Aria sat at her desk, fingers frozen above the keyboard, mind swirling in loops of self-doubt. The blinking cursor on the empty page felt like a heartbeat she had lost touch with.
"Get out of your head and write from your heart," she whispered to herself — advice she once gave a student, now echoing back to her.
She remembered her old journal, tucked beneath dusty books. Its pages were raw and real, filled with dreams, sketches, and fragments of feelings too wild to tame. Back then, she didn't write for likes or shares. She wrote to breathe.
"Some write to inspire and some inspire to write," her friend Alankrita used to say during their university days. Aria smiled. Those words still held weight.
She pulled the journal close and wrote the first thing that came to mind.
"All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."
—Ernest Hemingway.
She wrote:
“I am scared I will never be enough — and I write so I can find the parts of me that already are.”
It wasn’t polished. It wasn’t pretty. But it was true.
"It’s okay to write garbage, as long as you edit brilliantly," she remembered reading once. I can clean up later, she told herself, but I have to start now.
She looked outside her window. Rain tapped gently on the pane. Each drop reminded her that the world was alive with stories. And she? She was the only one who saw it this way.
"Don't forget, no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell."
—Charles de Lint.
She typed again. This time, she didn’t stop.
I write to inspire, to create, to motivate.
—Christen Blades.
She wasn’t trying to impress anyone. She was writing because something in her needed to be said.
"You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say," Fitzgerald had said.
Aria paused. She read her own words. They weren't perfect. But they were hers.
"If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word," Margaret Atwood once admitted. Neither will I, Aria vowed.
It no longer mattered if no one read her stories.
"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self," she thought.
Each word felt like a match lighting the dark corners of her soul.
I write to educate. I write to give voice to the voiceless. I write because my world depends on my work. I write because I want to be heard even without a platform.
—Love Igbeboh.
As she wrote, she felt something awaken — not just in her, but perhaps, in those who would one day read her words.
"By doing what you love, you inspire and awaken the hearts of others."
She smiled and remembered what her mentor once told her:
"Work for a cause, not for applause. Live life to express, not to impress."
With one deep breath, she let the story take over.
Aria didn’t just write that night.
She returned to herself.
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