I’m Returning to Texas, Where I Began—But Not as Who I Was
Reclamation in roots: a return has become an inventory of every life I have lived since I left—and what I am carrying home is not the same as what I took when I left. This week, I am packing years of papers, creative work, unfinished ideas, identities, memories, business history, grief, and physical belongings into a truck and beginning the drive from northern Maine back to Houston, Texas—the city where I was born. Technically, this is a move. I am changing addresses, crossing state lines, moving furniture and boxes from one part of the country to another. There are utilities to manage, a U-Haul to pick up, a car to tow, hotels, routes, deadlines, and all the wonderfully unspiritual logistics involved in relocating a life. But I know this is more than that. I am not simply moving across the country. I am crossing a threshold, and the timing carries a symbolism I couldn’t have planned better if I had tried.
The Week Everything Changes
The September Equinox arrives this week as the Sun moves into Libra, followed days later by an Aries Full Moon conjunct Neptune. I was born with a Pisces Sun, Taurus Moon, and Libra Rising, with my Sun sitting at the very end of Pisces—29 degrees, the final degree of the final sign of the zodiac. There is something almost absurdly poetic about what is happening in the sky while I leave Maine. As I begin physically moving from one life into another, the Moon moves through the final degrees of Pisces and crosses into Aries—the first sign of the zodiac—before reaching fullness. It is ending moving into beginning, water moving into fire, completion moving into initiation, and somewhere in the middle of all of that is me, driving a U-Haul toward Texas.
I don’t experience astrology as fixed fate. I don’t believe planets make my decisions for me, nor do I believe a Full Moon determines whether this move succeeds. I use astrology more like a symbolic language that I dance with from moment to moment, a way of noticing patterns, asking better questions, and sometimes finding words for something my body already understands. This particular symbolism is difficult for me to ignore because the question I’ve been sitting with isn’t really, Who am I becoming? It is something more uncomfortable and much more interesting: Who have I already become that I am finally willing to live as?
And that seems to be more beautifully terrifying than anything else in moments right now…
Going Back Is Not the Same as Returning
I was born in Houston, and now I am returning at 46 after 13+ years of living elsewhere and carrying an enormous amount of history with me. There is a difference between going back and returning. Going back implies recovering something that existed before. It carries the temptation to recreate an old life, revisit an old identity, or somehow step backward into a place where time has been patiently waiting for me. But Houston hasn’t been waiting, and neither have I.
The woman returning to Texas is not the woman who left it. I have lived more life. I have built businesses, lost people, loved people, survived things, made mistakes, rebuilt, changed careers, and changed my ideas about myself more than once. I have accumulated skills, scars, certifications, stories, boundaries, unfinished projects, ridiculous amounts of paper, and even more pieces of wood (those that know me, know what I am talking about!), and a much lower tolerance for bullshit. I don’t think I am going back to Texas. I am meeting Texas again, and Texas is meeting this version of me. That distinction matters because I am not returning to recover an old identity. I am bringing the woman I have become into a place that once knew an earlier version of me.
The Strange Parallel Between My Business and My Life
Something has been happening in my business over the last several months that I didn’t fully recognize as personal until recently. I have been rebuilding Momentive Media, except “rebuilding” isn’t actually the right word. I initially thought I was repositioning the company. Instead, I discovered that I was excavating it. More than sixteen years of work had created layers: marketing, messaging, strategy, systems, AI, websites, consulting, coaching, content, research, client work, methodologies, lessons, failures, proof, patterns, and intellectual property I hadn’t necessarily recognized as intellectual property while I was creating it. The more I dug through the business, the clearer something became. I didn’t necessarily need to invent more. I needed to understand what I had already built.
That realization eventually became one of the central ideas behind Momentive Media’s Business Archaeology methodology: Before you build what’s next, understand what you’ve already built. I thought I was talking about businesses. Apparently, I was also talking about myself. While I’ve been excavating sixteen-plus years of Momentive Media, I’ve also been physically sorting through years of my own life: papers, journals, creative projects, coaching materials, writing, art supplies, business ideas, things I started and never finished, things I once thought mattered enormously that don’t matter anymore, and things I had forgotten existed that suddenly feel important again. AND that’s when discernment is needed the most.
