so i brought you
to the back room of language

where good girls lose their grammar
and saints have dirty thoughts.

you wanted a confession.

i gave you my tongue.

a sentence.
then another.

until there was nothing left between us
but language
and everything it was trying not to say.

isn’t that what poetry is?

a language that knows
how to fuck with you.

ink beneath my fingernails.
metaphors between my teeth.
a pulse where punctuation should be.

ruined by rhythm.
undone by rhyme.

poetry makes me hungry.

it gets beneath my skin
and whispers

again.

read me slowly.
then fucking devour me.

read past my manners.
underline the parts i tried to hide.

put your mouth
where the poem hurts.

tell me which sentence
made you wet.

i want words
with their collars open
and their knuckles bruised.

poems that stumble home
smelling like smoke and sweat
saving their repentance
for tomorrow.

scripture
with lipstick in the margins.

holiness
without the pretty halo.

intellect meeting instinct
in a dark room
and realizing
they have wanted each other
all along.

the mind says,behave.

the body says, fuck that.

and somewhere between the two:

enlightenment.

and creation has always been this:

something wild inside you
refusing to die quietly.

something scratching at the ribs.
something begging for a body.

a poem.
a psalm.

a truth you cannot fucking
swallow anymore.

so you open.

you give it a mouth.
you let it ruin the silence.

give me language that sweats.

give me a woman
who can kneel before the divine
without pretending
she has never wanted
anything else
on her knees.

give me words
that leave me wondering
whether i have been seduced
or saved.

maybe i have been both.

because when a poem
gets that deep inside you,

you forget where words end and you begin.

Which is funny, because at seven I had absolutely no qualifications for this position.

No degree. No experience. No aesthetically pleasing desk. No Substack. No morning routine involving electrolytes and three pages of stream-of-consciousness journaling before sunrise.

I had a pencil.

And apparently, way more audacity back then.

I wrote my first story, read it to my second grade class, and something happened that I wouldn’t have had language for then: I recognized myself.

I don’t remember believing I was particularly good at it. That’s the beautiful thing about being seven. I wasn’t thinking about whether anyone would publish it or read it or think it was embarrassing. I wasn’t wondering whether writing was a viable career path or whether the market was oversaturated.

I just wanted to make something that hadn’t existed before.

So I did.

And then I grew up.

Which, honestly, has ruined many perfectly good ideas.

Growing up introduces you to things like practicality and comparison and LinkedIn and people who ask what your five-year plan is while you’re still trying to figure out what you’re having for dinner.

Life happened.

I became other things.

I worked. I loved people. I lost people. I moved. I got married. I got unmarried. I built things. I watched things I thought were permanent disappear. I made money. I lost money. I started businesses. I abandoned ideas. I resurrected them. I became versions of myself I loved and versions I barely recognized.

I’m a woman who has lived. I’ve died a few times too.

The only constant in my life, dead or alive, has been writing. It’s the only thing that had been in me the whole damn time. It always comes back.

There have been years when I’ve taken writing seriously and years when I’ve treated it like an embarrassing habit that I had no intention of sharing with anyone.

And still, that angel over my shoulder whispering:

grab the pen baby.

I think we all have something like this.

Maybe yours isn’t writing. Actually, I hope you don’t read Weekly Becoming as a series about becoming a writer. It isn’t.

This series is about becoming alive in all areas of your life…creativity, love, grief, desire, relationships, embodiment, motherhood, ambition, money, identity, faith and legacy. It’s about how to become more fully yourself without hardening, shrinking or abandoning the life that wants to move through you.

And I am becoming increasingly interested in the things that knew who we were before our developed brains got involved in deciding who we were supposed to be.

The things that keep coming back.

Let’s find yours.

1. Go back before you became impressionable.

Ask yourself a slightly strange but simply question:

What did I love before I knew it could be evaluated?

Before grades. Before followers. Before money. Before attractiveness. Before productivity. Before anybody could tell you whether you were “good” at it.

Children are remarkably uninterested in personal branding. A child will spend four hours constructing an unhinged cardboard city and never once ask about its monetization strategy.

There is information there.

Think about the child you were at seven or ten or twelve.

What did she disappear into? What did he make? What did they collect, draw, build, write, organize, perform, investigate, imagine?

Don’t dismiss the answer because it seems silly.

Especially don’t dismiss it because it seems silly.

Your younger self wasn’t necessarily telling you what your career should be.

They may have been telling you how you come alive.

2. Pay attention to what makes you jealous.

I know. We’re supposed to be evolved enough not to be jealous.

Best of luck with that. I, too, have downloaded the meditation apps.

I think jealousy gets a terrible reputation because we confuse it with resentment. Sometimes jealousy isn’t saying:

I want their life.

It’s saying:

I abandoned something they gave herself permission to have.

More useful information.

The writer publishing the book. The woman building the company. The person traveling alone. The artist selling paintings. The couple who seem wildly in love. The mother who still makes things. The man who left the safe career.

Whatever makes something inside you tighten a little— don’t immediately shame it. Get curious.

