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. We don’t always plan our episodes the way they end up unfolding. This one came up organically, the way the real ones do — we were catching up, and the word edge came up on its own, and neither of us could let it go.
So we sat with it. What is an edge, actually?
The Word Itself
The word edge comes from Old English, and it carries two meanings folded into one: the cutting side of a blade, and a point — a tip, a limit, a place where something ends.
I find that distinction worth sitting with longer than we usually do. An edge is both a tool and a boundary. It’s the thing that can sever, and it’s also the place where something simply stops. We use the word constantly without touching either of its original meanings — I’m at the edge of something; this is an edge for me to push through — but we rarely ask what we’re actually invoking when we say it. A blade. A limit. Something that can cut, and something that contains.
Maybe that duality is the whole conversation. An edge is both what we use to create change and the boundary that defines where we are.
The Day I Said No
Before we even started recording, I told Sarah I’d had another commitment that day — another collaborator, another recording — and I didn’t show up for it. I felt guilty about that. How much capacity do I have a right to claim? How do I stay in right relationship with someone if I’m not reciprocating in the way I think I should?
I sat with that question while walking my dogs, away from my computer. And what I landed on was simple and hard at the same time: I have to honor where I actually am. Not where I think I should be.
Not where being a good collaborator requires me to be. Where I am.
That was the edge. A limit got pushed, for reasons that weren’t fully mine to control that day, and I had to decide whether to honor it or override it.
This is the real question underneath capacity: how do you define how much you have, in any given moment, with any given person? And once you know — or even if you don’t fully know, even if you can’t articulate it — are you willing to act on that information?
To actually say not today? To trust yourself enough in the moment, and trust the people you’re with enough, to let the no exist without dismantling yourself over it?
That sounds almost luxurious when I say it out loud. But I don’t think it has to be. I think it just requires knowing what you want, which is its own edge entirely.
Capacity Without a Container
I told Sarah I’ve been feeling disheartened lately because so much of my work — coaching people through their corporate transitions, helping them reclaim sovereignty inside or outside corporate structures — depends on people having space. A container. The earth isn’t just floating water; it has a container that holds the water, the land and the people. Take away the container, and there’s no edge to define, no limit to push against, because everything becomes nebulous.
That’s what concerns me about where we are right now.
Not just millennials — though I think we’re carrying something particular — but the generations coming up behind us too. We’re being asked to define our own edges while our edges are simultaneously being defined for us, externally, by forces with no interest in whether we have the bandwidth to do either.
Sarah brought up something that stopped me: a statistic about self-regulation. Kids of the 60s and 70s — children of World War II parents who often couldn’t offer much emotional guidance — became, in some framing, a stronger generation because they were forced to self-regulate without scaffolding. I don’t know if that’s true in any rigorous sense, but it names something real about how different generations meet their edges. Some of us inherited containers. Some of us inherited absence and called the absence - resilience.
And now we’re the adults navigating a reality saturated with information, with technology that keeps us in our own bubbles. My neighbor and I might be standing on the same street and living in entirely different realities because of what we’ve each been fed, what we’ve each been shaped by. The edges we’re colliding against aren’t even the same edges anymore. We don’t share a cutting line.
We share a planet, sometimes barely.
Profession, Identity, and the Cost of Definition
Somewhere in the conversation, I mentioned something I’d seen — unverified, just a reel — claiming that by July of this year certain professions, including physical and occupational therapy, would no longer legally be considered “professional.” I don’t know if that’s accurate.
But the commentary stuck with me: the audacity required for a government or department to declare, in a single motion, that a career path people built their lives around no longer counts the way it used to.
I never defined myself by a title.
I knew I needed to be employed because I had debt, but I never let the job become the architecture of who I was. That degree opened doors precisely because I didn’t anchor my identity to any one of them.
I transplanted myself into different environments and tested what fit.
