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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a month 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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I read Anifa’s letter about Hanifa and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

Not because of the delayed orders.
Not because of the backlash.

But because of the question sitting quietly underneath all of it:

Is it all worth it?

That question haunts every Black woman who has ever tried to build something from nothing.

Only 3% of Black women-owned busin…

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Hey Sis

So I’ve been wanting to say this for a while, and I kept putting it off because I didn’t know how. But I think the only way to do it is to just… do it. So here I am. Sitting down, no script, no carousel, no perfectly worded thread. Just me, talking to you.

I need to tell you something.

I’ve been holding you at arm’s length.

Not on purpose. I think I…

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THIS WEEK’S TRUTH

The Relationship I Stayed In For Years Because the Timeline Said I Should

I met him in college. Senior year. He was about to go to medical school. Really good looking. Half Nigerian, and if you’re Nigerian, you know what that means. It felt like the universe was handing me exactly what I’d been raised to want. A good man. Educated. Ambitious. Someone my family would approve of. Someone who checked every box on the checklist I didn’t even know I was carrying.

And the sex was incredible. I’m going to be honest with you because that’s what this space is for. He knew how to please me. And when you’re young, and the physical connection is that strong, it becomes the glue that holds everything together — even the things that should be falling apart. It felt good having this fine man on my arm who was going to be a doctor. My high school friends were in relationships. I was in a relationship. The timeline was on track.

We carried on like this for years.

But there was a dark side to this relationship that I couldn’t see or maybe didn’t want to see because I was so desperate for the plan to work.

It started when I went to Nigeria for the summer. I’d gotten an internship — I was trying to level up, expand my world, do something bigger than what was in front of me. And while I was there, building something for myself, I found out…

For the price of one overpriced latte a month, you get: the diary entries I don’t share anywhere else, guest conversations with women who’ve walked through fire, a monthly open thread where the community actually talks to each other, and full access to the archive.

You’re not paying for content. You’re paying for a seat at the table.

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I lost my sister.

I don’t say that casually. I say it the way you say something that still catches in your throat even when you think you’ve made peace with it. She was in a coma for months. Months spent living between two realities. The one where she might wake up, and the one where I was already starting to grieve.

There were friends who knew. Not acquaintances. Friends. Women, I had shown up for in every way I knew how. Birthday dinners I planned. Milestones I celebrated. Graduations I attended. Houses I visited, even though they’d never once been to mine. I didn’t keep score because it never felt like work. That’s what love does. It makes generosity feel effortless.

Then I got the call.

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I used to think I was just unlucky.

Wrong timing.
Emotionally unavailable men.
Almost-relationships that felt real until they weren’t.

It took me a while to realize something uncomfortable. I was strategic about everything in my life except love.

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