who knocked."

Here, I write about music I'm making again after years of silence. I share boudoir work that asks people to look at themselves honestly. I talk about fashion with intention behind every piece. I write about what it means to be a mermaid — literally, in the water — and what the ocean gives back to you when everything else has taken. I tell the truth about what I've been through, because I think the truth is the only thing worth writing.

This is where Yna Mendez lives. Not Abby Laine the digital marketer. She has her own home at Abby Laine Digital. This is the artist. The writer. The woman still becoming.

To the People Who Wanted Me to Stay Down

I know some of you are out there. Some of you may even find this page eventually.

I want you to know: I'm not writing this for you. I'm not building this to prove something to you, or to hurt you, or to get even. I'm building this because I deserve a place to exist that is mine and because the people who actually want to find me deserve to find me at my most honest.

If things were left unresolved between us, I hope someday they won't be. I genuinely mean that. If you need something from me, come to me directly, not through fear tactics, not through messages that make me check my locks at night. I'm open to resolution. I'm open to grace. I'm not open to being diminished.

What I know is this: I'm not plotting. I'm not bitter. I'm just building.

The Other Thing Nobody Tells You About Being an Artist

There's a specific kind of hurt that comes with making art. Not the vulnerability of creating it. I've made peace with that. I mean the part that comes after. When you put something out, something that cost you, something you worked on and believed in and promoted as best you could — and the people you expected to show up just... don't.

Not strangers. People you know. People who watched you grow up, people who call themselves your supporters, people who will show up for almost anything else but somehow not for this. You learn very quickly who actually sees you as an artist and who just tolerates it as a quirky thing you do.

That silence, the absence of a share, a comment, even just an acknowledgment — it accumulates. And after a while it starts to ask a question you don't want to answer: does what I make even matter?

I've had to learn to answer that question on my own terms. Yes. It matters because I made it. It matters because someone out there will find it and feel less alone. It matters even when the people closest to me don't patron it, don't promote it, don't say a word. The art doesn't need their validation to be real. And neither do I. That's something I'm still practicing, honestly, but I believe it.

On Bourdoir, and the People Who Can't Handle It

And then there's the work that costs me the most socially: boudoir.

I believe, deeply, that seeing yourself honestly — your body, your sensuality, your full self — is a radical and necessary act. I believe boudoir photography is art. I believe it is healing. I have watched it change the way women look at themselves, and I think that is sacred work.

But I have friends from church. I have family with expectations. I have a community that was built around a version of me that kept certain parts of herself very, very quiet.

"I couldn't be actually me. Every time I wanted to share that part of my work, I'd run the calculation: who would see this, what would they think, what would I lose."

That calculation is exhausting. And it's a specific kind of exhausting that I think only creative people who come from conservative communities really understand; the constant editing of yourself before you've even spoken. The self-censorship that becomes so automatic you stop noticing you're doing it.

Facebook was where that calculation happened most loudly, because everyone was in the same room. My church friends, my clients, my family, my art community, people from my past — all of them seeing the same feed, all of them with the same access to whatever I posted.

Here, that's different. You came to my space. If you're here, you're here for Yna. All of her. The boudoir work, the music, the opinions, the process, the mess. Nobody is accidentally stumbling onto content that offends their sensibilities because they followed me in 2012 and forgot to unfollow. You chose this. And that means I can finally choose to show up whole.

Declaration · April 2026

I am Yna Mendez. I am a musician who went silent and came back louder. I am a mermaid who went back to the water when the land got too hard. I am a designer who puts intention behind every stitch, a photographer who believes seeing yourself clearly is an act of courage, a writer who tells the truth even when it costs something.

I am not the sum of what I lost. I am not defined by the relationship that ended or the business that failed or the threats from people who wanted me to disappear.

I am someone who deleted sixteen years of public life and built something better.

This is that something. And you are welcome here. '

~ Yna