Author name: keishaeffiom.author@gmail.com

On the sentence that stopped me at breakfast, and what it’s teaching me about leadership, reinvention, and the second fear that runs our lives. My husband said something over breakfast this week that made me put down my fork. “I’m not afraid of being afraid.” I asked him to say it again. He did. Same words, same calm. So, you’re not afraid of anything, I said. That’s not what I said, he answered, patient with me the way he often is. I said I’m not afraid of being afraid. And just like that, I was seven years old again. There was a girl at my school who made my stomach hurt for weeks. I can still feel the particular dread of walking down a certain hallway, the way my breath would change, the way my hands would go cold. I wasn’t afraid of her, not really. Not when I think about it honestly. I was afraid of the way my body felt when she was near. The pounding. The buzz in my ears. The hot shame of being the one who was scared. So, I shrank. Not because she was bigger. Because the fear was bigger than I wanted to let it be. Sitting across from Vincent, I wondered who I might have been in that hallway if I had let the fear just be fear. If I hadn’t spent all my energy trying not to feel it. If I had walked up to her, heart pounding and palms damp, and done what needed to be done anyway. Slap her. But no, seriously, if I had just been still inside. Not calm. Stillness and calm are not the same thing. Still in the way a tree is still in the wind. Moving because it has to. Rooted because it was built to be. I think I would have shown up as myself. And I think myself would have been enough. The Second Fear Here is what I am beginning to understand. The distinction my husband drew at breakfast is the one that separates the women who step forward from the women who stay seated. Being afraid is a feeling. Being afraid of being afraid is a posture. The first is human and unavoidable. The second is what actually runs our lives. We don’t flinch from the fire. We flinch from feeling the heat. I have spent a career in rooms where the stakes were human lives. I led teams in Rwanda and Burundi. I signed my name to decisions that shaped how we do development work. I have stood in the quiet rubble of an institution I gave eighteen years to, watching it dismantled in months. In every one of those rooms, the question was never whether I would feel afraid. I always felt afraid. The question was whether I would let the feeling of fear become a second problem on top of the first. Whether I would waste half my oxygen managing my own internal weather instead of meeting the moment in front of me. Sometimes I managed it. Sometimes I didn’t. The difference showed up in my leadership every single time. When I managed it, I spoke plainly, I decided quickly, I protected the people I was sent to protect. When I didn’t, I hedged. I softened. I rehearsed my sentences for days before I said them. I gave the institution what it wanted to hear instead of what it needed to hear. Not because I lacked courage. Because I was spending my courage on the wrong fight. I was fighting my own fear instead of the thing the fear was pointing me toward. For the Woman at the Edge And this is what I want to say to every woman standing at the edge of something. The woman unsure. The woman starting the business at fifty-seven. The woman writing the book she was told no one would read. The woman walking out of the building with her box of things and no next chapter yet written. You are not going to stop being afraid. That is not the assignment. The assignment is to stop being afraid of being afraid. When the fear stops being the enemy, it becomes information. It tells you that you are near something that matters. That you are standing on the edge of your own growth. That your life is about to get larger, and your body knows before your mind does. The goal was never to arrive at a fearless version of yourself. That version is a myth sold by people who have never actually done anything hard. The goal is to arrive at a version of yourself who can feel the full weight of fear and still move her feet. What It Would Look Like Imagine, for a moment, what our homes and offices and sanctuaries and boardrooms would look like if we were not afraid of being afraid. The mother would speak the hard truth at the family table without weeks of rehearsal. The executive would give the feedback the team actually needed. The woman with the idea would start before she felt ready, because readiness was never the prerequisite. The daughter would set the boundary she has been circling for a decade. The leader would tell the truth about the institution even when the institution had the power to punish her for it. The girl in the hallway would lift her head and walk through. None of them would be without fear. All of them would be without the second fear, the one that makes us smaller than we were made to be. A Doctrine Over Eggs Vincent didn’t know he was handing me a doctrine at breakfast. He was just describing himself. But I have been turning it over for days now, the way I turn over scripture, looking for the places where it catches the light. I’m not afraid of being afraid. Say it again. I am not afraid of being afraid. I want that to

