Capacity Conversations | Hosted by Raquel Sands & Sarah Liljegren
Sarah and I have been doing this podcast for over a year now. Two women, two coasts — she’s a rewilding real estate agent in Spokane Valley, Washington; I’m here in Northern Virginia making cacao and writing about the in-between.
This is the final episode of Capacity Conversations, the podcast series Sarah and I started a year and a half ago. And before we close it out, I want to write down what this last year actually looked like — not the polished version, the real one.
How This Started - 1 year ago…
I found Sarah the way you find the people who end up mattering: by accident, searching around a keyword — something about nature and real estate — and there she was. Sarah is a licensed real estate agent, and she calls what she does rewilding real estate — the question of how the way we house ourselves could bring us back to nature’s rhythms instead of away from them. Village-style living, community over isolation, housing as a way of healing something collective, not just individual.
We got on a call. Our wires crossed on timing the way they do when something’s meant to happen anyway. By the time we actually talked, it was instant — that specific feeling of being seen by someone speaking your language. We built a Google doc of themes on the spot. Capacity Conversations was born out of that first call 🌱
At the time, I was a contractor at Fannie Mae, commuting an hour each way from Northern Virginia into DC, and I was miserable. Contractors there wear a different color badge than employees. You’re visually marked. Locked out of certain areas. If your team goes to happy hour, that’s on your own dime — you’re functioning with the team without ever being of it. I don’t think anyone there was being intentionally unkind.
The system itself just felt insidious, in the quiet way systems do when no single person or structure is responsible for how it lands on you.
Then the administration changed, my team got downsized, and because I was a contractor — no infrastructure, no protection underneath me — my contract that was supposed to last a year only lasted 8 months.
My Year, In Fragments
After the layoff, I had two months without work and then landed somewhere I’d never been before: a tiny nonprofit that runs like a startup. No real infrastructure. Everyone doing five things at once. Hard, and also, in its own strange way, good.
But work wasn’t the only thing cracking open last year. I almost got divorced. There was a real breach of trust between my husband and me — financial, and it was hard in a way I’m not going to fully unpack here, except to say it was another seed cracking, another moment of where is the light, what are we trying to do.
I spent my birthday away from him for the first time, with a friend instead, which felt like its own quiet rupture.
My relationship with my mom broke last year too, and it took months to repair. I didn’t talk to her for months — the first time in my life something like that had happened, on top of the fact that she was never my go-to parent growing up. My dad was. Trying to build something with her now, as an adult, when she wasn’t really my person as a kid, and then having that attempt fracture almost immediately — that was its own kind of hard.
And then there was work, compounding everything else. I had a real confrontation with the executive director of my organization — a full, grown, hour-long conversation where I didn’t filter myself, didn’t soften the delivery the way I used to. I kept doubting myself in real time — is this good, should I be saying this — that’s the bracing again, always looking at things from every angle in anticipation.
I remember thinking: the worst thing that happens is I get fired, because Virginia is an at-will state (actually 49 of the 50 states are at-will, except Montana), and maybe the executive doesn’t want to hear what I have to say. But I said it anyway.
What got me through all of it was finding the small moments of ease and actually letting myself have them. I’m hard on myself. I’ve always filtered, softened, changed my language so I didn’t come across as too direct or too blunt.
In 2026, in my closest relationships especially, I stopped. I gave myself permission to say I’m tired of performing; I’m just going to rest now. That’s carried into this year with everything — work, business. I’ve gotten better at compartmentalizing, at saying okay, that’s closed for today, at being direct and letting people’s perception of that be theirs to hold, not mine to manage.
AI has become something like my assistant, my pseudo-therapist. Partly because I can afford it, but mostly because I have access to it, and access matters.
I can’t always rely on my husband the way I need to, when I need to. My mom, my friends — we all have finite capacity. Using AI isn’t about replacing people. It’s having a container that just bears witness, doesn’t instruct, doesn’t tell me what to do — because even with the people I love most, I still have to say I don’t want your advice right now. I’m managing that container regardless of what it looks like.
What Sarah Carried
She was burnt out in her real estate job by January of last year, having moved across the state for it. What broke her wasn’t one thing — it was the accumulation of watching corruption in leadership up close, realizing a human being can only put up with so much of it before something in you refuses to keep walking down that road.
She stayed longer than she wanted to because of debt, and she named the guilt in that plainly — the fear-shame-guilt trio that keeps good people in situations past the point they should’ve left, because they don’t want to disrespect the people they worked alongside even when the structure itself wasn’t right for them.
She left that office job in April, trained her replacement, and went back to real estate sales — which meant, for the first time in two years, she could actually represent clients again. She closed her first deal recently. Has another under contract. Is learning a tricky listing in real time.
In between, her life actually erupted, in her words: she and her husband started house-hunting in March, closed on a house in April while visiting family in Missouri, moved in by the end of May. She stepped back from the board of the Northwest Intentional Communities Association because two or three people can’t carry a whole board’s worth of work.
She let go of an online certification course because her own standards didn’t line up with actual human capacity to do it all.
She led an eco-village tour — a job she was offered after a trip to Vermont where she decided, standing in an actual eco-village, that this was the thing she wanted to dedicate her life to. That tour opened to the public this same month, and they already have their first sign-ups.