Now I have to decide what gets space in the truck, and that has become an unexpectedly existential exercise. When everything cannot come with you, you have to decide what still belongs to you. I am realizing that this applies to much more than physical belongings. Some identities have become too small. Some stories have expired. Some obligations have been carried long after their usefulness ended. Some dreams have changed shape. Other things I thought I had abandoned are revealing themselves as pieces of myself I may simply not have been ready to reclaim yet.
What I’ve Outgrown
One of the things I think I’ve outgrown is the constant urge to reinvent myself whenever the existing version becomes difficult to explain. For years, different pieces of me seemed to belong in different rooms. The strategist belonged over here. The writer belonged somewhere else. Marketing Christina made sense professionally. Spiritual Christina was harder to explain. There was the business owner, the coach, the artist, the tarot reader, the energy worker, the researcher, the woman fascinated by AI and emerging technology, the woman who talks to trees, the woman fascinated by shadow work and nervous systems, the poet, the practical one, the mystical one, the woman who wants meaning, and the woman who also very much wants to make money.
I spent a surprising amount of energy trying to determine which one was the “real” version. I am much less interested in answering that question now because they are all me. Maybe maturity and (perimenopause!) isn’t becoming simpler. Maybe it is becoming less fragmented. I am no longer particularly interested in chopping myself into marketable pieces so every part of me makes immediate sense to everybody else. That doesn’t mean everything belongs everywhere. Discernment still matters, and boundaries between my brands and work still matter. But integration matters too. I can decide what belongs in which room without pretending the other rooms don’t exist.
What I’ve Learned to See More Clearly
One of the biggest things I have developed this year is a deeper relationship with evidence. Ironically, AI helped teach me that. The work I have been doing around AI visibility forced me to become almost obsessive about distinguishing between what we think is happening and what the evidence actually demonstrates. A score isn’t proof. A correlation isn’t automatically causation. An assumption isn’t data. A compelling explanation isn’t necessarily a true explanation. I have had to build systems around evidence, interpretation, testing, retesting, and documenting what actually happened. ANd yes, AI can go rogue and lie. Anyone with half a brain knows what it’s capable of if allowed to move outside of it’s bounds.
Somewhere along the way, that started leaking into the rest of my life. I have become more willing to ask whether something is intuition, fear, conditioning, projection, an old wound, or something I can actually observe. I am learning that intuition and evidence do not have to be enemies. I can honor what I feel without automatically treating every feeling as a fact. I can listen to my body without requiring every sensation to become a prophecy. I can recognize a pattern without immediately building an entire story around it.
That feels particularly important this week because the astrology itself carries a strong Neptunian quality. Neptune can be associated symbolically with intuition, imagination, dreams, compassion, creativity, spiritual sensitivity, and the dissolving of boundaries. It can also speak to idealization, projection, escapism, confusion, fantasy, and the temptation to mistake emotional intensity for truth. I don’t want to romanticize this move into something Houston is responsible for fulfilling, and I don’t want to catastrophize a difficult moment along the way into evidence that I made the wrong decision.
Houston is not coming to save me, and Maine is not the villain I am escaping. Houston will contain opportunity, bureaucracy, friendship, loneliness, creativity, bills, traffic, work, pleasure, irritation, discovery, disappointment, connection, and possibility. In other words, it will contain life.
What I Am No Longer Willing to Carry
There are things I know I am becoming less willing to tolerate. I am less interested in being misunderstood and then exhausting myself trying to correct everyone’s understanding of me. I have less tolerance for relationships that require shrinking, systems that create unnecessary complexity, work that asks me to hide the most intelligent or unusual parts of myself, artificial urgency, performative professionalism, and the idea that availability is proof of caring.
There is another pattern I have been considering more deeply: being useful as the price of belonging. I know how to help. I know how to fix things. I know how to strategize, research, organize, coach, build, write, solve, and step into whatever gap happens to exist. Those are genuine strengths, but strengths can become survival strategies when they become the only way we know how to secure our place in a relationship. I am increasingly interested in knowing who remains when I am not performing usefulness.
