Every seven days, someone goes viral for hating it. I’m still telling you to get on. Like clockwork. Every week there’s a thread going around about how the people on LinkedIn are insufferable, how it’s the worst corner of the internet, how everyone there is embarrassing themselves in public.

I know the genre well, because late last year I went viral and became the subject of it. The dragging was extensive. People called me every name available to them. I read a lot of it.

I’m still here telling you to get on, because LinkedIn has changed my life more than any other platform I’ve ever touched (outside of Substack hehe), and my only real regret is that I didn’t start sooner.

For about two years, I was stuck on a question I couldn’t answer: was I an influencer, or was I someone who shares what she actually knows, or was I an author? I sat in that question for two years, hedging, posting into the wrong places, being a little vague everywhere.

When I finally chose, I chose LinkedIn. Everything since has come from that one decision.

Yes, it has problems

I’m not going to pretend the haters are making it up.

My number one pet peeve: someone replies to my comment, and it is so obviously AI. The cadence, the little summary of what I just said, the enthusiasm that belongs to no one. If you’re going to talk to me, talk to me.

What surprised me is how much the place has changed. I was a tech recruiter for over ten years, and LinkedIn was my whole job, so I know exactly how stiff it used to be. It isn’t that anymore.

People are being human there now. They post funny videos and selfies and real updates about their lives, and it works.

(The version of LinkedIn in your head is probably about four years out of date. Mine was too.)

Some of my most viral posts have been about being broke. Broke while I was being interviewed on the BBC, which I still laugh about. I’ve written about friendships. I’ve written about dating. I’m an open book there, and the openness is what travels.

So let me use this space to talk you into starting today.

First, the receipts

I’m not going on here on my soapbox and telling you to do something without showing you what it did for me.

In the last 6 months, LinkedIn has brought me $ 47 K in direct revenue. Real money in my account, from women who found me on a platform everyone loves to make fun of.

It brought me 3 speaking slots at Cannes Lions this year. It’s how my talent manager found me, which means it’s now behind every brand conversation I’m in. And it’s a big part of why our podcast is growing, which I’ll come back to.

If you want the actual mechanics of how I grew there, this is the piece I’d send you next:

It comes down to who’s in the audience

Let’s do the math together for a second.

Instagram gives me a huge audience, and I love it; it’s my biggest platform by a mile. But a lot of that audience is there to be entertained. They’re on the couch at 11pm. They are not, in that moment, thinking about who to hire.

On LinkedIn, everyone showed up in work mode. They have a budget and a problem they’ve been told to solve. The person reading your post is the same person who can approve a contract on Tuesday.

Same words, different audience, completely different outcome.

(This is why a post that gets 200 likes on LinkedIn can be worth more than one that gets 20,000 on Instagram. I’ve watched it happen enough times to stop being surprised by it.)

The podcast thing

Most podcasters put their clips on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts, and then they stop, because everyone has decided LinkedIn is for job announcements and Q3 humble-brags.

We started posting our Afropolitan clips there and the difference was immediate. The comments were longer. The people commenting had titles. The DMs weren’t “love this!”, they were “we’re planning something for next quarter, can we talk.”

Video is doing unusually well on LinkedIn right now and very few podcasters are putting it there. Sis, go now, while there’s still so much room.

I have no idea how far it’s gone

from walking around in London to an evening get-together at a bar in San Francisco, or even when I was standing in line to get my badge in Cannes, someone will bring up a post of mine from four months ago. Something I wrote in fifteen minutes and forgot about the same day.

I know my posts have been screenshotted into group chats I’ll never see. I know they’ve been forwarded to people who then followed me and said nothing for six months before booking a call.

Every woman who has ever paid me for a coaching call was already reading my content. Every single one. She just needed one post specific enough to make her think oh, she can actually help me with this exact thing.

You can’t manufacture that. You can only be visible long enough for it to happen to you.

There was a stretch where I couldn’t tell what was working and what was noise, so I built myself a prompt to audit my own account: what my positioning actually reads like, which posts are pulling their weight, where I’m being vague when I think I’m being clear.

