Since when can a robot with no emotions read a being made of emotion?

I turn to numerology, tarot, and astrology — not as truths to follow to the letter, but as tools to wake up an instinct our civilization is teaching us to silence. We're not only creatures of reason. We're also animals, children of nature — and wearing a suit and holding a résumé doesn't make that instinct disappear. There's a logic that goes beyond the factual. I look for it as much as I look for facts.

My birth chart, for instance: not a technical birth chart — just what it reminds me about what holds up over time, and what still needs strengthening.

Classical and contemporary dance from age four. Pointe shoes, discipline, hours I stopped counting. That sport forgives nothing: your feet stop being for walking, you teach them to carry your whole body, to brace, to resist the fall or stretch out into infinity. Over ten years of a discipline that became a backbone — until my teenage years, when I stopped.

Then nothing, for a long time. Until 2011, when roller derby arrived in France. I founded my team in Cannes. Thirteen years of contact, strategy, and team spirit — and leadership: I ended up coaching my own team, then others. Sport, for me, is inherited: my father, a fitness addict, fought his own battles through effort — I understood mine through his, without either of us ever needing to say it.

That sport pulled me out of a script I thought was written for me: becoming someone's wife, building my schedule around his. Derby gave me a schedule of my own. For the first time, I came first. And there's something else that pure performance teaches: chasing that edge, you transcend your emotions, you learn to be a team with others — and to be a team of one, alone.

I'm forty now. I traded physical violence for the body — weights, mountain hikes, a bit of qi gong. Passionate, rigorous, disciplined: sport was never a side note in my life. It's a pillar.

Kind, empathetic — and for a long time impulsive. Not harsh, but often overwhelmed by my own emotions, without necessarily having the hindsight to hear what my instinct was screaming at me. More than thirty tattoos on my body, which I kept hidden, waiting to be in a position of strength before showing them. I'm not talking about tattoos. I'm talking about everything I hid along with them — everything still invisible under skin that looks at peace. I was an elephant trying to play chameleon — and of course, eventually, it shows. But I believed in it so hard I ended up convincing myself.

For a long time, I confused climbing the ladder with proof of worth — as if a bigger title, a higher salary, could fill in what I wasn't giving myself. My body didn't follow along: the pressure, the unease, a signal you learn to silence. Everyone around me seemed to just deal with it. "That's life." I eventually understood: maybe it was their life — but I was incapable of making it mine. I think we underestimate that particular torture: not managing to do what everyone else does, even with all the willpower in the world.

No limits. I was whatever I was asked to be, even when it was absurd. That absence hurt me, on both sides — until it became one of the direct causes of the fall.

There was a collapse. What happened exactly stays mine — I won't detail it here. What matters is that everything let go at once:

Responsibility, owned — now, after analyzing it, accepting it, confirming it. If I'd set clear limits, put myself first, if I'd known what I actually wanted instead of letting myself be steered by what others expected of me, I probably wouldn't have ended up in burnout, then depression.

When a collapse is that total, it's never chance. It means nothing had truly been in phase for a long time — the job, the relationship, the person I was pretending to be. The self I thought I knew was never more than an invention — one that cracked under the pressure.

Going back to your parents is against nature. When the bird leaves the nest, it isn't supposed to return. But the fall had been so total it felt like the only reality left — and one thing mattered, only one: take the time. When life forces you to slow down, it's surely for something bigger.

So there I was, surrounded by mountains, alone in a village of fewer than twenty people — no view of the sea, only peaks. I cried when I woke up. I cried when I went to bed. I asked my father to put me to work: felling trees, chopping wood, gathering, farm chores — outward movement, because inside, everything was dead.

Over two years of therapy. You move through every possible state. You understand that what defined you was never more than trauma responses — survival patterns, because you weren't yet strong enough to face the rest. You understand you were never the captain of your own ship. You dissociate, and you rebuild.

I wrote a lot — I needed to get it all out on paper, proof of who I was in that exact moment: what I am, what I feel, what happened to me. One certainty came out of it: changing yourself demands deconstructing so much that trying to change other people becomes impossible.

Then the mind restarted. I began this degree in a depressive state — people around me didn't really understand what it would lead to, and honestly, I didn't have a clear vision either. I was forty. Digital marketing was trending, but more than that, it was a field you could work in remotely — and that angle interested me more than anything else.

During the program, I relearned. Or rather, I finally learned: my brain started working again. Little by little, I understood this path was simply the logical continuation of my experience, in a different environment. I sat my exams, my thesis defense, tests in a foreign language. I graduated with honors.

You show your mind what you're capable of and guess what: it wants more!

An Erasmus+ programme, the wish to improve my English, and always that idea of remote work — so English as one more string to my bow. But this time, not to hang myself: to lift myself up!

I leave, I work, I'm alone, I'm elsewhere, and I'm happy...

I discover my worth in an international market, I discover my mentor. I say "I discover," but I think it was simply what I needed to prove to myself: I have value, and I understand it at forty, abroad, without the pressure of those closest to me...

People often talk about a second life at forty. This life will be mine. I don't know its direction yet, but the path will be strong, and I will open every door.