Marieme Seck Author and tech founder

Marieme Seck

I don't think of myself as an author in the formal sense. I'm someone who loves sharing what she has noticed, even when it comes out imperfect. What I write isn't here to make you more productive, optimize your habits, or sculpt a better version of you. I write about the inner architecture: the things we feel and rarely name, the contradictions we carry, the slow work of becoming legible to ourselves.

Origins

I was born in Dakar, Senegal, and lived there for the first ten years of my life. That decade still shapes how I see the world: the rhythm of the days, the easy coexistence of religions in a country that has stayed quietly at peace, the way people knew one another and lived without urgency. My family later moved to Marseille, then to Paris, where I've now lived for nearly fifteen years.

A mixed inheritance

My father is Senegalese. My mother is Senegalese-Polish, part of a family that settled in France generations ago after leaving Poland. I grew up at the intersection of cultures, religions, and social classes, and that, more than any schooling, taught me to observe before I spoke.

When you're raised between worlds, you learn early that there's no single way to live, no universal definition of dignity, no fixed script for a meaningful life. You become tolerant out of necessity. You also become harder to categorize. I think that's the foundation of everything I write.

Before the writing

Writing was never the plan. I'd never pictured myself as an author. I wasn't even much of a reader. What I loved, since childhood, were notebooks. I bought them constantly and rarely wrote in them, but owning them comforted me, as if some part of me already knew there was material waiting, long before I was ready to reach it.

For years I was searching. I collected diplomas. I tried on roles. I never had a vocation I could name. I'd take a job, learn it fast, and feel the walls close in within weeks. It wasn't laziness or fear. It was a clearer signal than that: this is not where I'm meant to be.

What I always wanted was to build something of my own. I taught myself to code. I built websites. I co-founded Weelp, a travel-safety app that helps people feel protected far from home. And underneath all of it, something else was waiting to surface.

How writing arrived

It arrived through spirituality.

During the pandemic, I went looking for meaning beyond what the usual frameworks could offer. I studied astrology, the laws of the universe, esoteric traditions, the patterns conventional thinking tends to dismiss. I had my Destiny Matrix read, and one reading said I was here to help others, and that writing would be one of the channels.

I didn't believe it at first. Writing books fit no version of myself I could recognize. But the idea stayed with me. And one day, in a stretch of feeling unmoored, I decided I had nothing to lose.

I wrote Not Giving a F*ck Anymore.

It became the first in a series of self-help audiobooks that now reaches listeners in more than twenty-five countries. The catalogue includes The Silent Burnout, Your Anxiety Is Lying to You, This Is Not Procrastination, Regulate Your Nervous System, The Trauma Your Body Never Forgot, The Loneliness Nobody Talks About, and Nothing Feels Good Anymore.

I'm not a therapist. I'm not a coach. I'm someone who has paid close attention to the inner lives of the people around her, and to her own, and decided to write it down.

Who I write for

I write for everyone. I write for myself.

I write to make sense of what I've seen, heard, and felt, and I assume every time that I can't be the only one. None of it comes from theory. Every chapter starts as a question I needed to answer for myself.

I'm an Aquarius, and that matters to me. Aquarians are known for defending their ideas, for questioning every script society hands down, for believing they can shift something through the way they think. I've never trusted ready-made discourse. I don't hold fixed ideas about how a life is supposed to unfold. I think a lot of what passes for self-help is noise, and that the more useful work happens quietly, in the language we use with ourselves at three in the morning.

When you finish one of my books, I don't expect you to be cured or transformed. I hope for something more specific: that you feel less alone, more understood, and that something you'd been carrying privately finally has a name.

That's the whole project.

The process

Most of it starts with listening. I pay close attention to the people around me, to what they say and what they leave unsaid, and at some point something clicks and I have to write it down. From there I dig: I research through books, looking into historical facts, art, religion, philosophy, and psychology, and I gather all of it until the ideas start to hold together.

I write wherever I am, at whatever hour the work asks for. Once I start, I rarely stop. It comes out in long sessions, and the structure comes later. I cut, rewrite, research, and rewrite again. I'm not precious about the process, but I'm exacting about the result.

I also believe we all have a story to tell. Writing isn't reserved for scholars or for a chosen few. If you've ever wanted to write a book, do it. There is something genuinely good about putting what's inside you into words. That, at least, is how I see it.

Beyond the books

Writing isn't the only thing I build. I'm also the co-founder and CEO of Weelp, a travel-safety company built on a simple conviction: feeling safe far from home shouldn't be a privilege. The same instinct that drives my writing, paying attention to what people actually feel rather than what they're supposed to feel, shapes how I approach that work too.

If you're curious about that side of what I do, take a look.

If something I wrote landed with you, the newsletter is the best way to stay in touch. I read every reply.

Read the free first chapter →