Run it on yourself before you write another post. It’s uncomfortable and extremely useful.

“Okay, but is LinkedIn for me?”

This is the number one question I get, and it’s usually asked with a slight wince, like the answer is going to be no.

The answer is yes, and the test is simple: do you know something?

That’s the filter. If you have expertise, lived or learned, LinkedIn is for you.

I’ve worked with women in medicine. Women in government. A woman selling a CPG product out of her kitchen. Women in corporate roles who thought a personal brand was something only founders were allowed to have. None of them fit the tech-bro-posting-about-hustle mold, and every one of them found her people there.

What actually holds people back is staying vague. General knowledge doesn’t convert. Your own experience, with names and dates and numbers attached, does.

Where to start

You don’t need a content calendar. You need a profile that doesn’t put people off, and a habit.

Fix your photo first. Your profile picture should be bright and colorful. It should pop. Most people upload something dim and cluttered, taken in a badly lit conference room, and then wonder why nobody clicks. Wear a color. Get a clean background. This one change does more than a month of posting.

Then your banner. Free game: you don’t need Canva, and you definitely don’t need to pay a designer for this. Claude Design will build you a banner in about five minutes. Tell it your name, what you do, your colors, and let it run. Swap it out when your positioning changes.

Write a tagline that isn’t just your job title. “Head of Sales” tells me nothing. Where you’re based, what you’re known for, what you’re building, an accolade you’ve earned: that tells me whether to click.

Use the About section properly. You have a lot of space there, and most people leave it empty. Career journey, press you’ve gotten, languages you speak, how someone can actually work with you. Put one human thing at the end. People remember the human thing.

Build the network before you need it. Old colleagues, people you studied with, the woman you met at that conference, your friend’s sister who works somewhere interesting. You’ll never know that your neighbor’s son works at the company you’ve been trying to reach unless you’re connected to your neighbor’s son.

Send thoughtful cold messages. Never a pitch in the first message. Just a real reason you’re reaching out and a small, easy ask.

And you have my permission to skip the posting entirely. If content isn’t your thing, a good profile and consistent DMs will get you most of what I’ve described. Posting speeds it up.

One last thing

Everyone is telling you to be on Instagram and TikTok, and I’m on both. But there’s a smaller, frankly more serious group of people building their names on LinkedIn right now, and they’re getting hired and booked and paid while the rest of the internet writes another thread about how insufferable they are.

Go be one of them.

Start with the photo. Then the banner. Then run the audit and see what your profile is actually saying about you.

And if you want to sit down with me and go through all of it properly- your positioning, your first 90 days, what to post and what to stop posting- I do 1:1 coaching, and you can bring me every LinkedIn question you have:

Book a 1:1 coaching call with me

When the first “do you consult?” lands in your DMs, come back and tell me. I’ll be in the comments.

“What I get by following: I cannot tell. "On the journey to build the top podcast in entrepreneurship" is your goal, not my benefit. And it points at the podcast, which is not what you told me LinkedIn is for.”

I read it. Closed the laptop. I was annoyed, but honestly, it was right.

I’ve been building on LinkedIn for the past year. I write for a living. And a tool did something better than any strategist you’re going to pay with no ego and no interest in my feelings: looked at my profile for ten minutes and found the thing I’d been walking past for 5 months.

It cost me ten minutes and a Chrome extension.

First, why LinkedIn at all

Some of you aren’t on LinkedIn. You’ve decided it’s for men in quarter-zips posting about synergy, and I understand, because I decided that too for a long time.

Here’s my receipt. I’ve shown up on LinkedIn consistently for a year, and it’s put an extra $37,000 in my pocket, from speaking and partnerships.

That’s from posting. No launch, no funnel, no ad spend.

Most people who know the Afropolitan Podcast found it through LinkedIn. That one still surprises me.

If you’re reading my writing, you have expertise that should be earning you money. And you’re probably trying to make that happen on Instagram, where you’re competing with the entire internet for attention that converts badly.