That question applies to friendships, family, clients, collaborators, future relationships, and even my relationship with an audience. Who knows me when I am not producing something? Who checks on me when there isn’t a problem I can solve for them? Where can I exist without earning my place every five minutes? Those are becoming more important questions than whether everybody understands me.
Grief Is Coming With Me Too
My father’s death belongs somewhere in this crossing. I don’t mean that every move needs to become a grief ritual or that every emotion I experience over the next week needs to be traced back to loss. But relocation rearranges our relationship with the dead too. I am leaving Maine while my mother remains there, and I am leaving landscapes, routines, belongings, and places associated with a period of family history that included losing my father and dealing with everything that comes after someone dies.
I know enough about grief to know it rarely arrives when it is convenient. It may show up somewhere on the highway disguised as something ridiculous. It could be a road, a gas station, a song, a box, a receipt, something my father touched, or the sight of my mother’s house disappearing in the rearview mirror. If that happens, I don’t need to turn it into evidence that I shouldn’t be leaving. Sometimes grief simply waits until movement creates enough space for it.
I can desperately want this new chapter and still grieve what it costs me to enter it. Relief and sadness can exist together. Excitement and fear can coexist. I can feel free and lonely in the same afternoon. I can be proud of myself and still have a moment somewhere along the interstate when I wonder what the hell I’m doing. Contradictory feelings do not automatically mean I have made a contradictory decision.
My Body Is Making This Move Too
There is a very practical part of this transition that I refuse to spiritualize away: my body has to make this move with me. It cannot be treated like another piece of luggage. I have physical limitations and a history with my back that require me to pay attention, and I have spent months carrying an enormous workload while simultaneously preparing to relocate.
My Taurus Moon makes the symbolism around embodiment particularly meaningful to me because tangible safety matters. Food matters. Sleep matters. Comfort matters. Familiar objects matter. Beauty matters. Physical surroundings matter. My apartment becoming a sanctuary isn’t frivolous; it is part of how I establish safety in a new environment.
My minimum viable care plan for this move is therefore intentionally unglamorous: water, actual food, medications and essentials, bathroom breaks, fuel, movement, physical safety, and sleep. Ha! Who am I kidding, I haven’t slept in a over a year, but I am trying to be more mindful of getting rest. I need one accessible bag that does not disappear into the truck containing everything I need to function if every other box becomes inaccessible. I need to take movement breaks before my body forces me to take them. I need to remember that caffeine cannot permanently negotiate with exhaustion, and I need to treat my driving limit as a maximum rather than an achievement to beat.
When I arrive, my first job is not to relaunch my entire life. My first job is to create enough safety for my new life to begin. Sleep comes before optimization. Food and hydration come before strategy. The bed and bathroom need to function before my office needs to look impressive. I need internet and essential logistics, but I also need time to learn my neighborhood again, put familiar things around me, and let my body understand that we live here now.
I have business deadlines waiting almost immediately after I arrive. That is real. But October does not have to become the first month of some hyperproductive new era simply because I crossed a state line. My nervous system does not care about my content calendar. AND If I am honest, those of you that truly know me, know that I already have several launches planned, networking events, collaborations to look forward to and maybe a bit too much on my calendar as I write this just 4 days away from moving day. I am also aware that I can change my mind and slow down everything currently planned to 5 mph instead of 160 mph Thelma and Louise style on acid. But there is something worth noting…there’s a lot coming up around getting visible lately, speaking, being on camera (my worst nightmare!) but I am doing it imperfectly anyway. I have actually been sitting with that notion for several months now, the nudges and opportunities are just getting louder.
Right Relationship Is Changing
The Aries–Libra axis has me thinking a lot about what I mean by “right relationship.” With Libra Rising, relationship has always been significant territory for me symbolically, but right relationship is not simply about partnership. It is the relationship I have with myself, my body, my work, money, home, spirituality, friendships, family, creativity, ambition, solitude, community, and eventually intimacy.
