WHAT GETTING AN OBE TAUGHT ME

There is a particular silence that comes when something you have worked towards for a long time finally arrives. Not the silence of emptiness. The silence of fullness. The moment before you know quite what to do with it.

When I received the letter confirming the OBE in the King's Birthday Honours for services to social enterprise, that is what happened. Twelve years of work in a letter. I sat with it for a while before I told anyone.

This is what I learned from that.

RECOGNITION IS NOT THE SAME AS VISIBILITY

Recognition is external. Someone else decides to see the work and name it. Visibility is internal. You decide to be seen, regardless of whether recognition follows.

For most of the twelve years that led to that letter, I was visible before I was recognised. I was building BUD Leaders, running programmes, showing up to rooms I was not always sure I would be welcomed in, writing, speaking, connecting people who needed connecting. The recognition came later. The visibility was a decision I had to make first.

This is worth naming because a lot of people wait for recognition before they commit to visibility. They want proof the work matters before they put themselves fully into it. That is not how it works. The proof comes after the commitment, not before it.

THE VISIBILITY PARADOX FOR BLACK WOMEN

Being seen is not neutral. For Black women in Britain, visibility has a history of being used against you. Being seen as too confident. Too bold. Too present. Taking up too much space. Visibility has been weaponised often enough that the self-protective response is to make yourself smaller and harder to see.

That is a rational adaptation to an environment that has punished visibility. And it is also a cost that compounds. Every time you step back from being fully seen, you make yourself slightly harder to find, slightly harder to back, slightly harder to reward.

What the OBE clarified for me is that the visibility that led to it was never comfortable. It was a choice I made in the presence of discomfort, not instead of it. I was visible because the alternative was invisibility, and invisibility was going to cost more in the long run.

PERMISSION IS NOT SOMETHING YOU WAIT FOR

One of the things recognition does is retroactively validate the choices that led to it. But those choices had to be made without the validation. Nobody gave me permission to build BUD Leaders. Nobody told me to become a speaker. Nobody confirmed in advance that the work would matter.

Permission is a story we tell ourselves about why we cannot start yet. The real version is: you start, you do the work, and if the work is good enough and you are visible enough and you stay long enough, recognition may or may not find you. But the work is the thing. The work does not wait for permission.

What I would tell the version of me from twelve years ago is not to wait for the letter to confirm that the work matters. The work matters because you decided it does. That is the only permission that counts.

WHAT I WANT FOR THE NEXT GENERATION

The OBE is mine. But the recognition it represents is larger than one person. It belongs to every Black woman who built something in Britain without the networks, the capital, or the invitation that would have made it easier. The ones who showed up to rooms they were not supposed to be in and made the room better for it.

What I want for the next generation is for the wait to be shorter. Not because the work is less hard, but because the infrastructure is better. More platforms. More networks. More people who have already built it and can show how. More recognition that does not wait twelve years.

That is what Black Fearless Female is for.