Instagram takes volume, luck, and a funnel most women never get around to building. I have 31K followers there, and I can tell you it is the harder road to money.

LinkedIn works differently. The people booking speakers, filling board seats, and approving brand budgets are already sitting on it, reading, and they’re surrounded by far less competition for their attention.

Speaking invitations. Board seats. Brand partners who come to you. Clients who arrive already understanding what you do.

(The gap between those two platforms is the single most expensive thing I ignored in my thirties.)

None of it reaches you if a stranger lands on your profile and leaves confused. Which is where the audit comes in.

If you’re doing everything right and still growing by four a week

I’m talking to the woman who posts consistently, writes thoughtful captions, comments on other people’s work, and watches her follower count move like it’s wading through syrup.

You’re not lazy, and you’re not late. You’re too close to your own profile to see it.

When you’ve read your own headline three hundred times, your brain fills in the meaning before your eyes get there. A stranger doesn’t have that. She lands on your page, reads eleven words, and decides.

(Every woman I coach thinks her problem is content volume. It’s almost never content volume.)

So do the math with me for a second. Three posts a week is around 150 posts a year. If the thing turning people away is sitting in your headline, you just spent 150 posts finding that out the slow way.

Ten minutes now, or another year of that.

What you actually get

You open your LinkedIn profile, paste one prompt I give you, and go make a coffee.

When you come back, there’s a full strategist-level audit of your profile waiting. Written by something that actually read your posts, not something generating advice about LinkedIn in general.

It’ll tell you:

• What your headline is accidentally telling people you do (mine was [Creator | Author | Speaker | On the journey to build the top podcast in entrepreneurship])

• Which of your last 15 posts pull against your positioning, by name

• Your first two lines, quoted back to you, each one marked as stopping the scroll or dying on it

• The topic you’ve been overposting, and the one your best-performing posts actually sit in

• Where your CTAs point, and what’s missing between “she liked this” and “she paid you”

• The five things to fix this week, ordered by revenue impact

Then you ask it to build you a visual dashboard of all of it, which is the part I use every single week and the part I’ve seen nobody else teach.

I’ve watched women pay over 5 figures for a LinkedIn audit and receive a slide deck that said: “post more videos.”

The full walkthrough is below

Everything past this line is the exact setup: the two things you need, where to click, the full prompt with every blank marked so you can drop your own information in, the two mistakes that make the audit come back generic, and my real results with screenshots.

Paid subscribers get the walkthrough, the prompt, and the dashboard method. You’re also getting next week’s growth post first.

For the price of one overpriced smoothie a month, you skip the guessing.

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I have no idea what any of them is invested in.

These women have money. Several of them make more than I do. We have talked about pelvic floors and prenups and the specific loneliness of being the first woman in your family to earn like this.

Ask where their money lives and the room shifts.

Someone changes the subject. Someone makes a joke about being bad with numbers. And someone always says “I really need to figure that out,” and we all nod, and we order another round.

I have been guilty of this. For years I thought bringing up my portfolio at brunch would sound like showing off. Caring about money felt unfeminine. It felt like something other people did, something women like me were supposed to pretend we didn’t think about while we thought about it constantly.

Then a friend pulled out her phone at dinner and showed me how she organizes her savings. An emergency fund. A travel fund. A bucket just for angel investing. She scrolled through them the way you’d scroll through photos from a trip.

It was the first time money looked like something I could arrange rather than a test I had already failed.

That conversation changed how I moved. And I only had it because she decided to go first.

The last taboo at the table

We talk about therapy now because someone went first. Same with fertility. Same with leaving the jobs that were draining us, with divorce, with boundaries, with telling our mothers no.

Nobody has gone first on investing.

So we sit there pretending money bores us. As if the women at the table making six figures don’t also Google “how to start investing” at midnight and close the tab before anything sticks.

A few weeks ago I stopped pretending and asked some of my friends directly. One told me she already had money set aside. She was saving for a bag.