But I think that kind of testing is becoming a luxury too. How do you find the time, energy, and money to discover the environment that will actually support your edges — safely, slowly — when you’re also required to show up and get paid regardless of whether the getting-paid teaches you anything about yourself?
That’s the transactional bind so many of us are in. Knowing yourself and surviving financially used to at least sometimes overlap. Increasingly, they don’t.
What an Edge Actually Asks of You
Sarah named something about her own life that I think describes all of us eventually: an edge becomes familiar enough, gets pushed against long enough, that you stop experiencing it as an edge and start experiencing it as identity. She’s been the person who juggles a dozen different jobs and builds community since college.
A friend pointed that out to her — you’ve always done this — and she realized: maybe this isn’t an edge I keep meeting. Maybe it’s just who I am, and I finally let myself be known as that.
I think that’s the quiet hope buried in all of this. Edges aren’t only obstacles. Sometimes they’re identity waiting for you to stop flinching at it.
On Politics, Identity, and the Refusal to Pick a Side Cleanly
Sarah named that we’d reached our limit, politically, generationally: we’ve watched both parties shift so much in our lifetimes that we’re exhausted by the binary itself.
My father was a guerrilla fighter in Nicaragua under the Sandinista regime before he became an accountant under that same government. He carried a machete.
My mother left El Salvador by being a mom to her siblings and starting a new life in the 80s in Los Angeles — both of my parents arrived in this country shaped by a civil war that the United States had a direct hand in prolonging by playing both sides, the way it has in other countries when their politics don’t align with what’s convenient.
I am a literal product of that history. If those historical dominoes hadn’t fallen exactly as they did, I would have been born in El Salvador instead of here. That’s not abstract for me. That’s my whole existence.
So when people ask why I won’t pick a clean political lane, that’s why. I come from a family that fled both a totalizing ideology and the country that destabilized everything, trying to prevent it. I don’t trust totalizing systems, on either side, because I’ve inherited the cost of what happens when ideology outpaces the people living inside it.
Re-Indigenizing, Not Decolonizing
A friend introduced me to a term recently — re-indigenizing, distinct from decolonizing. I don’t know it deeply yet, but what I understand is that it’s about rerouting, not just dismantling. And what strikes me most is how it relates to capacity: in many indigenous traditions, children aren’t expected to carry adult weight before they’re shaped enough to hold it.
You’re not born an adult. You grow into one, slowly, inside community, inside containment, inside care.
I think we’ve lost some of that. We put enormous pressure on the individual — to define their politics, their profession, their values, their edges — before the self is even fully formed.
And then we wonder why everyone in their thirties is exhausted, questioning parenthood, questioning everything, beaten against the same edge of “can I actually provide for myself” over and over without relief.
What We Actually Want to Leave You With
If you find yourself surrounded by edges — external pressures, internal limits, the noise of a world that won’t stop reshaping itself around you — it is not your job to solve all of it alone. Find your people. Find the containers, the communities, the practices that let you regulate without having to carry everything in isolation.
And if you’re someone who comes from a lineage where rest was never modeled as a right — people of color, first-generation anything — let this be permission.
Sometimes I tell myself just one more email, just one more thing, while literally holding my own bladder rather than getting up. That’s not discipline. That’s a nervous system that hasn’t yet learned it’s allowed to stop.
Go drink water. Rest when your body is asking, not just when your calendar permits it.
Edges are necessary for growth. But even the edge needs a season of rest. The plant doesn’t bloom forever. Neither do you. Neither should you have to.
Raquel is a clarity and work strategist, the host of The Clarity Shift podcast, and the founder of a small-batch cacao blend business rooted in Central American ancestry and holistic nourishment. She offers blends specifically designed to support the female body, to honor indigenous plant traditions, and to ground people in something physical and real alongside all the conceptual work of career and income sovereignty. Find her at farmers’ markets in the Arlington, Virginia, area in 2026.
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.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Capacity Conversations drops regularly wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribe on Substack to never miss an episode.