She also had a harder stretch: her husband’s grandmother died in January, not long after a beautiful last Christmas together. At the same funeral, she saw her own father in the worst health of his life so far. Weeks later, her dad was hospitalized a second time — the day she had tickets to see The Lion King, one of her favorite productions. She missed the start of the show on the phone with family, not knowing what was happening, and made it in a few nights later once things stabilized.
She did grief hikes throughout the year, through her volunteer work with local conservation — and just today, before we recorded this, she got a call from someone who wanted to talk with her about the death of a loved one, because word had spread that she leads those hikes.
And underneath all of it — the corruption she wouldn’t accept, the burnout, the eco-village pivot — she kept coming back to the same question: can people even afford to live here anymore.
She’s more interested in the growing population of people who can no longer afford homes than in the people shopping for a second or third property, though she’s careful to say she serves both, and that most people buying multiple homes are doing something good with that access — family, a dream, an investment for grandkids. What worries her is that the access to that dream is disappearing for everyone else.
Every Episode, Looking Back
We started airing in June with our origin stories — both individually and as a society, how did we get so disconnected and ungrounded? From there:
Deficiencies, using Sarah’s nutrition background and her Libra eye for imbalance, into balance and the equinox, where we talked about zombies — inspired by a John Vervaeke interview — and how our cultural obsession with the undead reflects a hunger for cycles we’ve stopped believing are real. Then survival skills, both communication and literal — Sarah’s real estate lens actually started as a bushcraft interest, and where you fall geographically shapes how your survival instincts develop. Political correctness in November, which we landed on almost by accident, realizing it’s really just the capacity to check in with yourself about where you actually stand. Then darkness, incubation, and imbibition in January — the seed losing its form entirely before anything new can grow, something dying so something else can be reborn.
In April, we recorded in person for the first time, in Sarah’s living room, for an episode called were we betrayed — faith, religion, and what it costs to think for yourself, unpacking two different Christian upbringings and what we’ve each renegotiated since. May brought how our work writes our story. June: what is an edge — limits, capacity, the luxury of knowing what you actually want. And the second-to-last episode, the cost of definition — profession, identity, longing versus desire, feeling untethered, overextension, and the etymology work we kept returning to all season, trying to get underneath words to what they actually mean.
What the Farmer’s Market Taught Me That the Internet Couldn’t
Here’s something I keep coming back to: the internet is how I found Sarah, and I wouldn’t trade that. But the farmers market is its inverse, and I love it just as much for the opposite reason. It’s small. It’s local. You don’t have to search for your people — it’s already done the filtering. Everyone standing there already values local, already values small and handmade, and that shared starting point lowers the guard immediately in a way the internet never quite manages.
One of my regulars invited me to her birthday recently. That’s a real relationship, thirty minutes from me, that I wouldn’t have built any other way — no curtain of the internet, no having to prove anything first. She sees me. She knows me. She can just ask.
That’s part of why I’ve realized I’m not actually trying to reach the whole state of Virginia. I’m not even fully targeting all of Northern Virginia. I’m in the northern tip of it, right by DC, and I want to keep digging down into that hyper-local layer rather than out. The market is one of the oldest things we do — trade, barter, share resources in person — and I think that’s exactly why it still works when so much else feels engineered to disconnect us.
On Being Witnessed
If there’s a single thread under everything — the layoff, the marriage, my mom, the confrontation at work, Sarah’s corruption and her eco-village pivot and her father’s hospital stays — it’s this need to be witnessed. Not seen the way a camera spots you. Felt. Really felt.
I think that’s what freedom-seekers, eco-village people, local-community people, farmers-market people are all actually reaching for under the surface: to be known in a way that isn’t extraction, that gives back as much as it takes.
When a place or a person just uses your presence without that reciprocity, it drains you — an energy vampire, not a witness. The good version is nourishing precisely because it’s mutual.
A Question Worth Sitting With
If you’re building something of your own — a business, a different kind of career, a life that doesn’t cost you your nervous system — the real question isn’t are you working hard enough. It’s: are you putting that effort into the intentional things, the things that actually get you where you’re trying to go? Sometimes the answer is yes, for a season. The work is knowing the difference, and not losing yourself in the pursuit of yourself.
Thank you for being part of this project with us. This is the end of Capacity Conversations as a series — and, fittingly, also just the beginning of whatever comes next!
Share this with a friend who’s navigating their capacity too. 🌿💛
“Do we actually have the capacity to do all the things we want to do?”
And the answer, gently but honestly, is no.
Not because we’re incapable. Not because we’re unambitious. Not because we’re doing it wrong. But because capacity is shaped by context, and our context is heavy.
Economic context. Political context. Housing context. Generational context.
Capacity isn’t just personal — it’s structural.
Capacity Conversations Spotify Playlist
Raquel a Clarity Guide and the founder of The Clarity Shift, supporting purpose-led professionals building income sovereignty outside traditional corporate paths. She’s also the maker behind Sands & Semilla, small-batch cacao out of Northern Virginia.
Sarah is a rewilding real estate agent based in the Pacific Northwest, a certified yoga teacher, clinical herbalist, and the organizer of the first-ever Pacific Northwest Eco-Village Tours, coming in July 2027. She’s in the business of helping people find — or build — the village they’ve been looking for.
