It began not on a screen, but with a Gmail address.
Today, February 2nd, marks an anniversary. Eight years ago, on this day, I wrote the first words of what would become Tribute to Self Love. Long before Erotics of Liberation, some of you knew me as selflovetribute. It was a name, an idea, born in a quiet moment of desperation.
In 2018, I was a year into my new life in Berlin, having left Paris behind. I worked as a business analyst in a company that drained the life from me. I was desperate for an exit. That weekend, a conversation with a friend shifted the ground beneath my feet. She listened to me for hours and then asked two simple questions:
What would you like to do instead?
What do you like doing now?
I had no answer. The truth was, I had never felt I had the financial or emotional space to even ask. School had been my escape route. I followed the path my teachers laid out, believing it was the only way out of where I came from. And it worked, in a way. At twenty-six, I was successful on paper but exhausted in my body, utterly disconnected from my own desire.
Berlin gave me the room to breathe, to question. For the first time, I met people my age and older who worked two days a week, who didn’t subscribe to the gospel of “career.” I was stunned.
I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew two things with aching clarity: the romantic relationship I was in felt constricting, and I was perpetually at war with myself.
When I am lost, I return to the things that have always saved me: learning and writing.
Every evening after work, I would Google the emotions coursing through me. What is anger? What is jealousy? How do you live with them? I filled a small notebook with ideas that offered a moment of softness, a flicker of understanding. I read them aloud to my friends, and their response was always the same: “You should publish this. It really helps me.”
My earliest memory is the desire to write. At three or four, I asked my mother to write maman on a piece of paper. I copied the shapes, not yet knowing letters or meaning, only the deep, instinctual pull to create them.
The following Monday, walking back into that office, I made a decision. I would create a Gmail address and start writing. I would call it Tribute to Self Love.
My partner at the time had told me I “loved them too much”. I refused to believe that loving could ever be the problem, especially in this world. But I took something else from that exchange: maybe I didn’t love myself enough. Self-love felt less like an indulgence and more like a necessity for survival.
I asked five friends to be my first subscribers. They reluctantly agreed. Every Monday, I sent them a tribute to self-love.
I wrote the very first one on February 2nd, 2018. It read:
That same day, I was fired.
Walking out of that building, I knew—I decided—it was a sign. I would follow this thread of curiosity, wherever it might lead.
What feels beautiful now is realizing that whatever I have done in the last 8 years, writing has always been the foundation. Though it hasn’t always been at the forefront of my work, it’s the ground I’m built on. And 8 years later, it is writing that is asking to reemerge.
The idea of purpose is exhausting. The anxiety to find it is a heavy weight. I remember being 28 and feeling like a late bloomer—an absurd thought in hindsight. We are under immense pressure to know why we are here, when what is really being asked of us is to choose something productive that makes money. To justify our existence.
And yet, I understand the longing to leave a positive mark on the world. I couldn’t work for someone else; I refused to trade my integrity during the week to be able to enjoy my life on the weekends. But I had no safety net. I couldn’t afford to be broke forever. When I chose to follow desire, I made myself one promise: I would follow what felt warm.
I also wrote a “worst-case scenario” list.
Everything on it came true.
I lost my apartment. I became deeply unstable, moving from one temporary home to another for 3 years. There were moments I didn’t know where my next meal would come from. There were moments I didn’t eat.
For the first time, I thought about taking my own life, not out of despair, but out of practicality: I couldn’t pay for myselves to survive. It was brutal.
And still. I would do it all again.
I am sharing this because I have learned something crucial.
Purpose is a quiet curiosity for what you’re already doing—perhaps so well, you don’t even recognize it as a gift. So often, I have found that purpose lives where we once felt powerless. For me, it doesn’t arise only at the intersection of skills and values or whatever diagrams would have us believe. It’s the wound, transformed, that becomes the gift.
Abandonment became the capacity for connection.
Shame grew into the capacity for belonging.
Heartbreak deepened into the capacity to love more fully.
Silence has turned into voice and words.
The wound gestures toward the work that wants to move through you. Healing points the way to service; it is our collective purpose embodied.
We are all survivors of harm, each in our own way. Your survival is proof that the Empire is falling. Your thriving is what carries this revolution forward. Show us how you have endured. What kept you smiling through it all. Show us how you intend to flourish. This is the story we all need to hear. It is the future we all deserve. It’s us. We are the purpose.
This transformation only arrived because, again and again, I turned my face to the sun. I chose to hold 1% more curiosity than fear or despair. I dedicated myself to believe in my agency—even if, in the moment, I could only claim 1%. The world is wild and hard, but so am I. In those uncertain seasons, I realized that survival meant actively seeking beauty—even when it felt scarce, even when it required standing barefoot in the storm.
Sometimes I failed. Sometimes I cursed myself for choosing the hard path. But I ate the crumbs the universe left for me, gathering them one by one until, one day, they made a full meal.
The risk of healing is that we can mistake the wound for our identity. We set up camp there, lulled by the comfort of the familiar. We can build a home among the ruins, sometimes out of loyalty to our lineage—speaking from the wound instead of through it.
Alchemy demands movement.
The wound is not meant to be a residence. It is a passage—a site of transformation in service to something greater than the self. When we believe that purpose is something outside of ourselves, we become this tiny self-improvement project. This shit is miserable. Purpose lies within and extends outward as collective service.
If any of this resonates, if you find yourself stuck but full of longing you don’t yet know how to place, I want you to know:
I see you.
Keep moving toward what feels warm.
Giving up is not part of the equation.
Keep putting yourself in the way of curiosity and beauty.
It will work out.
Stay ungovernable, stay curious.
Care
This is so so beautiful and resonated so deeply. Ive taken screen shots of parts of it to look at in the very futile moments. Thank you