What does this person have permission for that I haven’t given myself?

There’s probably a breadcrumb in there.

3. Find the thing you keep quitting.

This is different from something you tried twice and didn’t enjoy.

I’m talking about the thing you dramatically quit every eighteen months and then mysteriously find yourself doing again.

Hello…writing and I have had approximately 47 farewell tours.

Over the years, I’ve tried to become more practical. More career-oriented. More business-minded. More sensible. I’ve told myself writing could just be something I did privately. Very mature. Very reasonable.

Anyway, here we are again.

There are things we quit because they’re wrong for us. And there are things we quit because they matter so much that wanting them becomes terrifying. Learn the difference.

One disappears when you leave it.

The other waits.

4. Stop asking whether you’re good enough yet.

This question has murdered more art than lack of talent ever could.

Am I good enough?

Good enough for what?

To write?

You can write.

To paint?

Paint.

To start something?

Start.

To dance badly in your kitchen? I am pleased to report there is currently no governing body overseeing this.

You become good through devotion. You become interesting through living. You find your voice by using the awkward early version of it long enough for it to become yours.

The seven-year-old version of me didn’t need evidence that she deserved to write. She just wanted to.

That was enough.

Maybe desire gets to be evidence sometimes.

5. Make the thing before you make it useful.

This has become increasingly difficult.

We have accidentally turned creativity into another branch of capitalism.

Make the thing. Then package the thing. Optimize the thing. Build the audience. Create seven revenue streams from the thing. Film yourself making the thing so you can create content about making the thing while theoretically still having time to make the fucking thing.

Apparently, the muse now needs a content calendar and a working knowledge of SEO.

Exhausting.

Write the poem nobody buys. Take the photograph nobody sees. Make the weird little ceramic bowl. Start the newsletter with twelve subscribers. Write the first 10,000 words of the novel you’re not entirely convinced anyone will ever read.

Creation needs somewhere it isn’t being watched.

Protect that place.

6. Build a ritual small enough that your excuses look ridiculous.

Who doesn’t love a grand reinvention?

New notebook. New routine. New identity. Tomorrow morning I wake at 5 a.m., meditate, write 2,000 words, drink lemon water and become Elizabeth Gilbert by approximately 8:45.

Eat, pray, probably not…

So make it smaller.

Ten minutes. One page. One photograph. One paragraph. One song. One sketch. One idea saved in your phone.

Your creative life does not need an elaborate morning routine. It needs contact. Touch the thing. Regularly. That’s it.

You are not trying to manufacture inspiration.

You are reminding yourself:

I still come here.

7. Ask the harder question.

Eventually I think we have to stop asking:

What should I do with my life?

It’s too big. Too loaded. Too concerned with outcomes.

Try this instead:

What keeps coming back?

What idea? What dream?

What way of living? What version of you? What desire keeps tapping you on the shoulder after you’ve given it several extremely compelling PowerPoint presentations about why now is not a convenient time?

Pay attention.

Not every returning desire is destiny. But I don’t think we’re supposed to spend our entire lives explaining ourselves out of the things that make us feel alive either.

Somewhere underneath the obligations and identities and relationships and disappointments and years you spent becoming who you needed to become, there are things that still recognize you.

Writing recognizes me. It has seen every version. Seven-year-old me making up stories. Twenty-eight-year old me sitting in New York City just to feel it. Thirty-two-year-old me trying to make a living from words. Lost me. Ambitious me. The me who thought she should quit. The me who came crawling back. Again. And again. And again.

At some point you have to stop calling that a coincidence.

Maybe the thing that keeps coming back isn’t asking you to become anything at all. Maybe it’s been standing there patiently, all these years, saying:

there you are.

THE BECOMING PRACTICE

This week, don’t make another five-year plan.

Take fifteen minutes and answer these:

• What did I love before I cared whether I was good at it?

• What do I envy — and what permission might be hiding inside that envy?

• What have I quit more than once, only to find myself returning to it?

• What would I make if nobody could like, buy, judge or validate it?

• Where have I mistaken practicality for self-abandonment?

And finally:

What keeps coming back?

Don’t force the answer.

You probably already know it.

The annoying things have a way of making themselves known.

A little note about Weekly Becoming

This is Weekly Becoming No. 01, and I think I should tell you what I’m doing here.

Every Monday, I’m taking one piece of the messy work of being a human — creativity, love, relationships, self-trust, ambition, money, motherhood, sensuality, grief, healing, business, identity, starting over — and turning it into something we can actually do something with.

Part personal essay. Part field notes. Part practical guide. Part I learned or am learning this the unnecessarily difficult way, so perhaps you don’t have to.

I don’t want Fire Writer to only give you beautiful things to read.

I want something here to change something out there for you.

The first four editions of Weekly Becoming will be open to everyone.

After that, Weekly Becoming moves behind the paid-member door and becomes one of the core weekly offerings inside Fire Writer. Because part of this dream is getting paid for my work—for pouring this much of myself onto the page and building something that can hold both my words and my life.

