“This is it,” Elisa thought to herself as she settled into her chair, the same way she had done thousands of times before. But this time felt different. Because this time was different. Elisa had enjoyed a relatively comfortable career as a professional ghostwriter. Clients would come to her, often through direct referrals, or she’d seek out these projects herself through a variety of online bidding sites. Her writing skills were not a concern.

She stretched her hands in front of her, cracked her knuckles, and sat up straight.

Whereas she had written hundreds, even thousands of pieces over the years, they’d always been for clients. They’d have an idea for what they wanted, with or without a skeleton of an outline, and it was up to her to flesh it out. In their voice. Sometimes, she tackled speechwriting for executives at conferences. Other times, a corporate client needed a white paper on a particular topic. For Elisa, the writing was the easy part.

And yet, as she sat there in front of her computer, she could do nothing but stare at the cursor in her empty Google Doc. The cursor just blinked at her — blink, blink, blink — as if it were taunting her with its steady, unforgiving rhythm. Elisa felt it. She felt the uncanny and unrelenting tyranny of the blank page, belittling her ability to string together words in a meaningful and worthwhile manner.

Writer’s block is not the exception. It’s the rule. It’s the default status.

“Come on, Elisa,” she spoke aloud. “You can do this.”

When it came to her professional writing projects, she never had to come up with the core topic. The client always provided that. Sure, she exercised creative license and looked for unique angles to approach the subject matter, but at least she had a starting off point. A springboard off which she could leap into hundreds of words without skipping a beat. This time, she didn’t have that.

What she had was a blank page. And a blinking cursor.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

Her once emboldened sense of confidence shrunk down like a frightened girl, taunted and teased by the older girls bullying her on the school playground. She was thrown back to the numerous times she was told she wasn’t pretty enough, funny enough, clever enough. Good enough. It’s largely because of these years of torment that Elisa retreated into herself, losing herself in books and magazines and stories.

She got good. Taking both creative and technical writing courses at the local community college, Elisa honed her skills as a writer. And a versatile one at that. She’d done well for herself, by herself, and now she felt she needed to make a name for herself. “A blog,” she thought to herself. “A blog is an easy place to start, a platform where I can have my own voice, speak my own truth, tell my own stories.”

This felt like the next logical step in her writing career. Ghostwriting paid the bills and she found the work rewarding, but there was something missing. Elisa didn’t feel like she owned anything. Even though they were her words on the screen or on the page, they weren’t really her words because they weren’t her voice. So, she wanted to write, as she had done so diligently for years, but from her own perspective.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

Her work had consumed her for all those years. And it was then, as she just stared at the blinking cursor, that Elisa came to a profound realization. A conclusion that would shake her sense of self-identity down to its very core: You cannot sit down to write when you haven’t stood up to live.

Elisa closed her laptop, put on her coat and stepped outside.