For me, the question underneath all of those relationships is becoming increasingly clear: Can I belong without abandoning myself? Healthy Libra is not self-erasure. It is reciprocity. Healthy Aries is not selfishness or isolation. It is sovereignty. I don’t want independence that is really armor, and I don’t want connection that requires disappearing. I want to understand what interdependence looks like when everyone involved is allowed to remain whole.
Distance will inevitably reorganize some of my relationships. Some connections are maintained partly because proximity makes them easy. Others become stronger when intentionality replaces convenience. Some may naturally fall away. Some people may surprise me. Leaving my mother in Maine may also bring complicated emotions, but love does not require geographical proximity, even when guilt occasionally tries to argue otherwise.
I am also becoming more protective of the difference between experiencing my life and publishing my life. I am a writer, and writing is one of the ways I understand myself. But I do not owe the internet real-time access to every transition. Some experiences need to belong to me before they become material. I am allowed to live something before I decide what it means. I am allowed to move something without sticking a label on it. And much of what I have been moving lately, you can’t label. Not everything needs to be named.
What I Am Reclaiming
When I think about the phrase “there is more of me to reclaim,” I don’t think it means I need to discover another dozen identities. I think it means I am ending some of the internal negotiations that prevented the identities already inside me from occupying the same room.
I am reclaiming my voice. My writing has become more embodied, intimate, provocative, intelligent, and less willing to sand down contradiction. I am not simply trying to find my voice anymore. I am learning to trust it.
I am reclaiming professional authority too. I have spent this season turning years of experience into methodologies—Business Archaeology, AI Visibility, evidence systems, positioning, strategy, coaching, and the intersection between human intelligence and emerging technology. I am beginning to recognize that some things that felt obvious to me are actually accumulated expertise. Some of what I built intuitively over sixteen years has names now.
I am reclaiming creativity. Packing has confronted me with physical evidence of how much I have created over the years: writing, poetry, art, journals, ideas, unfinished projects, fragments, and things I once put down because life moved in another direction. I am beginning to wonder whether every unfinished project should really be classified as something I failed to complete. Maybe some of them were breadcrumbs. Maybe they were evidence of parts of myself I didn’t yet know how to integrate.
I am also reconsidering spiritual authority. I have studied many modalities and frameworks over the years, and I value what they have taught me. But eventually every serious spiritual practice seems to arrive at a similar threshold: at what point do I stop asking the modality to tell me what I already know? That doesn’t mean abandoning teachers or deciding I have nothing left to learn. It means allowing tools to support my discernment rather than replace it. Creating an authority in my own ways and methodology of healing, perspectives, building communities that don’t leave others out or make them feel less than while in the middle of moving mountains of trauma and navigating life. Staying curious to everything and it’s energetics is truly important to me and my way of life.
I may also be reclaiming anger in a healthier form—not rage for the sake of destruction, but anger as information. No. Enough. I want this. I don’t want that. That hurt. That isn’t mine to carry. Anger can contain boundaries long before the rational mind finds language for them.
Pleasure belongs here too. Sensuality, beauty, rest, desire, food, music, art, comfortable sheets, candles, bare feet, morning light, and a home that feels like mine are not rewards I need to earn after becoming productive enough. They are part of being alive. I want my new home to communicate something to my nervous system that I have not always been very good at prioritizing: we are not only surviving here.
Financial self-trust is part of this reclamation as well. I am moving without every financial variable perfectly resolved, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But financial sovereignty doesn’t require pretending uncertainty doesn’t exist. It requires replacing vague anxiety with numbers, choices, priorities, evidence, contingency plans, and action. I don’t need to perform abundance. I need to build stability.
What the Full Moon Means to Me
The Aries Full Moon conjunct Neptune feels less like a command to begin again and more like an invitation to distinguish instinct from illusion. Aries wants movement, identity, desire, and action. Neptune can dissolve certainty. Together, they remind me that an intense feeling is not necessarily an instruction.
If something feels like a revelation this week, I can notice it without immediately restructuring my life around it. I can ask what I actually felt, what actually happened, what story my mind constructed around what happened, and what remains true after food, water, sleep, and time. Intuition does not require immediate obedience. I can honor a message without acting on it today.
