The Uber crossed the Potomac river, and something in me cracked open.
I was on my way into DC last week to give a keynote. I hadn’t really been back since graduating with my MBA from Georgetown University in 2009. Three quick visits in seventeen years. And now here I was again, watching the river slide past the window on my way to speak to a room of 700 executives about purpose, people and culture.
But I wasn’t thinking about the keynote.
I was thinking about her.
The version of me who crossed this same river in 2007. Twenty something. Terrified.
She had quit a perfectly good job in Seattle and moved across the country for graduate school. She was paying double the rent for a room in a strange house, in a neighborhood disconnected from the metro and far from her classmates. A rotating cast of roommates she barely knew. Every space felt unfamiliar. Every day felt like proof she might have made a catastrophic mistake.
She was drowning quietly.
The math in her head went something like this:
A hundred thousand dollars in debt, even after scholarships.
The classes felt like a foreign language.
Everyone else smarter. Sharper. More polished.
And from there, the fear dominoes fell fast.
Failure. More failure. No job. Eviction. Homelessness.
Looking back now, I’m struck by how short the wiring was in my nervous system. How quickly my brain could leap from I might not belong here to I will end up sleeping on a sidewalk.
Fear didn’t move in baby steps. It teleported to total destruction.
That first year was lonely. I pushed the fear down because I didn’t know what else to do with it. I studied like my survival counted on it. I treated emotions like inconveniences. Things to manage privately so I could keep functioning publicly. Keep showing up. Keep surviving.
As the Uber crossed the river, I closed my eyes and tried to reach back through time.
Einstein said time is relative, after all.
I wanted to find her sitting in that strange house on a Sunday afternoon, stomach tight, trying to calculate whether she had ruined her life.
I wanted to tell her she could let the fear be present. That pushing it down didn’t make it go away. That fear was not proof she was failing. It was proof she was somewhere new.
I wanted to tell her she was not actually alone. That she had people who loved her deeply. People who would never let her collapse into the future she kept imagining. The story in her head was not prophecy. It was panic wearing a convincing costume.
I wanted to tell her she would graduate with honors.
That she would build a beautiful career.
That one day she would return to DC, not as the terrified student trying to prove she belonged, but as the keynote speaker flown in to teach executives what she had learned about business.
That some of the companies rejecting her internship applications would one day hire her to stand on their stages, teaching their leaders about strategy.
And maybe most importantly, I wanted to tell her this:
The fear never fully disappears.
It just changes costumes.
Even now, there are moments when my nervous system still tries to turn uncertainty into catastrophe. Moments when a setback suddenly feels like the first domino in a chain reaction toward ruin. Moments when I still doubt if I’m good enough to be in the room.
But now I notice it sooner.
Now I know fear tells dramatic stories when it wants protection. The more afraid it is, the more dramatic the story.
So I keep practicing.
Letting the fear speak without letting it drive.
Because it’s easy to look at someone’s life and only see the highlight reel. The keynote. The confidence. The success.
What we don’t see are the quiet Sundays in strange houses. The panic. The self doubt. The invisible negotiations someone had to make just to stay in the room.
Those moments rarely make it onto the résumé.
But they are often the moments that built the person standing on the stage.
