Marieme Seck

Origins

I was born in Dakar, Senegal, where I lived for the first ten years of my life. That decade still shapes how I see the world: the rhythm of the days, the coexistence of religions in a country that has stayed quietly peaceful, the way people knew each other and lived without urgency.

My family later moved to Marseille, and then to Paris, where I have lived for nearly fifteen years.

A mixed inheritance

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

When you are raised between worlds, you learn early that there is no single way to live, no universal definition of dignity, no fixed script for what a meaningful life looks like. You become tolerant by necessity. You also become harder to categorize. I believe that is the foundation of what I write.

Before the writing

Writing was not the plan. I had never imagined myself an author. I was not even a particularly avid reader. What I loved, since childhood, were notebooks. I bought them constantly. I rarely wrote inside them. But owning them comforted me, as if some part of me already knew there was material waiting, even before I was ready to access it.

In the years before writing, I was searching. I collected diplomas. I tried roles. I never had a vocation I could name. I would take a position, learn it quickly, and feel the walls close in within weeks. It was not laziness or fear. It was a clearer signal than that: this is not where I am supposed to be.

What I always wanted was to build my own work. I taught myself to code. I built websites. I co-founded Weelp, a mobile application for travel safety that helps users feel protected when they are far from home. Beneath 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 mainstream frameworks could offer. I studied astrology, the laws of the universe, esoteric traditions, the hidden patterns that conventional thought tends to dismiss. I had my Destiny Matrix read, and one of the readings indicated that I was here to help others, and that writing would be one of the channels.

I did not believe it at first. The idea of writing books did not align with any version of myself I could recognize. But the thought stayed with me. And one day, in a period of feeling untethered, 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 over 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 am not a therapist. I am not a coach. I am 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 have seen, heard, and felt, and I assume each time that I cannot be the only one. Nothing I write comes from theory. Every chapter begins as a question I needed to answer for myself.

I am an Aquarius, and that matters to me. Aquarians are known for defending their ideas, for questioning every script handed down by society, for believing they can change something through the way they think. I have never trusted ready-made discourses. I do not subscribe to fixed ideas about how a life is supposed to unfold. I believe much 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 do not expect you to be cured or transformed. I hope something more specific: that you feel less alone, more understood, and that something you have been carrying privately finally has a name.

That is the entire project.

The process

I write wherever I am, at whatever hour the work calls for. When I start, I rarely stop. The material comes out in long sessions, and the structure comes later. I cut, rewrite, research, and rewrite again. I am not precious about the process, but I am exacting with the result.