So consider this first month our little courtship period…

I’ll show you my inner world. You decide if you’d like to keep seeing each other.

I’ll try not to make it weird.

To your becoming & mine,

Christine🌹🔥

Just a question.

Are you brave enough to be this free?

I sat with it.

The way you sit with questions that have teeth.

That ask something of you before you have had your coffee. That refuse to be answered quickly or cheaply or with the kind of spiritual-sounding language that lets you feel like you engaged without actually doing so.

Are you brave enough to be this free?

And the honest answer, the one that arrived before I could dress it up was this:

I don’t know.

So naturally, I wrote about it to find out.

Here is what I know about freedom.

Most of us are not living in the prison we think we are living in.

We think the prison is out there.

The circumstances. The history. The people who did what they did and took what they took and left the damage they left. The relationship that ended. The loved one who died too soon. The plan that collapsed. The betrayals that rewrote the story of what we believed about love and safety and the basic trustworthiness of the world.

We think the prison is made of those things.

And those things are real.

I am not going to write this and tell you that the external circumstances of your life are simply a matter of perception and if you just shift your mindset everything transforms.

That is not what I am saying at all.

What I am saying is that somewhere along the way — inside the surviving, inside the adapting, inside the completely understandable and completely necessary process of learning to live inside the difficult reality of an actual human life — we built a second prison.

An interior one.

Made not of circumstances but of stories.

Stories about who we are. Stories about what we are capable of. Stories about what is available to us and what is not and why and who decided and when the decision was made and whether it can be unmade.

That prison — the one inside the mind, made of old conclusions that were drawn under old conditions that no longer exist — that one is yours.

And the walls feel like truth. Like reality.

You built it.

Which means you can take it apart.

Let me talk about limiting beliefs.

Not the way the personal development world talks about them — the slightly clinical, identify-and-replace, five-steps-to-a-new-mindset version that makes the work sound more manageable than it is.

The real life version.

A limiting belief is a story you took on so long ago and integrated so completely that you have stopped experiencing it as a story.

You experience it as reality.

You experience it as simply the way things are.

The way the world works. The way you work. The ceiling of what is possible for someone like you in a life like this.

Some of them were given to you explicitly.

You’re too much.
You’re not smart enough.
People like us don’t do things like that.
Who do you think you are.

Some of them you constructed yourself — from the accumulated evidence of the times things didn’t work out, the times you tried and it cost you something, the times the reaching was followed by the falling and the falling was followed by the conclusion that maybe reaching isn’t what you’re supposed to be doing.

Some of them came from the fire.

From the unsurvivable things that taught you — not explicitly but cellularly, in the oldest register of the self — that certain kinds of hope lead to certain kinds of pain and maybe managing your expectations is the same as being wise.

It’s not always wisdom.

Often it’s the scar tissue of an old wound trying to prevent a new one.

Here is the question underneath the question.

Not are you brave enough to be free, but:

what would you do

if you knew you could not fail?

If you knew —

in the body, in the bone, with the full certainty of someone who has survived whatever it is and found themselves still standing — that you could not be broken by this.

That the trying itself — regardless of outcome, regardless of the response of the world to what you make and who you become — was enough.

What would you do.

What would you write.

What would you say.

What would you build.

What would you become.

If the fear of failure was not the organizing principle.

If the ceiling — the one you have been decorating and calling a sky — was removed.

What is up there?

What have you been not looking at?

We take on so many false identities in the name of surviving.

This is the thing I keep coming back to.

The woman who survived the fire becomes the survivor. And survivor is true. Survivor is earned. Survivor is not nothing.

But survivor is not the whole story.

The woman who loses someone she loves can become organized around the absence. That loss is real. It may be permanent. It may alter the architecture of her forever.

But grief does not get to be the ceiling of her life.

Terrible, unforgiveable, and unforgettable things happen.

But they are not who you are.

They are things that happened to who you are.

The difference between those two sentences is the difference between a prison and a life.

You are allowed to thank them.

And then leave them in the rearview.

I wrote this in my journal that morning too:

Cleaning out the clouds.

Because that is what this work feels like.

Not dramatic transformation. Not an overnight reinvention. Not the sudden arrival of a fully realized self who has shed all limiting beliefs and now moves through the world with unobstructed clarity.

It really does feel like cleaning out the clouds in your sky.

One at a time.

The cloud that says you are not enough.

Look at it. Really look at it. Ask it when it arrived. Ask it whose voice it sounds like. Ask it whether it is actually true or whether it is simply old.

Most limiting beliefs are not true. They are simply old.

The cloud that says this is not possible for someone like you.

Who decided what someone like you means. When was this decision made?

Was it made by someone who had full information about what you are capable of. Was it made by someone who had your best interests at the center of their assessment.

Was it made by someone who had done their own burning and knew from the inside what becomes possible on the other side of it.

Or was it made by someone who needed you manageable. Who needed you to believe the ceiling was lower than it is?

Fuck those clouds.

Finally, I wrote this:

Go all in.

Underlined it.

