One arrives in the world without having asked for it, without having had the choice of anything. We don’t deserve to be born poor or rich, black or white, beautiful or ugly, small or big, and so on. We could have been born elsewhere, on another continent, in another culture, in a different body. There is nothing fair in the attribution of places, that’s how it is.

Fate is not written in a big book, nothing is inexorable or is imposed from the top downwards as James the Fatalist believes[1]. Roles are assigned at the beginning of the game by chance and if one does not deserve to be born here rather than there, everyone can play the game to the best of their ability, as long as they do not consider themselves a victim condemned by fate, or alternatively, as some kind of chosen one.

As a young girl, I remember calling my parents selfish for bringing me into the world without asking me. I felt inadequate for a long time, because I was too sensitive and too much subject to the state of the world. I needed philosophy to say ‘Yes’ to life. Stoicism taught me to separate what depends on me from what does not depend on me; to act on what depends on me and not caring too much about the rest.

Knowing this doesn’t prevent me from feeling pain or anger, it just allows me to reason with myself. That’s why I got ‘Amor fati’ tattooed where I can see it, so that I don’t forget what those two words mean, and so that I can remember it on those dark days when the idea of an absolute freedom comes back to haunt me. ‘Amor fati’ helps me remember that it is useless to torture myself in front of the obscenity of the world, the passing of time, the injustices, the inequalities, the wars, the hatred, the gratuitous meanness, the contempt, or whatever it may be. ‘Amor fati’ reminds me that dwelling on my own bile will not bring me any good.

‘Amor fati’ invites me not to give up on life and to do what I can in order to change what I can. This is not the same as the method of autosuggestion; it’s about thinking about yourself as an individual, with the aim of not being driven by emotions. It works in practice; I experience it everyday and that’s why I think it’s useful that I tell you. Even though the distribution is unequal, you are still the master of your own game, and it is not by brooding over ‘bad fate’ that you’ve been suffering, or that anything good will happen to you.

I’m writing to tell you that you may have been unlucky, but in order to change this, you have to get on with your life. Every action has an effect, every cause has a consequence. If we can deplore the fact that we were not born on the right side, we can consider as a good thing the fact that we were not born a prince or a princess, with traced destinies, and that we can choose to take sideroads according to our singular trajectory.

I want to tell you that by being open to opportunities, ready to seize them, open to the Other and guided by intuition, beautiful things can happen to you. But for that to happen, you will have to accept the idea of reconsidering certain thoughts that you take for granted.

It depends on you, especially on how you address others, without taking them for fools, which also supposes that you don’t take yourself for a fool.

In the meantime, I can only invite you to consider that I am not here, not so I can say any sort of nonsense to you, but to share with you what guides my steps, and that it has nothing to do with my telling you that it is enough to cross the street to find a job.

[1] Denis Diderot, Jacques le Fataliste et son maître, Paris, Buisson, 1796