Dear Amayzers,

Time for a dose of realness. Just as you are used to from me. For almost three weeks, I haven't put a single letter on paper. A unique situation for me as a writer. It felt stiff. Too stiff. Every sentence was dumb. Everything just didn't come out right. Just looking at the laptop gave me the jitters. A literal physical reaction in the form of a shiver. It made me angry. The nightmare of every writer: a writer's block. So I closed the laptop and it hasn't been opened since today. In fact: I'm typing this on my phone. For a reason.

Where it started, I find hard to say. It creeps in slowly. Where the letters first found their way out as an outlet, they now remained absent. Why does a person block creatively? Because you subconsciously feel that it's time for something new? Is that it?

I have been able to do so many beautiful things for my work. Met inspiring people and seen enchanting places. Sniffed around in lifestyle journalism and discovered it in the broadest sense possible. Wrote down everything that inspired me in all conceivable forms. The interviews, the columns, the odes, the sexy stories, the lists, the diaries, the critical pieces, the even-complaining-and-laughing articles, the satirical video clip reviews... From Famke Louise to Donny Roelvink. From Las Vegas to Iceland, from Doha to Costa Rica via Thailand back to Amsterdam.

And then I almost forget my baby. The satirical points-we-need-to-talk-about. The babbles. Starting with Expedition Robinson. Moving on to Who is the Mole?. Temptation Island. Then The Bachelorette. Messages from loyal readers and followers. Are you going to do Farmer Wants a Wife too? A new season of Expedition. A new season of WIDM. A new season of Temptation. Should we do The Traitors too? Yeah, sure. Again The Bachelor?

DMs: ‘Kiki, I miss your babbles. Are they coming back?’ ‘Kiki, you're going to write this and that, right?’ ‘Where is your piece about (name program X)?’ And then suddenly it happened. How much energy I had at the beginning (working with bad wifi on a winter sports trip in Austria because this piece MUST go online) versus how that actually feels at this moment. How incredibly cool, beautiful, and unreal I find it that you can touch and entertain people with text versus the pressure it unconsciously gave me to perform. Suddenly I felt like a slave to my own system. Suddenly watching TV was no longer for fun, but became work. Suddenly.

Maybe it's the curse of a creative person. When you create something that scores (and then receive your reward in the form of recognition), you don't want it to stop. The high of ‘success’ (you do something that people like, how cool is that?) feels good, so you start thinking of ways to keep that line of recognition going as long as possible, even if it means repeating a trick.

I think my gut has been indicating it for a while. Intuition never shouts in your face, but rather subtly waves you in a direction. That's why it's easy to ignore. I didn't want to believe that I was ready for a new step. I pushed it away. Out of fear. Fear because I don't know ‘what else I should do’. Fear of having to say goodbye to my colleagues I've worked with for six years. Fear of disappointing people. Fear of never finding a nice new job. Fear of not being able to pay the mortgage. Fear of who I really am. Fear of my own light.

Meanwhile, I know that living in fear is a choice. There is also another choice: living from love. Those who live from love look with trust. Those who live from love know that there is a reason you are getting less joy from your work. That space is being made for something new. New things are exciting, but being afraid is unnecessary. The new is going to be beautiful. You just have to trust it.

I write this with a smile and a tear and a slightly hoarse throat because I feel that this is the end of an era. A smile because I know that the future has beautiful things in store for me. For now, the laptop remains closed for a while, but I’ll be back. Perhaps in a different form, but I will always remain a storyteller. Amayzine will forever stay in my heart.

‘Our biggest fear is not that we are inadequate, our biggest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.’ – Marianne Williamson