On feeling muted, unseen, and how you find your voice again By Keisha L. Effiom There is a particular kind of pain that does not announce itself loudly. It does not arrive with sirens or shattered glass. It creeps in quietly, settling into the spaces between conversations, between moments, between the version of yourself the world sees and the one still waiting to be known. It is the pain of being invisible, of being present and still unseen. I had spent 18 years in an extraordinary career where I was known and respected. I could walk into a room and people recognized not just my title, but my track record, my judgment, my name. But when everything crumbled with USAID, I went from being seen and heard to being invisible and muted. And that transition, from fully present to quietly erased, was something I was not ready for. The worst thing in the world is not failure. It is invisibility. Failure, at least, requires an audience. But to be unseen is to exist without witness. It is a specific kind of loneliness, the kind that follows you into crowded rooms and sits beside you at full tables. And it makes you question whether the decades of work, the relationships built, the missions led, were as real as you believed them to be. I have sat in rooms where I was the only person who had actually done the work, and watched others win anyway, not because they were right, but because the table was already theirs before I arrived. Credentials earned over decades were no match for the confidence that comes with a last name on a building. I was questioned, overruled, and quietly written out, not because I was wrong, but because I was inconvenient. That distinction matters. So, I stopped being surprised and started being strategic instead. I used the relationships I had earned over decades to make sure my voice could not be buried. I am not ashamed of that. That is what it looks like to refuse to disappear. I remember telling my husband what happened, and I carried that moment for weeks. Not because I was fragile, but because I knew exactly what had happened, and I knew that naming it, out loud, without apology, was the only way through it. How did I get here, I wondered. How did I go from walking into a room and being not only known, but respected, to feeling like a nobody? I was a diplomat for 18 years, leading missions and teams, working alongside senior government officials, responding to Marburg, preparing for Congressional visits, and then, just like that, muted. There is a moment I write about in my book, a moment of being truly seen. Not the title, not the mission, not the institutional armor I had learned to wear so well, but the woman underneath all of it. I was not prepared for how much that would undo me. Not in a breaking way, but in the way that water finally breaks through soil that has been too dry for too long. It was relief. It was recognition. It was like being called by your right name after years of answering to something that almost fit. Being seen is not a small thing. We have been conditioned to minimize it, to treat the need for witness as weakness, to perform self-sufficiency while quietly starving for connection. But the longing to be seen is not vanity. It is humanity. It is the most fundamental thing we ask of each other. I will be honest with you, because that is the only way I know how to write. There are still days when I feel it again, that quiet, that particular deafness that comes when you are in transition, when you are building something new in a season where the scaffolding is still invisible to everyone but you. Navigating this new chapter, I have had moments where the silence felt less like peace and more like abandonment. The question I keep returning to is the one I imagine you have asked yourself too: How do you stay motivated when you cannot feel the impact of your own movement? How do you keep going when the feedback loop goes quiet? You cannot break what was not meant to be broken. And you cannot silence what was built to speak. Here is what I am learning, slowly, in real time. Being unseen is not the same as being unworthy. The two feel identical in the body, they produce the same shallow breath and the same second-guessing, but they are not the same truth. Worth is not determined by who is watching. It never was. So, I go back to the moments I have been seen and replay them not as nostalgia, but as evidence. Evidence that it happened before. Evidence that the world is capable of recognizing what I carry. Evidence that a season of invisibility is a season, not a sentence. When no one else is clapping, I choose to be my own witness. I write things down. I mark my own milestones. I say to myself, plainly and without ceremony: I see you. Keep going. And I trust the process with the same faith I take into everything else, knowing that purpose moves toward those who keep showing up, and that the work done in the quiet seasons is often the most important work, the kind that holds everything else up once the visibility arrives. If you are in a quiet season right now, I want you to hear this directly: your silence is not the end of your story. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is refuse to disappear, even when the world is not looking. I spent 18 years building something. Then I was muted. And I made a choice, not a dramatic one, not a single turning-point moment, but a quiet, intentional decision to speak anyway. To say my piece. To

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