Hello, I am Merel,
There are probably a hundred ways to introduce yourself on an About page. I thought I’d start with a few things that seem to come back again and again in my life.
The deeper layers of life
I’ve always been curious about what happens underneath the surface. Why do certain experiences stay with us for years? Why does one person feel safe in a situation where someone else doesn’t? What makes us feel seen, understood, at home in ourselves?
Give me a book or a long conversation about psychology, the body, consciousness or just being human, and there’s a good chance I’ll disappear into it for hours. Happily. :)
I think I’ve always wanted to understand things deeply. Although these days, I’m also learning that understanding something and actually feeling it are two very different things.
What my own path has taught me
There have been periods in my life when trauma and my mental health took up a lot of space. More space than I would have liked, obviously. But looking back, I think that’s also where something important started for me. When you’ve been in pain yourself, it can create a very strong wish to help others, ease some of their suffering, and do something meaningful in this world.
For a while, I wondered what that was supposed to look like. I knew I didn’t want to become a therapist. That wasn’t my place. What I did keep coming back to were the things I had always loved and been good at: writing, communication, visual art, ideas, and creating things that feel both meaningful and beautiful.
My own experiences also sent me down quite a few rabbit holes. Trauma, the nervous system, psychology, body-based work. Later meditation, Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies too. Some of it gave me answers. Some of it gave me even more questions. I think both have been useful.
A world that started to feel bigger again
Over the past few years, I’ve noticed that I feel less and less of a need to understand or fix everything.
I used to be able to spend hours thinking: Why am I feeling this? Where does it come from? What am I supposed to do with it? As if there had to be one answer that would suddenly make everything fall into place.
Now I try, more often, to just stay with what is there. I’m definitely not always good at it. :) But I notice that something changes when I don’t immediately try to solve everything with my mind.
There’s one visualisation I come back to a lot. I imagine light radiating out from my heart. It sounds simple, and it is, but somehow there’s almost an entire philosophy of life in that image for me.
I don’t have to teach anyone anything. I don’t have to save anyone or convince them of something. I can just try to keep my own heart open, not make my light smaller, and let it shine.
Maybe it reaches someone. Or perhaps it doesn’t. Both are fine. And often it’s the smallest things that stay with us anyway. Someone giving you a genuine smile in the street. A friend saying exactly the right thing without even realising it. A sentence in a book you keep thinking about three days later.
I think we probably leave little traces in each other’s lives much more often than we know.
Why I do this work
I didn’t start my business because I had always dreamed of working in marketing. Quite the opposite, actually.
It grew during my own healing process, when I started thinking more seriously about what I wanted my work to be for. I wanted it to feel useful and most of all, meaningful. Connected somehow to the things I cared about outside of work too. I knew I wasn’t going to be the therapist in the room. But I could support the people who were doing that work. I could help them explain what they do, find the right words for it, or turn their knowledge into something another person could actually understand and use.
That’s probably why I still see marketing a little differently. For me, it has much less to do with convincing someone and much more to do with making something that helps people understand themselves a little better. Something they can recognise themselves in or that might help them find their way towards the right kind of support.
They can read about an approach, a therapist, a class or a piece of information and get a clearer sense of whether it aligns with what they are looking for. Maybe it makes them think: Ah, this could be something for me.
From there, the choice is theirs.
The things that make me happy
Outside of work, I love nature, dancing, yoga, meditation, travelling, writing and books.
But if I’m being more specific: conversations that accidentally last three hours. Dancing until I suddenly feel fully back in my body. Finding one sentence in a book that makes me put it down for a moment. People who don’t mind going a little deeper than “How are you?”
I keep coming back to curiosity, connection and wonder. And also to the idea that life can be much bigger than it looks from inside one difficult moment.
That’s probably the thread running through most things I do.
Merel