About The Edge of Strength
The Edge of Strength is an ongoing interview project exploring the identities we create as we create, protect, endure, and overcome.
The project began with a question from my own life.
I had spent years confronting fear out of a desire to learn to trust myself. Somewhere along the way, I became exceptionally capable at handling adversity. I could function in chaos, make decisions under pressure, push down fear, and keep moving when circumstances became increasingly difficult.
Those qualities have served me extraordinarily well.
Then, in the middle of one particularly extreme moment, I found myself asking a question :
Is this really what I want to be good at?
Not because I wanted to become less capable. And not because the qualities I had developed were inherently good or bad.
I became curious about what happens when the ways we learn to meet the demands of our lives become so practiced that we cannot separate them from who we are .
What do our lives require us to become?
Which qualities do we consciously build, and which emerge because circumstances demand them?
Do they continue to expand our lives? Do they sometimes complicate them? How do they affect the way we lead, love, create, protect, relate, and make decisions?
What happens when who we have become has left another part of us behind?
And when a way of being is no longer required, can we recognize it? Can we choose when to carry it forward and when to lay it down?
I do not know the answers.
That is the reason for The Edge of Strength.
I am interviewing 100 women with very different lives and experiences. I am not trying to prove a theory. I want to see what emerges when I ask these questions and listen carefully to the answers.
The project is an investigation into becoming: the relationship between the lives we build, the qualities those lives ask of us, and the people we become along the way.
The project continues to evolve with every conversation. The more women I speak with, the deeper and more complex the questions become.