I’m Not Reinventing Myself. I’m Remembering Who I Am.

If you’ve been watching me lately and wondering, What in the world is Christine doing now? Fair question. From the outside, it may look as though I have wandered through several different worlds.

First, there was Angel Chatter.

For years, it was the place I created for helping others connect more deeply with the angelic realm, strengthen their intuition and learn to trust what they know beyond what they can necessarily prove. I wrote, taught, channeled and created a rather ridiculous number of products because apparently I have never understood the concept of doing anything halfway. There were books, oracle decks, classes, programs, private sessions, metaphysical expos where I was blessed to meet so many of you face-to-face, and enough ideas to keep several moderately caffeinated people busy for quite some time.

That world meant a great deal to me. So did the people it brought into my life, the conversations, the connections, and those beautiful moments when someone suddenly realized they could trust what they were already sensing. Angel Chatter gave me experiences and relationships I still treasure, and I remain proud of what it brought into the world.

But life has a rather interesting way of continuing the conversation whether or not we feel prepared for the next chapter.

Then came burnout.

Not the cute, “I need a bubble bath and a weekend away” variety. I’m talking about the kind that arrives when life becomes an extended series of medical adventures involving people you love. Some of ours have been frighteningly serious. Brain bleeds. ICU stays. Surgeries. Long recoveries. Other situations haven’t been quite as dramatic, but none of them have exactly been hangnails.

When your family is moving through things like that, life doesn’t simply rearrange itself once. It rearranges itself again and again. You adapt because you have to. You show up because people you love need you. You become incredibly capable at managing the next thing that needs managing.

Until one day you realize that somewhere in all of that capability, you disappeared from the list of people being cared for.

That realization was not subtle.

This was more than being tired. This was burnout in the truest sense of the word, and because much of my life has involved turning what I am experiencing into something that might help another human being, I began talking about burnout, studying it, writing about it and creating around it.

But burnout wasn’t merely something happening in my schedule. It had found its way into every corner.
The hustle had become exhausting in a way that went far beyond being busy. My brain was toast. My shoulders slumped because I had no emotions left to give. Physically, I was overwhelmed. And spiritually? There were days I honestly wondered whether the entire gang had packed up and left my side.

That may sound dramatic, but burnout has a way of dulling everything. Joy, curiosity, creativity and connection can all begin to disappear beneath the weight of simply getting through the next thing. Even what once felt sacred can begin to feel strangely far away.

Layered underneath all of that was the way I had been taught business was supposed to work. The funnels. The constant promotion. The pressure to stay visible. The endless message that if you are not posting, selling, launching, emailing, optimizing, scaling, nurturing, converting and somehow staying endlessly enthusiastic about all of it, your business will apparently collapse by Thursday.

There were moments when doing meaningful work began to feel disturbingly similar to being a used-car salesperson waving from the side of the highway.

Not me. Yuck with a capital Y.

Eventually a question surfaced that I suspect many of us avoid:
What if the thing you have always done is no longer the thing you are supposed to keep doing in the same way?

That question matters because when you have spent years building something, loving something and being known for something, changing your relationship with it can feel almost disloyal. As though evolution somehow erases what came before.

It doesn’t.

Angel Chatter wasn’t wrong. The burnout work wasn’t wrong. None of it was wasted. It all belonged, and it all brought me here.

Once I stopped trying to force myself back into a version of me that no longer quite fit, something became impossible to ignore. Somewhere underneath the teacher, the intuitive, the business owner, the channel and the woman trying very hard to keep all the plates spinning, there has always been a writer.

Apparently this came to everyone else’s attention long before mine. I recently remembered that in junior high I won an award for a short story about my pencil talking to me.

 

So perhaps we can agree that having an imagination and writing down what the voices say is not exactly a new development.

 

I am not becoming a writer.
I am coming back to one.
And that brings us to The Lantern Library.

Oh, how I love this world.

The Lantern Library is a magical place filled with tea, books, flowers, questionable amounts of Linzer cookies and a collection of characters who have become astonishingly good at asking the questions we humans spend years avoiding.

There is Christine. Read that as you may.

