I’m Miriam Rachel — a Canadian writer, entrepreneur, and mother, working at the intersection of mental health, work, culture, and public life.

I started working from home long before it was fashionable, after my daughter was born in 2002. Like many people trying to build something meaningful outside traditional structures, I struggled, experimented, failed, learned, and rebuilt more times than I can count. That long road shaped my interest not only in business and writing, but also in the psychological and emotional realities behind how we work, live, cope, and adapt.

My background spans writing, digital media, entrepreneurship, and human behaviour. I studied business in college, later trained in astrology and symbolic systems (earning certification in 2006), and eventually found my way back into digital work through SEO, online publishing, and communications. In 2011, I founded Gemini Rising Ltd as a way to support small businesses, creatives, and independent professionals in building sustainable visibility and voice online.

Over time, however, my work evolved beyond marketing.

I became increasingly interested in the human cost behind systems — how economic pressure, institutional instability, cultural shifts, and political decisions shape mental health, identity, motivation, and wellbeing. I also live with depression and other mental health challenges myself, which has made these questions personal as well as professional. I don’t write about mental health from a distance. I write about it from inside the experience of being a human trying to function, work, parent, and think clearly in a world that often feels chaotic, contradictory, and overwhelming.

This site exists to explore that space honestly.

Here, I write about mental health, work, burnout, dignity, meaning, psychological safety, and the way public systems and social narratives affect our inner lives — often in ways we are not taught to notice or name. I am especially interested in how policy, culture, and institutional behaviour shape emotional well-being, trust, stress, and resilience.

Alongside this site, I also write a separate political and cultural publication, Hold the Floor in the North, which focuses more directly on free speech, civic accountability, and power. I keep these spaces distinct on purpose — because mental health requires nuance and care, and political critique requires clarity and firmness. Both matter. They simply serve different functions.

I don’t write to persuade you into a worldview.

I write to name patterns, clarify dynamics, and offer language for experiences many people feel but struggle to articulate. My goal is not to perform compassion, but to practice honesty. Not to moralize, but to understand. Not to sell solutions, but to make sense of what we’re living through.

If you are here because you feel tired, disoriented, disillusioned, overwhelmed, or quietly asking yourself, “Why does this feel so hard lately?” — you are in the right place.

This is a space for thought, clarity, and human reality — not slogans.

Welcome.

— Miriam