ABSTRACT
This personal chapter looks at the role powerlifting played in the transition of the author out of academia. Having grown up fully identified as a “brain in a jar,” she found her way to lifting in her final semesters as a professor. At a political moment in the United States that was particularly fraught in terms of gender politics, the exploration, cultivation and embodiment of literal strength helped her develop a new understanding of what it means to be a “strong woman.” Using her pursuit of physical and emotional strength in analogous terms, she found ways in which the various facets of her identity that had once been siloed (mother, writer, athlete) instead supported one another.