The truth is I have been going most of the way in for most of my life.

Ninety percent, enough to say I tried.

But not enough to actually find out what happens when you remove the safety net entirely and let the full weight of your own commitment meet the full possibility of what you are capable of.

Most of us live in the ninety percent.

It’s safe there.

If it doesn’t work out you can say you didn’t really go all the way.

You kept something in reserve.

An exit strategy.

A way to not be fully responsible for the outcome because you were never fully committed to the attempt.

Going all in removes that.

Going all in says —

this is what I have.
This is what I am.
This is what I believe is possible.

And I am going to find out.

Not wonder, not imagine, not write about in my journal at a safe distance from the actual attempt — find out — whether I was right.

Here is what I want to say to the woman writing or reading something similar in her own journal. Or her own kitchen. Or the car in the parking lot where she sits for ten minutes before going inside because the inside requires a version of herself she is not sure she has access to today.

You are brave enough.

Not in the absence of fear.

You are brave enough with it.

Bravery is not the feeling of being unafraid. It is the decision that something matters more than the fear.

That the life on the other side of the ceiling — the one you can almost see, the one that has been pressing against the inside of your chest for longer than you have been willing to admit — matters more.

Than the safety of the known.

Than the comfort of the prison you have at least learned to navigate.

Than the familiar weight of the story you have been telling about who you are and what you deserve and how much of the ceiling is actually sky.

The question is not whether you are ready.

You won’t be.

I’m not.

Nobody ever is.

Ready is the story that keeps you in the prison one more day.

So maybe the real question is how willing are you to clean out the clouds?

One at a time.

Willing to look at the stories — the old ones, the inherited ones, the ones you wrote yourself from the rubble of the ash — and ask them honestly whether they are still serving you or simply still present.

Willing to go all the way in.

To find out what is actually up there.

Above the ceiling you have been calling a sky.

Which brings us to the next one…

Are you brave enough to be this free?

Let’s find out.

x, Christine🌹

funny thing to say
with both fists closed.

to say i surrender
when what i mean is
i have run out of ways
to make my life obey me.

i have knocked and knocked
at the door
until my hands bled.

loved past the place
where love could hold them

carried plans like small children
against my chest, saying—

not this one, please.
take anything.
but this one.

called it faith
when really
i was negotiating.

keep this.
change that.
give me more.
just don’t take this.

i breathe better when
i finally stop deciding
what winning looks like.

so here i am.

with the love,
the wreckage,
the plans that didn’t happen
and the prayers that did—

just not how i prayed them.

here.

the heart that loved
badly and beautifully.

the mouth that has said things
it wishes it could gather back.

the body that kept going
when the soul lay down beside it
and whispered—

i cannot.

here is the grief.
here is the wanting.

here are all the lives
i thought i would be living by now.

i don’t know what to do
with them anymore.

maybe You do.

so before i spend another lifetime
asking how You will give me
what i want,

let me ask a better question:

how would You use me?

use the fire.
the ache.
the fool in me
who had to learn everything twice.

use me as a vessel.
use me as the key.

wherever that may lead.

if there is something
You are trying to make of me,

make it.

i don’t want the map.

just enough light
for the next right step,

and enough faith
to take it.

please god, i surrender.

and whatever it may be,

teach me
not to close my hands.

x, Christine 🌹

I have been thinking about this lately, probably because there are so many other kinds of women I have spent my life trying to become.

Successful, obviously. Good. Beautiful. Wise. Healed. The sort of woman who has figured out both her purpose and an appropriate morning routine. A woman who answers emails on time, remembers people’s birthdays, drinks enough water, and owns matching glass containers in her refrigerator.

I have wanted, at various points, to become nearly every culturally approved version of a woman except the one I already was.

But lately I want something else.

I want to remain astonished.

I want to be eighty years old and still interrupt a conversation because the moon is doing something ridiculous outside the window. I want to hear a sentence in a book and have to close it for a minute. I want to fall in love with songs and play them until everyone around me considers staging an intervention.

I want to remain embarrassingly moved by things.

Sunsets. Dandelions. Men who mean what they say. Women who begin again at forty-seven. Old couples holding hands in parking lots. People who lose nearly everything and still plant tomatoes the following spring.

Really good sex. Really good sentences. The smell of rain after a long stretch of heat. A dress that makes me remember I have hips. Champagne on a completely unjustifiable occasion. The full-body electricity of realizing you are standing inside something you once prayed for.

The fact that somewhere, right now, two people are meeting who will change each other’s lives and neither of them has the slightest fucking idea.

I mean, honestly.

How are we all behaving so normally about this?

We are walking around inside stories whose endings we do not know. We are meeting people on random Tuesdays who may become entire chapters. We are making decisions over coffee that could alter the next ten years. We are saying goodbye to moments we don’t yet know we will miss.

And somehow we get used to it.

That is one of the strangest things about being human: how quickly the miraculous becomes ordinary.

Someone falls in love and then goes to Costco. A person creates a legacy that will outlive them and then takes the garbage out. God performs some small miracle in our lives and forty-eight hours later we’re irritated because someone is driving seven kilometres under the speed limit.