I love a bag. But I told her what I’m about to tell you: the discipline already exists. She has proven she can set money aside, month after month, toward something she wants. The skill is there. It is simply pointed at an asset that loses value the moment it leaves the store.

The silence costs us. Compound interest does not wait for us to stop feeling awkward.

Here is my proof that the awkwardness is survivable: my investment portfolio just crossed six figures. And I started exactly where you might be right now. Midnight Googling. Tab closed. Telling myself I’d figure it out later.

The best-performing stock market in the world this year, in dollar terms, is one almost nobody in your feed is talking about. I’m invested in it. I’ll tell you which one in a minute.

One of my friends went first for me. This is me going first for you.

For my paid subscribers, I will share: every account I hold, every fund by name, what I did with my book advance, how I’m buying into the best-performing stock market in the world, and the exact message to send your group chat tonight.

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It’s midnight and you’re scrolling LinkedIn.

The phone glow is the only light in the room. And there she is. A woman maybe five years younger than you, standing on a stage, microphone in hand. The caption reads Honored to keynote the Women in Leadership Summit.

You know her resume. It’s a fraction of yours. Fewer years on it. Fewer scars. Fewer late nights like the ones your career is built on.

And yet there she is. Booked and paid.

You close the app. You lie there in the dark. And the thought that surfaces is quieter than jealousy, and it hurts more:

What does she have that I don’t?

Sis, let me answer that for you, because I have been the woman in that bed.

She doesn’t have more qualifications than you. She has more visibility. That’s it. That’s the whole gap.

Most of us answer the midnight question the same way. I need one more certification. Maybe one more year of experience. Then I’m allowed to stand on a stage and charge for what I know. We treat visibility like a reward you collect once the work is done. Finish the website first. Get the promotion first. Then you can be seen.

Girl, the women getting booked stopped waiting a long time ago. Some of them have half your credentials and none of your proof. What they built is a system for being seen, and then a system for turning being seen into being paid.

If you’re a woman in your thirties or forties with real expertise, real results, and a quiet, maddening sense that you’re still the best-kept secret in your industry, this one is for you.

I call it the Visibility Gap: the distance between what you know and what others know about you. Closing it isn’t vanity. It’s the highest-ROI work you can do for a career that has outgrown your LinkedIn profile.

And it starts with one asset that sells while you sleep. Let me tell you the whole thing.

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A woman named Marina changed my business in one sentence.

We were at a Blueprint mastermind in Nashville. I knew exactly how much I’d paid to be in that house, surrounded by people whose work I’d admired for years. And in the middle of it, Marina turned to me and said, “Chika, I read every one of your emails. Your emails are amazing. Who writes them for you?”

Me. I write them.

I said it out loud, and something clicked. There’s a whole industry of people who pay to have their emails written. Ghostwriters, agencies, retainers. And I’d been doing the thing myself, for years, in the dark, not even filing it under “skill.”

I flew home and started paying attention. Every time someone mentioned my writing, I noticed it now. The comments, the replies, the “who does your copy” questions. The pattern had been there the whole time. I just hadn’t let myself count it.

This is the strange thing about becoming a B2B creator. Your expertise is usually the thing you’ve been ignoring, because it comes too easy to feel valuable.

Here’s the exact 5-step process I used to turn that one realization into 30,000 LinkedIn followers and steady inbound in six months. Plus the one bonus most people skip.

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Six months ago, I was sleeping in my childhood bedroom, eating Indomie, too embarrassed to tell anyone I was building again.

Last week, a company paid me to fly to another city, put me in a hotel, and handed me a microphone.

The difference between those two versions of me is 30,000 LinkedIn followers. That’s the number. But the number doesn’t tell you what happened. What happened is I figured out a system for being seen, and then I figured out how to turn being seen into being paid.

This post is the system. The free part gives you the framework. The paid part gives you the exact posts, the cadence, the outreach template, and the three things I stopped doing that doubled my growth.

The framework

I didn’t grow on LinkedIn because I posted more than everyone else. I grew because I treated visibility like a skill.

