The Digital Ghost

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Wordweavers Story: The Digital Ghost

I am a member of a writing group called the WordWeavers in the southwest of France. We meet once a month to share stories of 1000 words written in response to a prompt.

August 2025 Story: The Kingdom of Eternal Night

July 2025 Story: The Scarlet Spectre’s Social Hour

This month’s prompt is “backwards glance”, and here is my contribution, a ghost story:

Logline: When a former corporate executive receives a phantom work anniversary notification three years after being laid off, she confronts the high-powered ghost of her LinkedIn profile and must decide whether to resurrect her toxic past or finally lay it to rest in the present of her new life as a digital nomad in Bali.

The Wi-Fi in the Canggu café was acting like a capricious teenager: fast and furious when it felt like it, sullen and slow when you really needed it.

Cleo tapped her fingers against the ceramic cup. Tap-tap-tap. Condensation pooled around the base of her iced turmeric latte, the coffee so roasted it probably had its own zip code. Outside, a scooter horn blared, answered by a motorbike weaving around a stray dog like a stunt double in a low-budget action film. Tuesday had a new soundtrack: no sirens, no elevator chimes from the 42nd floor.

Her laptop screen flickered. A notification slid into the top right corner, polite but lethal.

LinkedIn: Congrats on your work anniversary at Orion Global! Give your network a heads-up.

Cleo stared. The cursor hovered over the “X,” trembling slightly.

Orion Global. It had been three years since the layoffs. Three years since the “restructuring” that had escorted her out of the glass-walled building with a cardboard box and a severance package that felt more like hush money.

The algorithm, in its infinite wisdom, had forgotten she was fired. It thought she was still the VP of Strategic Operations. She was still the woman in the silk blouse who slept four hours a night and considered a panic attack a valid form of cardio.

She clicked the notification. Mistake.

A ghost filled the screen. Her old headshot.

Just look at her. The blazer was sharp enough to cut glass. The smile was practised—teeth whitened to a blinding unnatural gleam, eyes wide and terrifyingly alert. It was the face of a woman who answered emails at 3:00 AM and wore waterproof mascara because crying in the bathroom had to be a scheduled event.

Three years, the notification chirped. Celebrate with your network!

“Celebrate,” she muttered. A barista with a topknot looked over, concerned. She waved him off.

She scrolled down. The phantom limb syndrome kicked in—buzzing phone, adrenaline spike, toxic triumph in the boardroom. Down, down, into the archives of her digital past.

Cleo M. (3 years ago): “Grind while they sleep. Sleep is for the weak when you’re changing the world!. #HustleCulture #Leadership”

She winced. Physical pain. She actually posted that.

Cleo M. (3 years ago): “Another 80-hour week in the books. The team crushed it. “

“Sleep is for the weak,” she whispered to her latte. “FFS, Cleo.”

She looked up. Through the open slats of the café window, she saw a woman walking down the dusty street. The woman was balancing a basket of offerings—flowers, incense, rice—on her head. She moved with a fluid, unhurried grace, stepping around a puddle without breaking her rhythm.

Cleo looked back at the screen. The “Cleo” in the posts was a stranger. A frantic, hollowed-out stranger who thought “busy” was a personality trait. She remembered the ulcer that had gnawed at her stomach lining during Q4. She remembered missing her sister’s engagement party because of a merger that fell through anyway.

She looked at her hands now. Unmanicured. Tan. A small callous on her thumb from the surfboard she was terrible at riding but loved anyway.

The ghost on the screen was so very successful.
The woman in the café had a pulse.

The choice wasn’t hard, but it was heavy. It required an exorcism.

She hit Edit Profile.

The cursor blinked at “VP of Strategic Operations.” It waited for her to update the years, to legitimise the lie.

Instead, she highlighted the text. Delete.

She typed: Freelance Consultant & Errant Nomad.

She went to the summary section. The paragraph about “synergy” and “maximising ROI” vanished.

New Summary: “I help sustainable brands tell their stories. Sometimes I miss meetings. I never miss the sunset. Formerly high-powered, currently high-humidity.”

She hovered over the “Update” button. A sudden, sharp fear spiked in her chest. The fear of irrelevance. If she wasn’t the VP of Orion Global, who was she? Just another digital nomad with a laptop and a fantasy?