Humans are adorable this way.

Maybe this is why wonder requires practice.

Because ordinary life is really good at disguising itself as just that.

The other day I caught myself rushing through something beautiful. It wasn’t a particularly cinematic moment. There was no sunset over Tuscany. Nobody was playing the cello nearby. God did not descend through the clouds and hand me a useful piece of information.

It was simply my life.

And I wasn’t in it.

My body was there, certainly, but my mind was somewhere three hours ahead, doing what minds like mine apparently believe they were put on Earth to do: managing seventeen imaginary emergencies at once.

What needed to be done. What hadn’t been answered. What I needed to write. What I needed to build. What I needed to buy. What might happen. What might not happen. Whether I had remembered to respond to that text. Whether my entire life was headed in the wrong direction because of something someone said on a Tuesday.

The usual.

And then this thought came through me with uncomfortable clarity:

You’re going to miss this.

Not someday in the abstract.

This.

This exact version of your life. The unfinishedness of it. The people who are here now. The questions you haven’t answered yet. The body you are living inside today.

Even some of the things currently irritating the absolute shit out of you will someday belong to an era you cannot return to.

That is the terrible trick of time.

We rarely recognize an era while we’re living inside it.

While we’re living it, Tuesday becomes Wednesday.

I think astonishment requires a willingness to be a little uncool.

Cynicism is much more sophisticated. Cynicism crosses its arms. Cynicism has seen this before. Cynicism knows how this ends.

Astonishment is standing barefoot in the kitchen saying, Come outside. You have to see the moon.

Astonishment is crying during a song you’ve heard 200 times. Buying yourself flowers. Believing in synchronicities. Telling someone you miss them first. Getting wildly excited about an idea that currently exists only in your Notes app and possibly has no business becoming a real company.

Astonishment has a terrible poker face.

I like her.

There is vulnerability in being impressed. There is vulnerability in loving anything enough to point at it and say, look.

Because to remain astonished by life, you have to keep allowing life to touch you.

And if you have lived long enough, you have accumulated some very persuasive reasons not to.

Most guarded people weren’t born guarded. They learned. They believed someone. They loved something. They prayed hard for an outcome that did not come. They built something that failed. They trusted someone who betrayed them. Or even worse, they trusted someone wonderful and lost them anyway.

Eventually the body begins keeping its own little ledger.

Don’t get too excited. Don’t believe it yet. Don’t love that much. Don’t celebrate until you know it will last. Don’t let yourself need anything you could lose.

This makes sense.

It is also an extraordinarily expensive way to live. Because if you spend your entire life preparing not to be devastated, eventually you discover you have also been preparing not to be delighted.

The heart does not have separate doors for those things.

At least mine doesn’t.

Annoying design flaw.

Grief was the first thing that taught me this. When someone is gone, you don’t only miss the monumental occasions. You miss stupid things.

Their name appearing on your phone. The sound of them moving around another room. Some phrase they always said. The way they ordered food. The completely unremarkable privilege of assuming they would still exist tomorrow.

That is what grief does. It strips the varnish from ordinary life and says:

Look again. This mattered. This mattered. This mattered too.

And one of the few things grief can eventually give us—though I hesitate to call anything grief gives a gift—is the ability to recognize some things before they disappear.

To say:

I know this won’t last. I know.

And I am going to love it anyway.

There is a kind of courage in that. Maybe the deepest kind.

Because loving something after you understand impermanence is different from loving it before. Before, you think love is a promise that something will remain.

After, you understand that sometimes love is simply saying, I know I cannot keep you forever, but come here anyway.

Creativity feels like another version of this mystery. A blank page is nothing. And then someone sits down and makes a world.

Think about how fucking strange that is.

A book begins as something invisible inside someone’s head. A business begins as an idea someone could very easily dismiss. A poem begins as a sentence that arrives while you’re driving because apparently inspiration has no respect whatsoever for designated creative hours.

We make things from invisible material: memory, longing, pain, desire, faith, curiosity, some weird idea that won’t leave us alone.

And then we give it a body.

A page. A song. A company. A garden. A meal. A life.

Creation is one of the closest ways we ever come to understanding the divine.

There was nothing here. And then there was something. And for reasons we cannot entirely explain, we were compelled to make it.

I think this is partly why I never want to become too sensible about creativity. I don’t want every idea to require a business plan before I’m allowed to fall in love with it. I don’t want every piece of writing to have a content strategy attached to its ankle.

Some things should be made because they make your pulse quicken. Some things should be followed because they won’t leave you the hell alone.

Some things should exist simply because something inside you caught fire and making them was the only reasonable response.

That still knocks me sideways.

I hope it always does.

Love astonishes me too.

Even now.

Loving before you have been hurt is one thing. Loving after you have acquired evidence is another. To have your heart broken and eventually find yourself wanting intimacy again feels almost biologically unreasonable.

And yet the heart does this.

The stubborn little idiot.

It returns.