Most women on LinkedIn are waiting. Until they feel ready. Until the website is finished. Until they lose the last ten pounds or get the certification or land a title worth talking about. They treat visibility like a reward you earn once the work is done. But the visibility is the work. It’s what creates the opportunities. You don’t get it as a prize afterward.

I learned this the hard way. In 2022, I was on the BBC, Forbes, and WIRED. Major publications had written about me. And I was still broke, still invisible in the rooms that mattered, still eating instant noodles and wondering why all that external validation never turned into income.

Being written about puts someone else’s name on your story. Being seen puts your name in front of people who can hire you, book you, and pay you.

LinkedIn is where those people are. In six months of posting consistently, I built an audience that sends me inbound opportunities every week. No cold DMs. No portfolio website. No waiting until I felt ready.

In the paid post, I break down:

• The exact 3-part content system I used to grow from 0 to 30,000 followers in 6 months. What I posted, when, and why most people’s content dies before they hit publish.

• The outreach template that turned followers into paid speaking gigs. Word for word, including the subject line that gets opened and the one thing you have to put in the first paragraph.

• The three things I stopped doing that doubled my growth rate. Two of them will surprise you. The third one will make you uncomfortable.

• How to price yourself when you’ve never been paid to speak. The exact rate I started at, and how I climbed it.

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The women I know in their late 30s are not having midlife crises.

They are having midlife reckonings.

The difference: a crisis is loud and short. A reckoning is quiet and structural.

A crisis ends in a sports car. A reckoning ends in a different life.

We are watching a generation of women rebuild from the inside, in public, in slow motion.

Nobody has named it yet.

I am going to tell you what I did, what worked, what almost broke me, and what I am building now, because the path I took is the one I keep getting asked about. The Substack growth. The LinkedIn move. The brand deals I turned down. The book deal. The repositioning. The decision to teach what I have learned to other women on this path. It is all below.

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This is the part of the story where I stop talking about her.

I have been writing about Serena for a few weeks now. The friendship, the brunch, the bathroom call, the pink dress, the silence after my engagement. You have read it. Some of you have written to me and said you have lived your own version. Some of you have asked what came next.

What came next is this essay. If you have not read part one, part two, or part three, go back here.

This is the part where I tell you what it actually cost me. What I had to grieve to leave her behind. The woman I had been carrying for a decade because I needed her to choose me. The version of myself I have buried in the six years since.

I have been waiting a long time to write this.

The first thing the friendship cost me was my circle.

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The last time I saw Serena, I was wearing a bright pink dress.

It was May. A friend’s child’s birthday party in Lagos. The kind of afternoon party that runs from one until five, with too much food and a bouncy castle and women you have known for years circulating between rooms. I came in alone. Eche was meeting me later.

I saw her out of the corner of my eye when I walked in.

I want you to understand what was happening in my body at that moment.

I had known what she did for almost six months. I had not spoken to her in that entire time. I had spent half a year holding the knowledge of her betrayal in my mouth like a stone, swallowing it back every time I saw her name come up in a group chat, every time someone asked how she was, every time her face appeared in a photo from an event I had decided not to attend.

I had come to this party knowing she might be there.

I had decided, as I walked in, that I would not approach her.

If she came to me, I would know one thing.

If she did not, I would know another.

She did not come to me.

I moved through the party. I greeted the women I always greeted. I held the baby. I ate from the buffet. I became aware of her location across the room and decided not to look at her again.

The pink dress mattered.

I do not normally wear pink. I had bought the dress for that summer, specifically, fitted, knee-length, the kind of shade that catches the light from across a room. I had put it on that morning, knowing I might see her. I had wanted to be impossible to miss.

Two hours into the party, a friend touched my arm.

“Have you seen Serena?” she said. “You two should at least say hello.”

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I was 31. I had just left a startup that nearly broke me. No partner. No clarity. At a father’s house, I was sleeping in because I couldn’t afford anywhere else.

I needed a system to rebuild. So I made one.

Seven days. Seven prompts. The actual questions I had to answer to find my way back to myself.

