The cursor blinked at her like it was mocking her. Again!

Mira stared at the empty document on her laptop, her fingers hovering uselessly over the keyboard. For the past ten years, she had written stories for people who couldn’t string two sentences together but had their faces on billboards and their names on bookshelves. Celebrities, CEOs, influencers. People who knew how to sell their stories but not how to write them :)

And Mira had been their ghost.

A new email sat open on the side of her screen:

Subject: Exciting New Project!
Hey Mira! Got a new client, he’s an influencer, 3 million followers, wants to write about “overcoming obstacles” (lol). Needs your magic. Usual deadline. You’re the best!

She wanted to throw her laptop out the window.

Instead, she sighed, got up, made herself coffee, sat back down, and opened a blank page, not for the influencer, but for herself.
She wrote:

Title: Untitled

That’s as far as she got.

For weeks, she kept trying. Every night, after finishing other people’s stories, she would sit in front of her own, and nothing would come. Not because she had nothing to say, but because she didn’t even know who she was without someone else’s voice in her head.

She would type a sentence, then delete it. Write a paragraph, then overanalyze it until it felt like someone else's work. Every time she tried to write, the voices of her past clients whispered in her head.....!!! Make it more engaging. Add a dramatic arc. This isn’t marketable enough.

Until one night, everything cracked.

It was past midnight. Mira was scrolling through Instagram, half-drunk on cheap wine and bad decisions, when she saw a post from one of the authors she’d ghostwritten for.

“So proud of my book, my story, my words. It’s all me.
#Blessed #HardWorkPaysOff”

She let out a dry laugh, sharp and bitter. She remembered writing every word of that book, pouring parts of her own broken heart into sentences no one would ever know were hers.

Her fingers clenched around the glass. Then, slowly, she put it down, closed her laptop, and pulled out an old, battered notebook from a drawer. It was the one she had used years ago, before the so to say, ghostwriting gigs, before deadlines, before she had traded her voice for a paycheck.

She ran a hand over the cover, then flipped it open. The pages smelled like dust and forgotten dreams.

She wrote one line:

"I don’t know how to be the protagonist in my own story."

And somehow, that was the key.

She kept going. Some nights it was only a sentence, sometimes a paragraph. She didn’t try to make it pretty. She didn’t think about who would read it. She wrote about the first story she had ever written at twelve and how her teacher laughed at it. About the boyfriend who said,
"No one cares about your little stories." About the day her father passed away, and she couldn’t find the words to write his eulogy, even though she had written books for strangers.

She wrote about being invisible. About being the person behind the curtain, pulling all the strings but never taking a bow.

One night, she hesitated, her fingers hovering over the page.
"What if no one cares?" she thought. What if I’m not as good as I think I am? But then she took a deep breath and wrote anyway.

Weeks turned into months. Some days she wanted to delete everything. Some days she cried while typing. But she kept showing up.

One night, her friend Nisha called.

“You sound different lately,” Nisha said.

“How?” Mira asked, leaning back on her couch, notebook resting on her lap.

“Like... like you’re finally writing for yourself.”

Mira let out a soft chuckle. “Maybe I am.”

“Good,” Nisha said, her voice warm. “I was starting to worry you’d spend your whole life being someone else’s shadow.”

Mira didn’t respond right away. She looked at the words in front of her, ink smudged where her fingers had brushed over them too many times. “You know what’s funny?” she finally said. “I used to think that being invisible was safer. That if I hid behind other people’s words, I wouldn’t have to risk anything.”

“But?” - Nisha exclaimed.

“But I think I was wrong. It’s exhausting, living in the background.”

Nisha hummed in agreement. “So, what now?”

Mira exhaled. “I finish this.”

And she did. The night she wrote the last sentence, there were no fireworks. No applause. Just her, sitting alone in her tiny apartment, staring at the words:

“This is the story of a woman who gave everyone else a voice until she finally found her own. This is the story of a woman who wrote herself :)”

She didn’t know if anyone would ever read it. She didn’t know if it would sell, or if it even mattered.

The next morning, when her agent emailed her about another "exciting ghostwriting opportunity," she hesitated for a moment. The old fear crept in, What if I fail? What if no one cares? But then she looked at her words, her story, and for the first time, she knew they were enough.

She typed her response:

"Thank you, but I think it’s time I write my own story now."

And for the first time, the words felt like hers.