It wants to know someone and to be known. It wants hands and mouths and conversation and laughter and somebody to tell the truth to in the dark.

It wants to be touched. Chosen. Challenged. Cherished. Like tenderness and heat. Safety and electricity. Someone who can hold the soft parts without trying to own them.

Because I don’t think desire makes us less evolved. I don’t think wanting to be deeply loved, thoroughly kissed and occasionally looked at like someone has just remembered exactly what they plan to do with you later is a spiritual failing.

Quite the opposite, actually.

The body is one of the places aliveness speaks loudest. And after everything it has learned, the heart still wants to look at another human being and say:

You. Come closer.

I find that incredibly brave. Not because love guarantees safety. It doesn’t. Love has never made that promise.

And then, of course, there is God.

I have spent a great deal of time trying to understand God, which I increasingly suspect God finds amusing.

I find Him in scripture.

Sometimes.

But I also find Him in considerably less organized places.

Desire. Grief. Coincidence. Sex. The sentence that arrives exactly when I need it. The thing I begged to keep that left anyway. The thing I never thought to ask for that appeared.

I have become less interested in separating my life into what is sacred and what is not.

I don’t want a God who only gets invited into the tidy rooms. I want Him in the kitchen and the bedroom and the boardroom and the blank page. In the wanting. In the making. In the pleasure. In the grief. In all the messy human places where I am still becoming.

Maybe the body can be an altar too. Maybe desire isn’t always something dragging us away from God. Maybe sometimes it is one of the ways we remember we are still fucking alive.

And then there is the strange choreography you can only see looking backward, when you realize that what felt like your life falling apart was also your life rearranging itself.

I used to think faith meant understanding more. Now I wonder if faith is becoming increasingly comfortable with mystery.

I don’t need everything to explain itself to me anymore.

Some things can remain strange. Some things can remain sacred precisely because I cannot solve them. Reverence doesn’t require certainty.

Reverence looks more like standing in the middle of your own inexplicable life and saying:

Well. Would you look at that.

Maybe this is the woman I want to become. Or remain. Not a woman who has figured life out.

God, how boring that would be.

I want to get older without becoming harder. I want laugh lines and books stacked beside the bed and flowers on the table. I want stories nobody believes until someone else at dinner says, No, she really did that.

I want to wear perfume for no reason. I want to flirt. Pray. Write. Make things nobody asked me to make. Get too excited about ideas. Cry at songs. Make money doing things I love. Buy the shoes. Send the risky text occasionally. Dance in kitchens. Kiss slowly. Laugh loudly at inappropriate moments. Believe there are still versions of my life I cannot currently imagine.

I want to remain a little unreasonable about what might still be possible. A little feral around the edges. A little too interested in pleasure and God and language and the great ridiculous mystery of all of this. I want to resist the strange cultural pressure to become increasingly unimpressed.

Mostly, I want the deep understanding of how much life can hurt you and choose to remain movable anyway.

To know grief and still love. To know betrayal and still trust wisely. To know endings and still begin. To know death and still be delighted by a human experience.

That feels like true wisdom to me.

Not invulnerability.

Participation.

There will always be reasons to become cynical.

There will be disappointing people and failed plans and unanswered prayers and bills and heartbreak and algorithms and laundry. There will always be somebody eager to explain why your hope is naïve, your dream unrealistic, your tenderness dangerous, your faith irrational, your desire excessive.

Fine.

Let them be unimpressed.

I have no interest in becoming too intelligent for wonder.

And I have even less interest in becoming so “healed” that nothing makes me lose my fucking mind a little. Give me goosebumps. Longing. Loving something beyond what is reasonable.

Because the older I get, the more astonishing the whole thing seems.

That we are even here at all.

That out of every impossible arrangement of timing and ancestry and atoms and accident and grace, somehow I got this life.

This one.

Not the life where nothing hurts. Not the life where everyone stays. This messy, sensual, heartbreaking, hilarious, inconvenient, holy little life.

The one where hearts break and somehow love returns. Where businesses begin on laptops with seventeen tabs open. Where poems appear in grocery stores. Where bodies make pleasure and people make art and strangers become family.

Where a life can change because somebody finally said one true thing.

Temporary.

Every bit of it.

And that is not the tragedy, but an invitation:

To notice before nostalgia has to do the noticing for us. To love before loss teaches us that we should have. To stop demanding permanence from things before we allow ourselves to enjoy them.

To be here while we are in fact, here.

So yes, I want to remain astonished.

I want to let beautiful things wreck me. I want to remain soft enough to be surprised and wild enough to follow what surprises me. And the next time life gives me a reason to close my heart—and life being life, I imagine it fucking will—I hope I remember this:

Cynicism might save me from looking foolish. Distance might save me from feeling everything. Keeping one foot out the door might even save me from certain kinds of pain.

But I don’t think we came here to be saved from being alive.

I think we came here to be alive.

Completely.

Temporarily.

Astonishingly.

