KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Last week, Martha Atlas ceased to be invisible.

“I’m very excited,” the 62-year-old Prairie Village, Kan., woman said. “And a little scared.”

Confident and energetic, a self-described “bubbly” person by nature, Atlas concedes it bothers her to admit that nearly two hard years of unemployment made her feel at times as if she didn’t exist.

No one fired her from her former job. A successful fundraiser, she left voluntarily in 2010, thinking a brighter future was ahead. Always connected, she knew people. What would it take to land another job? Six months?

But then came month after month of shipping off resumes. Of making phone calls. Of setting up lunch meetings and coming within a breath of being hired, only to be ignored, denied or sent e-mail rejections.

She was bent on remaining positive.

“It’s exhausting to be around someone who is down, dour or grumpy,” she said.

Words she never associated with herself — “invisible,” “embarrassing,” “loser” — crept unwanted into her thinking.

Except now she’s among the lucky few.

Atlas has begun a new job fundraising for the Folly Theater.

The life lessons of protracted unemployment and employment are fresh in her mind, as they are for others who have landed jobs in the past year.

There is Clark Pickett, 59, of Raytown, Mo., an accounting analyst who was out of work for the better part of three years.

There is Deidre Anderson, 41, a nonprofit executive director from Raymore, Mo., who found herself relying on the same food stamps she used to recommend to her clients.

There is Kathy D. Mays, 48, of Kansas City, a union carpenter whose faith sustained her as she lived without work or health benefits for months on end while struggling to care for a 17-year-old daughter and a chronically ill husband.

“I’m grateful, I’m grateful, I’m very grateful that the Lord heard my cry,” said Mays, now entering her third month of work on a bridge being constructed near Eudora, Kan.

She and the others who have found jobs know just how fortunate they are. While the unemployment rate dropped to 8.1 percent in August from 8.3 percent in July, that was because more people stopped looking for work and so were no longer counted as unemployed.

Employed once again, Atlas and the others speak not only of the joy and relief of rejoining the workforce, but also of the importance of holding out hope and counting the blessings in their lives. As well as anyone, they know how long-term unemployment has tested them and challenged their views on everything from money to family to the values they held dear.

Anderson speaks without hesitation.

“My life was my career.”

She knows that isn’t how it should be and that a person is not wholly defined by work. It’s what they do, not who they are.

But for Anderson — a single mother of two girls, ages 19 and 6 — it matters a great deal. She is her job, a fact that made her year of unemployment all the more onerous. She spent her entire career helping disadvantaged children and families. Most recently, it was for a decade in the Hickman Mills School District in Kansas City. Before that, it was working with foster children and others with difficulties.

“My career is part of why I believe I’m here. I help people,” Anderson said.

In July, she was hired as the executive director of United Inner City Services, a Kansas City nonprofit that provides community services to families and children. Many of its clients are poor.

Now, more than ever, Anderson understands their plight.

Like Atlas, she was not fired from her former job. In 2010, she chose to leave and return to her native Des Moines, Iowa, to try to open her own nonprofit to introduce minority children to careers in health fields. At the same time, she held a make-do job, helping out at a cousin’s dental practice.

“I was making ends meet barely,” Anderson said.

In a bad economy, the nonprofit never gelled.

After a year, she returned to a job in Kansas City. That also soon collapsed. Suddenly, Anderson was unemployed and starting a search that would drag on for months.

Now, she feels lucky.

“The lesson for me is that on the other side of what seems like the end of the world could be something far greater than you ever imagined,” she said. “And sometimes you have to be patient.”