If you never saw someone like you in the stories, write yourself in. That’s how the shelf changes.

Absence in the stories you grew up with teaches a quiet lesson about who gets to be the subject. That lesson is wrong, and the correction is not a complaint but a contribution. Every shelf is made of what people decided to write, which means it can be changed by someone deciding to write.

Write the version you needed, with the particular details only you would know to include. Do not generalize it into something universal first. Someone else in that same position will recognize it immediately, and the recognition is the entire point.