I’m giving it to paid subscribers of In the Mirror — free.

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She was my best friend for a decade. She was at my sister's funeral, my big milestones, and every birthday in between. She also tried to take my husband and almost succeeded. This is the first time I'm telling the whole story.

Welcome to Part 2 of The Friendship Timeline.

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She was my best friend for a decade. She was at my sister's funeral, my big milestones, and every birthday in between. She also tried to take my husband and almost succeeded. This is the first time I'm telling the whole story.
Welcome to Part 1 of The Friendship Timeline.

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Here you’ll find the most unfiltered version of my journey — the lives I didn’t live, the timelines I grieved, and what it actually costs to look at yourself honestly.

I’m thirty-seven. I’ve grieved more lives than I’ve lived. I’m finally ready to tell you about every one of them.

At twenty-nine, I was a celebrated startup founder. I had raised over a million dollars as one of the few Black women in 500 Startups. Forbes had written about me. WIRED had written about me. The BBC interview I had just given had gone global.

I was also tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt, sleeping in my old room at my father’s house in Lagos, eating instant noodles for dinner because I had checked my account that morning and there wasn’t enough in it for real food. I had flown to London to talk about scaling a company I couldn’t afford to live off.

That was the night I scrolled through Instagram and watched everyone I knew cross finish lines I had assumed I would cross first. The stunning wedding in Morocco. The baby shower. The first home in a neighborhood I couldn’t have afforded.

I put the phone face down.

I didn’t have a word for what I was feeling. I had been raised to call it behind. Failure. Not yet.

It took me almost a decade to find the word that was actually true. The word is grief.

I was grieving a life I never lived. The marriage I thought I’d have at twenty-five. The children I haven’t had. The friendships that didn’t survive my becoming. The startup that taught me by failing. The sister I lost. The version of me who could have stayed small enough to fit the original script.

I call it Timeline grief.

I kept performing the celebrated-founder role for two more years after I knew the company was over. I kept saying yes to interviews. I kept being the woman in the article.

Because if I stopped being the celebrated Black woman in tech, I didn’t know who I was.

I’m here now because I finally did the work of finding out.

Today I co-host The Afropolitan Podcast with my husband Eche. The show gets over a million views a month. I have a book deal with Simon & Schuster for a book called Timeline Grief, which means the word it took me a decade to find now has an editor and a deadline.

But this Substack is not the highlight reel.

In the Mirror is where I write, in detail, about every timeline I’ve grieved and am still grieving. It will read like a memoir. It will sometimes read like gossip, because telling the truth about your life often reads like gossip when you’ve been raised to perform a polished version of it. It will also teach.

This is the room where the curated life goes off, and the real one comes back.

This week, I’m starting the first series.

It’s called The Friendship Timeline, and it’s about a woman I would have died for. She was one of my closest friends. She was at every pivotal moment of my adult life. She also tried to break up my marriage.

I’m telling the whole story in three parts. Part One drops on Wednesday.

Subscribe so you don’t miss it.

I’m telling the truth here now.

Read part one of “Friendship Timeline Grief”

The Powder Room

The Friend I Would Have Died For

She was my best friend for a decade. She was at my sister's funeral, my big milestones, and every birthday in between. She also tried to take my husband and almost succeeded. This is the first time I'm telling the whole story…

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3 months ago · 18 likes · Chika Uwazie

There was a happy hour I went to in 2017 that I still think about.

It was a Thursday. One of those “optional” ones that everyone in the office knew wasn’t optional. The kind where your manager doesn’t technically take attendance but remembers who showed up. I didn’t want to go. I was tired. I had a presentation due the next morning. I had been the only Black woman in my department for two years and I had learned, through trial and error and a particular kind of quiet observation, that being excellent at my job was not enough.

So I went.

I stood near the bar and laughed at the right times. I asked about someone’s weekend renovation. I nursed a glass of wine I didn’t want and stayed forty-five minutes past the point where my body was telling me to leave. I remember my face aching on the drive home. Not from smiling. From holding the shape of a smile for that long.