That feels particularly important during a move because exhaustion distorts perception. I don’t want to interpret exhaustion as failure, guilt as evidence that I should stay, loneliness as proof that I don’t belong in Houston, or one frustrating experience as evidence that the entire move was a mistake. I also don’t want to idealize Houston into a magical solution for everything I want to change.
I want reality.
Reality is where I can actually build something.
Before I Leave Maine
Before I leave, I want one quiet moment that isn’t about packing, deadlines, clients, content, routes, or logistics. I don’t need an elaborate ritual. I want to sit somewhere quietly and acknowledge what this place held for me, who I became here, and what I am choosing not to carry forward. I have already been doing that in small moments as I drive to and from clients watching the trees turn into wildfires in the sky is the most peaceful thing to me, it stirs up this electric energy all around me. I have been taking advantage of bare feet on the earth’s surface while burning financial papers that don’t need to come into my next chapter of becoming. It’s all about noticing. and elements.
I want to acknowledge what Maine taught me, what Maine took from me, and what Maine gave me without forcing any of those answers to become prettier than they really are. I don’t need every chapter to become a gratitude exercise. Some things can simply be true.
When the Full Moon comes, whether I am in a hotel room, on the road, visiting someone along the route, or finally somewhere quiet, I want to ask myself two things: What am I done negotiating about myself, and what am I willing to become responsible for now? Those feel like Aries questions worth carrying with me.
For the first week after I arrive, I want my integration practice to remain equally simple. I want to notice what my body needs, what actually happened that day, and what I want tomorrow. No five-year strategy. No immediate reinvention. No demand that Houston reveal the meaning of my next chapter before I’ve even unpacked the kitchen.
What I Want to Remember This Week
I want to remember that I don’t need to interpret every feeling. Some feelings simply need to move through me. I can be uncertain and still make sound decisions. I can build this life slowly enough that my body actually gets to live in it. Not feel like it must survive it.
I want to prioritize safety, sleep, food, hydration, my physical body, essential logistics, and getting myself and my belongings south safely. I want to postpone permanent decisions made from temporary activation whenever possible. I don’t need major relationship conversations from hotel rooms, dramatic business decisions because inspiration struck after ten hours of driving, or commitments made because I’m afraid an opportunity will disappear.
I especially want to watch the old reflex to manage everyone else’s experience while I am the one undergoing the transition. I don’t have to make everyone comfortable with my decisions. I don’t have to explain every choice until it becomes acceptable to someone else. I don’t have to make my departure painless for everyone in order for it to be loving.
I can trust evidence. I can trust patterns more than isolated moments. I can trust my body when it asks for basic care. I can trust the professional skills I have actually accumulated. I can trust the boundaries I have earned. I can trust the relationships capable of surviving honesty. I can trust myself to change course if new information eventually requires it.
Most importantly, I can remember that uncertainty does not automatically mean I have chosen incorrectly.
What I’m Taking With Me
There is one image I keep returning to as I prepare to leave.
For months, I have been building Business Archaeology around the idea that businesses do not necessarily need another layer piled on top of them. Sometimes the work is excavation. You dig through what already exists and uncover the evidence, assets, patterns, proof, history, intelligence, and forgotten value buried underneath years of accumulation. Then you decide what deserves to be carried forward and what is creating noise.
Meanwhile, I have been standing in Maine doing almost exactly the same thing with my physical life. I have been sorting years of papers, creative supplies, unfinished work, memories, identities, ideas, belongings, and pieces of myself, deciding what deserves space in the truck.
I don’t think those are separate processes anymore.
I have been excavating Christina too.
Maybe this Full Moon isn’t asking me to burn down an old life and become somebody new. Maybe this entire transition is asking something much quieter and much harder: After everything I have excavated, what remains unquestionably mine?
That’s what I’m taking with me.
Everything else does not automatically deserve passage into the next chapter.
Thank y’all for reading my musings and supporting this journey called life!
See y’all on the others side, In Texas!
Christina Rae