And after everything we lose, everything we survive, everything we swear will surely be the thing that finally makes us stop believing—

something beautiful still has the nerve to happen next.

x, Christine🌹

a love that doesn’t ask to be permanent gets to be honest instead.

the match doesn’t grieve the wood. it just gives it a new shape to be.

i used to think burning meant losing. now i know it just means becoming light-weight enough to rise.

every ending is a flame deciding it’s done pretending to be a spark.

the people who taught me the most left enough heat behind that i never had to wonder if it was real.

i know it was.

the ash isn’t proof that something died.

it’s proof that something finally stopped holding its shape for other people’s comfort.

i no longer want a love that survives forever. i want one that’s honest enough to burn all the way through.

the question stopped being “how do i keep this from going out?” and became “did i feel everything while it was lit?”

most things people call heartbreak is just fire doing its only job: turning what it torches into something it can carry forward as warmth.

let it go and grow.

i’m not afraid of anyone disappearing anymore. i watched a flame do it a thousand times and come back as light in someone else’s house.

god, if you’re listening: thank you for never building anything that was meant to last unchanged. thank you for making the burning the point.

for years i’ve been gathering the sparks, the scorched pages, the matchbooks, the things i loved enough to let change me completely. i kept them in a box of darkness i never opened in front of anyone.

i’m opening it now.

Prelude

I had a dream I was running through fire.

Not the kind of dream you wake from and shake off by breakfast, but the kind that lingers and leaves you weary for years, once you understand what it was trying to say.

In it, I was back in a familiar place. The place where I had first crossed paths with someone who would end up being pivotal to my life—though now I can see that what I eventually carried out of that story was far more significant than the person themselves.

I didn’t know who or what I was running toward—only that I had to get to that change room.

The hallway was burning. The air was thick with smoke. Flames licked the walls like a tongue against skin. So I ran. Like some old, younger part of me knew:

this is the only way through.

I remember the way my lungs burned as I pushed with all my might and kept going, the way you do when your body knows the dream isn’t finished yet.

I reached the end of the hallway and turned the corner into the change room. Fluorescent lights. Cold tile. Rows of locked stalls and big mirrors—the ordinary architecture of a place where women undress and redress their lives in small, daily ways.

She had been gone for a little over two years. I hadn’t seen her in a while.

But in the dream, she wasn’t sick. She wasn’t fading. She wasn’t fighting for breath or lying there with a single tear rolling down her cheek.

She was an Angel, sent back to me by God in the moment I needed her most.

“Mama.”

She stood next to me in the mirror’s reflection, steady and sure, and said,

“Oh, there you are — you made it through. I’ve been waiting for you.”

Now, finally, we can begin.

The story chooses the writer

That’s the thing about dreams and stories:

They choose you.

For a long time I believed I could manage mine. That if I made the right choices and stayed on the right path, I could craft the narrative, shape the characters, and bend the arc of my life toward the version I thought would keep me safe.

Plot twist:

It doesn’t work.

Some stories arrive to crack you open.
Some arrive to burn what cannot come with you.
Some arrive to quietly, relentlessly, save your life.

The words that change me have never arrived in neat, polished packages. They don’t show up in tidy outlines or perfectly punctuated sentences—

They come feral.
Unfiltered.
Untamed.

They come at the exact moment I stop gripping the outcome and allow my pen to name what my body isn’t ready to. They slide up from the hips and heat of me before my mind can dress them.

Because writing that stirs the soul does not travel from the mind down to the page.

It rises up—from somewhere older, somewhere primal—that has no interest in being quiet anymore.

“Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.”
—Elizabeth Gilbert

Writing doesn’t care about optics. It only cares about transmission and truth.

My best pages have always risen from the aftermath.
From the collapse.
In the grief‑drunk stillness when the noise dies down and only what’s real is left.

I know I’ve touched it when I flip the light on, read the paragraph back, and whisper,

“Oh fuck.”

No forcing.
No performance.
No wrestling my voice into submission or obedience.

Just blood on the page.
Just me and God, bargaining through language, giving in by taking turns.

Fire Writer was born from those meetings. From the stories that chose me, and the ones I have to be brave enough to tell.

The burning catalyst

When I look back, it’s no surprise that this space is called Fire Writer.

Fire has always been the element that finds me first.

It is the turning point and the teacher.
The ending and the invitation.
The force that shows me, again and again, what I cannot carry any longer.

Fire is what strips things down to their essence.

It burns away the roles that no longer fit, the versions of me I’ve outgrown, the treatment I tolerated just to feel chosen. There have been seasons where everything familiar felt like a building going up in flames—and I was the one running through the hallway, praying I would recognize myself on the other side.

Fire is shedding.
Fire is rising.
Fire is transformation in a language that does not apologize for being the same pulse as desire.

For years, I was a ghost with good credentials. A shell of the real me. I wrote sentences I didn’t yet believe in. I lived inside an illusion someone else had so brilliantly crafted and masked it as “ours.” I took lies and dummy rounds from the bathroom floor.

And in doorways.
On random Tuesdays.
In wedding vows.

Don’t ask, don’t question.

