the invisible wind factory in liverpool is not a room you slip into quietly. exposed brick, a stage lit up like it means it, a few hundred people who all built something.
i was there because unbarrier had been shortlisted for accessibility champion at the edgy futurist awards. me, baobao's owner, solo-parenting in cardiff, up against people with teams and budgets and marketing departments.
i didn't win.
for about ten minutes i sat with that the way i sit with most things — quietly, making it smaller than it was. of course you didn't win. what did you expect.
then i stopped and actually looked at the room i was in.
i was in the room.
i'd been shortlisted. someone, somewhere, had read what unbarrier does and decided it mattered enough to put next to the other names on that stage. that's not nothing. that's proof the work has weight, even when the trophy goes elsewhere.
and it made something else obvious, something i'd been quietly avoiding for months: nobody in that room knew who i was unless i told them.
i've built a business on being the person who shows up for other people's belonging — and i've been almost invisible doing it. no weekly updates. no "here's what i'm working on." the blog sat there, unshared. the recognition i did earn barely made it past my own notes app.
that has to change. not because visibility is comfortable — it isn't — but because people can't ask for what they don't know exists.
so here's what i'm doing differently: one small "here's what i'm doing" post a week. not polished. not a highlight reel. just the actual thing — one thing i worked on, one thing i noticed, one thing worth passing on.
i keep coming back to a line that landed hard that night: i need to climb the ladder of the people who've gone ahead of me, and leave mine down for whoever's coming next. that's the whole job, really. loop breakers is the ladder i'm building for other people. showing up loudly enough to be seen is the one i'm still learning to climb myself.
if you want the small, unpolished version of what i'm building — not just the finished posts — that's what loop breakers is for. come see what it actually looks like, week to week.
[find loop breakers →]