That was the tax. And I paid it every week.

If you’ve worked in corporate as a Black woman, you know this tax. You know the calibration. How much of your personality should you reveal? How much ambition to show. How warm to be so they don’t call you aggressive, how direct to be so they don’t call you passive. You learn the temperature of every room before you’ve even entered it because you’ve been burned before.

I say all of this because Emma Grede said something recently that set the internet on fire, and I can’t stop thinking about the way we’re responding to it.

The interview

In a recent interview, Emma said something along the lines of: if you want to live an extraordinary life, if you want real career advancement, you can’t work from home.

The reaction was immediate. And loud.

Black women especially pushed back. The critiques write themselves: We don’t have the privilege of affordable childcare. We don’t have the privilege of having offices built to welcome us. We don’t have the privilege of showing up and being seen the same way. Remote work gave us room to breathe for the first time.

All of that is true. I felt every word of it.

And I also think we’re missing what she actually said.

The difference between endorsement and observation

Emma didn’t say, “This is how it should be.”

She said this is how it is. And pretending otherwise is costing women their careers.

That’s a different sentence.

Big tech has been calling people back for two years. Promotions still favor the person physically present in the room when the conversation happens. The coffee chat before the meeting. The hallway debrief after. The dinner where someone casually mentions an opening. The rules of advancement have not kept pace with the rules of flexibility. Anyone paying attention knows this.

I know it personally. My highest-paid career salary was a fully remote job. I thrived. I was productive. I was excellent. And I also know, sitting here in Lagos building Afropolitan, that I am leaving money on the table every single month because I am not physically in the U.S. schmoozing with brand partners. I know deals that went to other creators because those creators were easy to grab lunch with. I know what it costs to be far from the room. I am living that cost right now.

Both of those things are true at the same time. The freedom of remote work changed my life. And the cost of distance is real, measurable, and ongoing.

Emma holds both of those truths in her hands and chooses to say the uncomfortable one out loud. And we punished her for it.

What do we do with women who are honest

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The Question
Where are you being dishonest in your friendships?

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I applied for a credit card a few years ago.

One of those instant-approval sites where you know within seconds.

The screen said: denied.

So I tried another one. Denied again. A third. They said they’d send the details in the mail—but I already knew what the mail would say.

I’m telling you this from the other side now. I’m approaching 40. I’m comfortable. I …

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Earlier this year, I told myself something that changed everything: I’m not going to fight or force my way into rooms I’m not invited into.

I’ve been watching the discourse around Essence Black Women in Hollywood, and I want to say something honestly. Some of those women absolutely should be in that room. I’m not here to dismiss that.

What I do want to reframe is the energy underneath it.

Because a lot of the time, when we say “I should be in that room,” it’s coming from a place of scarcity. Somewhere deep inside, there’s a voice whispering that if you weren’t invited, you’re missing your chance. That you’re not being recognized. That the window is closing.

I’ve felt that. I know what it sounds like.

But when you shift into abundance, you start to remember that there are thousands of rooms like this happening all the time. Consistently. And the rooms where you’re supposed to be? You will be visible. You will be seen. You will be invited with ease. Because I genuinely believe that abundance and flow is how we’re supposed to operate in the world.

Late last year, I was invited to an event in Morocco. I’m not in fashion. I didn’t pitch myself. I didn’t lobby for it. Everything was taken care of. Flights, accommodations, white glove service. And I remember thinking, " Wow, it’s so interesting that I was invited into this room, because I didn’t really know how they saw me until I got there.

The night of the event, one of the organizers walked up to me and introduced herself. She said, “I’ve been watching and reading what you’ve been putting out, and it really resonated with me. I told the publicist, you must be invited to this event.”

That small moment reminded me of something I needed to hear again. I’m visible. I’m being seen. I’m being witnessed. And the rooms I’m supposed to be in will find me, even when it doesn’t happen at the time I think it should.

I believe in serendipity. I believe in divine timing. And I think both of those things require us to hold a posture of gratitude for the rooms we’re already being invited into.