All the while, the body and that Angel on my shoulder whispering and screaming all at once:

“This is not your story. Get to safety baby.”

The irony. The metaphor. The goddamn poetry of it all.

“Take your best shot
Show me what you got
Honey, I’m not afraid
Rear back and take aim.”
—Chris Stapleton

I didn’t realize it then, but I’d been pulling poems from deception. Sifting lies for lines. Turning trauma into transmissions through the stroke of a pen or keyboard, trying to envision what it would feel like to be touched by someone that wanted me whole.

Was it all an echo from a past life? Or another manipulative story someone tried to embed into my skin until I mistook it for my own voice?

I forgive him. I forgive myself.

Thank you, God.
Thank you, Universe.
Thank you, Great Teacher.

My marriage wasn’t just an ending. It was an initiation into the most vital aspects of my life.

Spiritually.
Somatically.
Creatively.

I may have danced with confusion for years, but if there was one thing I always knew to be true in the fog, it was this:

That the page had been my bloody prayer mat.
My medicine.
My calling.
My every pink sky when all I wanted was to die.

I knew if I could write it, I could survive it.
And if I could survive it, I could meet myself.
And in that meeting, I could finally Shake Hands with Angels.

And someday, today, I would try to help others do the same.

The bigger why

I’m building this Fire Writer community for the men and women ones who are no longer afraid to chase what sets their soul on fire. For the mystics and misfits who may have forgotten along the way. For the ones who’ve died a thousand deaths and continue to rise, wet with new life.

I’m writing it for myself too.

This publication comes from the simple conviction that writing has been the most reliable way I have ever found to walk myself back to the change room—to the mirrors, the younger selves, the quiet presence of God in the most unlikely places.

Everything I share here is stitched from the deepest parts of my own humanity—and what I’ve witnessed in others.

This is where I write about grief, stillness, sex, God, trauma, and tenderness, and what it means to be both lion and lamb with all of it living in the same chest.

Here is where I want us to give ourselves permission to write what still terrifies us. To release the words and wounds we once swallowed. To channel from a different frequency we didn’t know lived inside of us—the holy, the hungry, the erotic. To feel and name it all—no matter what cracks open on the other side of the page.

Because it’s in this permission, we find it:

The voice beneath those dreams and stories.
The alchemist who doesn’t write from the mind.
They create from the body. From the lungs.
From the edge of water.

“I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own.
Life is a kind of madness that death makes.
Long live the dead, because we live in them.”
—Clarice Lispector

The act of writing has always saved me. Fire Writer is where I return to the page to say what I was born to, in service of those still moving through their own fire.

This space is for that.

For us.

What you will find here

I think of this newsletter as a kind of digital fire—something we can gather around, week after week, to remember who we are and what we’re made of.

What you can expect from this Substack:

Personal Letters
Weekly long‑form pieces about love, grief, creativity, faith & mysticism, sex, and the beautiful, bewildering work of being human.

Sunday Transmissions
Shorter Sunday offerings: prayers, poems, prompts, and voice transmissions to take into your week. A way to begin again with a little more presence and a little more creative devotion.

The Smut Altar
A spicier, more private corner dedicated to sacred sensuality—erotic poetry, short stories, body‑based reflection, desire as something holy instead of something to hide.

Tongues of Fire
For writers, founders, and creatives who want their work to sound like a living human, not a performance. Essays, prompts, and raw guidance around voice, storytelling, and saying what you really fucking mean.

Behind the Writing
Glimpses into the making of my debut novel, Shaking Hands With Angels, other written works, and the process of building a life around words—messy drafts, process notes, and early chapter excerpts.

Plus as many resources and offerings I can share to help you write your truth, elevate your life or business, and burn old narratives down.

My word to you is to create a space where we can honour ourselves through written, spoken, and body-driven artistry. Where we can embrace our shadows, our light, our scars, our beauty. Where we can breathe, move, purge the pen, and weave together in radical aliveness.

All of it being held together by one simple commitment:

To tell the truth from madness, magic, and ash.

Because somewhere between those lines is the power to write what we dream of into existence, right from the place we actually are.

And so it is

If you’d like, you can treat this first letter as your own small turning.

A moment at the end of one burning hallway, the beginning of another, a choice to keep moving toward the room where all of you is welcome.

You don’t have to know where this is going yet—I sure don’t.

The First Transmission

You might let these words move through your lips, or simply hold them gently in your mind:

“I sever any soul contract with the shadows of the past.
Every word or action they cursed me with dissolves now.
Their voice is no longer God.
Their memory no longer law.
I call all fragments of myself back into my body—
from every scream, every scar, every apology I should have never made.
I now return to my timeline.
And alchemize my ashes into art.
Clear. Sovereign. Unhaunted. Rare.
Only those who meet me in truth may find me here.”

It is done.
You are free to be free with me.

Fire away, fire writer.

From the fiercest place of Love,
Christine

P.S. Thank you for being here, for reading or listening to the first of many letters. If any part of it hit home, tell me which line stuck with you. <3