Read time: 3 min.

This has been one of the harder periods of my life.

I can't tell you everything. Some of what's happening right now isn't mine to share. It involves people I care about, and their privacy matters more than my openness.

But I can tell you this: it's been blow after blow. And the thing about that kind of period is that it barely gives you time to process one thing before the next one arrives.

The part you know

You already know some of it.

Defqon cancelled at midnight. The Instagram account deactivated. 260,000 followers gone in a day. Content rules tightening across every platform I've built on. And next week, one of my closest friends leaves for the United States. Moving there with his girlfriend for at least three years.

And, on top of all of that, something personal I can't speak about here.

I'm not sharing this for sympathy. I'm sharing it because I've always been honest with you about where I am. And right now, where I am is in the middle of something genuinely difficult.

The thing that stopped me

Something happened recently that shocked me completely.

Two people I used to work for, back when I had my very first job as a teenager, have had their lives taken over by illness, in different ways, neither of them asked for it. One of them is no longer here.

I won't share more than that. It's not my story to tell in detail. But when I sit with it, really sit with it, everything else gets very quiet very fast.

The Instagram account. The platform rules. The friend leaving. The business challenges. All of it just stops mattering in the way it did five minutes before.

What's left when you strip all of that away is so simple it almost feels too obvious to say.

The people around you. The fact that you're alive. That's it. That's the whole list.

I know that sounds like something you'd read on a motivational poster. But there's a difference between knowing it and feeling it land in your chest at 2am when someone you know is gone too soon.

It lands differently then.

What I still believe

I don't believe everything is predetermined. I don't think some force decided this period had to happen exactly this way.

But I do believe this: everything that happens becomes meaningful the moment you decide what to take from it.

I can't always see the lesson while I'm in it. I can't right now. Not fully. Some of this will only make sense in three years when I look back and think, oh, that's why that had to happen.

But I've lived enough of those moments to trust the process even when I can't see it.

Every setback I've ever had has eventually revealed something I wouldn't have found otherwise. None of it was wasted.

This won't be either.

Underneath it all

I'm not going to wrap this up neatly. I don't have a clean lesson for you this week.

What I have is this.

When things strip you down to nothing, you find out what actually, truly matters.

For me, right now, it's the people. The ones who show up without being asked. The ones who sit with you without needing to fix anything. The ones who just stay.

Everything else, the platforms, the numbers, the milestones, it's all real and it all matters.

But not like that.

Not even close.

Much love,

— Martijn