Chapter 11: When Loyalty Becomes a Limit

There comes a point in building something small where effort is no longer the problem. Love is not the problem. Even commitment is not the problem.

Capacity is.

I think I’ve reached that point in my microenterprising.

For a long time, I believed this work could grow through one relationship — through shared domestic life, shared making, shared survival. I thought: we can do this together, just us. That care, that loyalty, that closeness would be enough.

But it isn’t enough to grow something that wants to move outward.

I have been pushing a course that no longer has capacity behind it. Not because of cruelty or lack of love — but because the person beside me does not want expansion, does not see the vision, does not want the weight of outward thinking, economic growth, or business development.

And I kept pushing anyway.

Not because it made sense — but because I didn’t want to leave loyalty behind.

At some point, loyalty becomes a ceiling.

I didn’t see that for a long time because I was living domestically — inside care, inside survival, inside the daily work of keeping life together. In that space, you stop thinking outward. You stop imagining scale. You stop asking who else could carry this with you.

You shrink your vision to fit the room you’re in.

I did that.

I kept telling myself: She can do it, or I can do it with her. That was the boundary of my imagination. And slowly, without noticing, I stopped thinking like a microenterprise and started thinking like a household.

This project doesn’t want to be a household.

It wants to be a network.

It wants groups who can carry it further, not just one pair of hands. It wants connections that know how to market, organisations that can resource, people who can change processes, not just endure them.

It wants outward thinking.

And I haven’t been free to do that while staying inside one limited structure.

Yesterday I went to a Psychosocial Centre — a place from my past — and talked about running a woodworking and woodcarving workshop. Not a big thing. Not a finished thing. Almost a mock version of what’s coming in February.

But something shifted.

I wasn’t asking, “Can we manage this?”

I was asking, “What could this become?”

That’s a different posture.

It felt like stepping into a future version of myself — one who is not trying to squeeze vision into survival, but letting it look for the people and places that can hold it.

This feels like a new stage.

Not because everything is clear — but because something is no longer possible.

I cannot keep pushing a path that doesn’t have capacity behind it.

I cannot keep mistaking loyalty for infrastructure.

I cannot keep shrinking the work to protect a structure that cannot grow.

This doesn’t mean abandoning love.

It means refusing to let love define the limits of what is possible.

This blog is the only continuous record of this microenterprise becoming. Every confusion, every detour, every compromise, every spark has passed through these words.

So this chapter marks a turning point.

Not a success story.

Not a strategy.

But a decision:

To stop forcing growth where there is no capacity.

To start looking for the people, groups, and systems that can carry this work outward.

To let the project become what it has been asking to become — even if that means becoming someone new in the process.

This is the moment where microenterprise stops being private.

And starts becoming a movement of others.

Read an early or later chapter of Microenterprise Builder:

• Chapter 5: Priscilla’s Woodcraft Adventures
• Chapter 4: Cognitive Factory
• Chapter 1: Picking Up Wood
• Chapter 11: When Loyalty Becomes a Limit
• Chapter 8: Strong Hands, New Beginnings.