The Hacker Was Me

I had a dream, or maybe it was a nightmare.
A woman hacked into my computer and found out I’d been stealing ideas from ChatGPT. She was famous, or at least famous enough that one public statement from her could ruin someone’s life. Within hours, she exposed me as a fraud. My name was everywhere. My already tiny reputation vanished overnight, like it had never existed.

When I tried to explain myself, no one listened. The hacker kept talking over me, her voice louder than mine, until I couldn’t even hear myself think. Not even my own sister believed me. I was screaming into the void, desperate to be understood, but the more I spoke, the less anyone seemed to hear.

When I woke up, my heart was pounding, and the shame lingered. It felt less like a dream and more like a confession—like I’d finally seen something I’d been hiding from myself. Except I didn’t know what that thing was.

At first, I thought it represented my imposter syndrome, something I’ve talked about before. But this felt deeper. I’ve already made peace with the idea that I sometimes feel like a fraud. This wasn’t that. This is about being terrified that one day, everyone else will agree.

Our minds believe what we tell them. And most of us, whether consciously or not, feed them fear.

We whisper things like, You’re not original. You’re not smart enough. You’re copying. You’re pretending. You don’t do this as well as her. You’re never going to make it.

Just a few of the thoughts that show up, uninvited, every single day.

And like obedient machines, our minds accept it as truth. They don’t question the tone or check the source. They just download whatever we repeat and run it in the background until it becomes the story of who we think we are.

But maybe that’s where the dream becomes something else.

Maybe the hacker wasn’t an enemy. Maybe she was my alter ego, the voice in me that challenges the status quo and pushes me to be braver and dig beneath the surface.

So they think you’re a fraud. You know better. The world won’t stop. You’ll keep writing. You’ll be okay. You’re one small piece of a very big universe, so do what lights you up and stop giving weight to anyone else’s opinion.

I think, in some way, we’re all haunted by the hacker. She’s not hiding in our laptops; she lives in our heads, rent free, available at all hours, waiting to systemically take us down. She’s the voice that interrupts every good idea with a reminder that someone else has already said it better.   She’s the one who makes us edit our truths before they even make it to the page. She’s the reason we equate inspiration with theft and vulnerability with exposure.  However, this is only the case if we let it.  As much as we allow in negative thoughts, we can shut them out just as easily.

I don’t think my dream was about ChatGPT at all. Sure, I’m slightly terrified of AI and the way it’s advancing faster than we can process, but that’s a conversation for another time.

I think it was about the fear of being seen and the world we’ve built around that fear.

We live in a time where originality is both expected and impossible. Everything we create echoes something that came before it. Still, we punish ourselves for not being completely new, forgetting that nothing human ever really is.

We’re living in a world where everyone is watching and being watched at all times. Where authenticity has become a brand and confession has become content. You can’t just exist anymore; you have to curate it. Some of us want to be honest, but not too honest. Confident, but not arrogant. Vulnerable, but only if it photographs well or sells the exact story we are trying to tell.

The hacker, then, is the consequence of that tension. The gray area. She’s the part of us that can’t stand pretending anymore, the one who wants to burn down the version of ourselves we built for approval.

When I woke up, I couldn’t shake one thought: maybe the hacker wasn’t destroying me. Maybe she was saving me.

Maybe she was forcing me to face the truth I’ve been dodging, that no one else has the power to expose me if I stop hiding.

Because the real fraud isn’t the person who borrows, echoes or learns. It’s the person who silences themselves before they ever start. The one who lets fear become their master.

So yes, I had a dream about being hacked. But maybe the invasion wasn’t a threat at all. Maybe it was an intervention, a warning that staying small is its own kind of theft.
Maybe the hacker was never the villain.
Maybe she was me, all along, telling me to wake up.