Because here’s the thing. The biggest room that will change your life? You have not been invited into it yet.

And sometimes, you finally get into the room you’ve been clamoring for, and it’s nothing like what you imagined. Maybe the people are a bunch of mean girls. Maybe the connections you thought were waiting for you aren’t there. Maybe it’s not everything you cracked it up to be.

I truly believe things are in alignment for people. That timing is real. That the work you’re doing when nobody is watching is the very thing making you visible to the rooms you haven’t even heard of yet.

So put your head down. Keep doing the work. Because eventually, you will be seen.

🔒 For Powder Room members: the tactical playbook below.

How to Actually Become the Person Rooms Come Looking For

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Most people did not choose their career.

They chose a paycheck.

At first, that choice feels practical. Responsible, even. A paycheck brings stability. It gives you the ability to move out, support yourself, help your family, build a life that feels secure.

But over time something subtle happens.

The paycheck becomes a lifestyle. The lifestyle becomes a set …

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There is a particular kind of silence that only grief teaches you.

Not the silence of an empty room. Not the silence of being alone. The silence of being surrounded by women who called themselves your sisters, who clinked glasses at your birthday, who texted heart emojis under your wins — and realizing, in the single worst season of your life, that the room was full of echoes. Not voices. Echoes.

When I lost my sister, I learned something about friendship that I wish someone had taught me before the lesson cost me so much.

I learned that some people are only your friends in well-lit rooms.

I don’t mean they’re bad people. I don’t mean they don’t love you. I mean, they love you in the way that requires nothing of them. They love you at brunch. They love you at the birthday dinner. They love you when your life is a highlight reel they can screenshot and celebrate. But when the room goes dark — when grief walks in and sits down at the table and doesn’t leave — they don’t know what to do with their hands.

So they disappear. Quietly. Politely. With a “thinking of you” text that arrives once and never again.

I wrote about this recently. About the silence that follows when you realize a friendship was entirely one-sided. About pouring into women for years — remembering their children’s names, showing up to their events, celebrating their milestones as though they were my own — and watching, with a clarity that only pain provides, as almost none of it came back when I needed it most.

The response was overwhelming. Thousands of you saved it. Hundreds of you came into my DMs with stories that sat heavy in my chest for days. Women in their thirties. Women in their forties. Women who had held their friend groups together with both hands for years and were exhausted from holding.

We are carrying so much quiet grief over friendships we were never allowed to be fully human in.

One woman wrote to me: “I’ve been the strong friend for so long that when I finally fell apart, my friends didn’t recognize me. They didn’t know what to do with a version of me that needed something.”

Another: “I stopped initiating with everyone six months ago. Two people noticed. Two. Out of maybe fifteen women, I considered close.”

And the one that stayed with me longest: “I don’t even know if I’m angry or just tired. I think I’m grieving people who are still alive.”

That last line. Read it again.

Grieving people who are still alive.

That is its own kind of timeline grief. The version of the friendship you thought you had — the depth, the reciprocity, the unspoken covenant that says I will show up for you the way you show up for me, that version was the timeline. And when reality cracks it open, you’re left holding the pieces of something you can’t even name as a loss because the person is still right there. Still liking your posts. Still texting “we need to catch up!” Still technically in your life, but functionally absent from it.

In that post, I mentioned that the silence forced me to do something I now call The Friendship Audit. And I promised you that I don’t believe in dramatic, burn-the-bridge, cut-everyone-off reckonings. I don’t believe in the performance of boundaries. I believe in quiet recalibration. In protecting your peace by adjusting your expectations, not by making a spectacle of your pain.

Today, I want to walk you through exactly how I do it.

This is the framework I use to differentiate between the people who get my core energy — the unguarded, unperformed, unpolished version of me, and the people who just get my polite presence.

Because both can exist in your life. But only one should have access to your grief.

The rest of this piece is for paid subscribers of The Powder Room.

If the words above named something you’ve been feeling, the framework below is how you start to do something about it. Not with anger. Not with announcements. With clarity.

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