There is Ambrose, our elderly English gentleman with wisdom, spectacles and very definite opinions. There is Alden, the softly magical, somewhat absent-minded world traveler. Christos is a unicorn whose relationship with Linzer cookies may eventually require professional intervention. And around them are dragons, dragonflies, dogs, fae and books that occasionally decide they know better than anyone else where they belong.

 

On the surface, it is whimsical, magical and sometimes ridiculous in exactly the right way. Beneath all that magic, however, is something very real, because the conversations inside the Library are about us.

They are about burnout and boundaries, friendship and asking for help, knowing when to quit and knowing when to keep going. They are about taking up space, truth disguised as humor, the overwhelming number of choices we now face, the excuses we use when we are frightened to become who we already know we are, and what it might mean to create a life we no longer feel the need to escape from.

They are about things I have experienced, things you may have experienced, and things happening in the world around us.

Perhaps that is why this form of writing feels so natural now. Standing on a platform and telling people what to think has never interested me. Opening a door does.

A door into a magical room where the tea is poured, the cookies are passed, and a unicorn, an English gentleman, a dragon or perhaps a suspiciously opinionated teapot can look at a question from another angle. A place where humor, integrity, compassion and love can all exist together without anyone pretending there is only one answer.

That may be my favorite part.

The Lantern Library does not exist to hand you answers.

It invites you to ask better questions.

Several people who have already read some of these conversations have told me something that delights me every single time: they make them think, they make them feel, and they make them laugh, sometimes all within the same paragraph.

That is exactly what I want the Library to hold.

Wisdom without heaviness. Depth without self-importance. Magic without escapism. Humor without cruelty. Empowerment without someone standing in front of you pretending they know your life better than you do.

And somewhere in the writing of these conversations, something clicked into place.

I have not been changing directions all these years. I have been gathering pieces.

Angel Chatter taught me to listen. Burnout taught me to stop. Life taught me discernment. Each taught me that not everything—or everyone—deserves access to me 24/7. Love taught me what matters.

Writing is giving me a place to put all of it.

The person you were twenty years ago is not the person you are today. Thank goodness. But she helped build you. Her dreams mattered. Her mistakes mattered. Her courage mattered. Even the things she eventually outgrew mattered.

The same is true for me.

So no, I am not abandoning everything I have done before. I am allowing it to become part of something larger.

Private clients are still part of my world, although I no longer feel any desire to chase anyone around the internet shouting that appointments are available. If you want to work with me privately, you can ask. If you want to come spend an intensive, loving and powerful weekend with me, you can ask about that too.
The courses and resources I have already created are still there as well. They were created because they answered questions I believed mattered, and I remain proud of them.

What I no longer foresee is a future where my life revolves around constantly promoting them.

That chapter feels complete, and there is enormous peace in saying that.

Because peace, as it turns out, feels very different from giving up. Sometimes peace is simply what happens when you finally stop arguing with what you already know.

These days, writing is where I want to be.

There is something delicious about following the characters when they wander down paths I wasn’t expecting, discovering which tea the Library serves when someone finally admits they are exhausted, or what blooms when someone tells the truth.

Then there is Ambrose, who invariably has something to say when Christine is being particularly stubborn. And I’m sure you’ll be shocked when I tell you she can be!

Alden will undoubtedly misplace his glasses again, Christos will continue to treat Linzer cookies as though they are a food group, and somewhere in the middle of all that magic, another conversation will reveal itself.

So if you’ve been watching and wondering what I am doing, the answer is simpler than it may have appeared.

I’m writing. I’m creating. I’m remembering.

And perhaps, for the first time in a very long time, what I create is being allowed to grow from joy rather than obligation.

Maybe that’s what coming home to yourself looks like.

Not becoming someone new. Not burning down everything that came before. Simply gathering all the versions of yourself who brought you here and saying, Thank you. I’ll take it from here.

And if you would like to come along, there is always another chair at the table. The kettle is on. The books are waiting.

And somewhere nearby, a unicorn is absolutely pretending he did not eat the last cookie.

Welcome to The Lantern Library.

Where wisdom meets magic and Linzer cookies are never safe.