She looked outside again. The woman with the basket had reached the temple gate. She set the offering down, lit the incense, and bowed. A small, quiet act of devotion.

Cleo exhaled. The breath was long and shaky, leaving her lungs empty and ready to be filled with the damp, thick air of the present.

She clicked Save.

The page refreshed. The blazer photo remained—she’d change that later, maybe to one where she looked less like a hostage—but the title was gone. The anniversary notification vanished, replaced by the new truth.

Her phone buzzed. Not an email. A WhatsApp message from her surf instructor.

Waves good at 4pm. You coming?

Cleo closed the laptop. The screen went black, reflecting her own face. No filter. Just her, unenhanced, looking back at herself.

“Yeah,” she said to the empty chair opposite her. “I’m on my way.”

Wordweavers in France has recently published an anthology called Thank you, Shirley Valentine that contains stories about strong women making radical changes in their lives.

On the threshold of your next chapter, how do you lay the ghost of your first chapter to rest?

To lay the ghost of a first chapter to rest, you must stop trying to ignore it and instead invite it to sit down for a final exit interview.

In psychological terms, you are navigating a liminal space—the disorienting “threshold” between an identity that no longer fits and one that hasn’t fully formed. The “ghost” isn’t the job or the relationship itself; it is the neural pathways of your old habits and the lingering attachment to status or security.

Here is a protocol for laying that ghost to rest, drawing on narrative therapy and transition psychology.

1. The “Skill Distillation” (Deconstruction)

Ghosts often haunt us because we think we left our “best self” behind in the old life. You need to separate your intrinsic value from your institutional container.

• The Exercise: Take a piece of paper. In one column, write down the things you miss about the old chapter (e.g., “I miss being the expert,” “I miss the team,” “I miss the adrenaline”).
• The Shift: In the second column, strip away the context to reveal the core skill or need. “I miss being the VP” becomes “I miss high-level problem solving.” “I miss the office banter” becomes “I need connection.”
• The Insight: You realize the ghost (the title/role) is dead, but the spirit (your capability) is alive and can be translocated to your new life.

2. The “Digital Exorcism” (Ritual)

As Cleo discovered in the story, our digital footprints act as anchors, keeping us tethered to past versions of ourselves. We often keep old profiles “just in case,” which signals to our brain that the door is still ajar.

• The Exercise: Schedule a 30-minute “Digital Exorcism.” Go to LinkedIn, your website, or your bio. Delete the corporate buzzwords. Archive the photos that look like a stranger.
• The Shift: Do not just delete; replace. Write a bio that reflects your current reality, even if it feels smaller. “Former Architect” is a tombstone; “Landscape Painter” is a living breathing person.
• The Insight: When you align your public avatar with your private reality, you stop performing for an audience that has already left the theater.

3. The “Eulogy for the Old Self” (Grief Work)

We often rush to “move on” without properly mourning. This creates “unresolved grief,” which manifests as that phantom limb syndrome—reaching for a phone that doesn’t ring.

• The Exercise: Write a literal eulogy for your past self. Acknowledge what that version of you achieved, what they survived (the burnout, the late nights), and—crucially—thank them for getting you to this threshold.
• The Shift: Read it aloud (perhaps on a walk or in nature, given your affinity for the outdoors). Then, perform a physical act of closure: burn the paper, delete the old work files, or pack the “power suit” into a donation bag.
• The Insight: You are not killing the past; you are burying it with honor so it becomes an ancestor rather than a ghost. Ancestors offer wisdom; ghosts just make noise.

4. Re-Authoring the Narrative

In narrative therapy, we move from a “contamination sequence” (where the good past was ruined by the bad ending) to a “redemption sequence” (where the struggle was the necessary fire for the new forging).

• The Shift: Stop telling the story of “how I lost X.” Start telling the story of “how I chose Y.”
• The Reframing: Instead of “I got laid off and now I’m freelancing,” try “I survived a system that wasn’t built for me, and now I’m building one that is.”

The goal isn’t to forget the first chapter. It’s to place it firmly on the bookshelf of your life so you can stop re-reading it and finally pick up the pen to write the next one.