I sat down to write this the way I start most of my writing: to stop myself from blabbering endlessly on the topic to my dear friends, who have good-naturedly entertained and endured me. These long conversations over coffee or lunch help me refine my position in real time. Then I take it on the road, try it on another friend, tell myself I should really write this down, until I am forced to, lest I bring it up again.
This one I have been talking about for at least two years. And lately, I am being introduced to new audiences who, however varied, all tend to sputter when they hear my story. So, basically, this is the essay I will send people when they are confused or intrigued by me and want to know more. The essay that will somehow encapsulate my motivations, my philosophy, and how they’ve led me here, and you reading this.
So, let’s start here: for most of my professional life, I have felt deeply illegible to people.
Not because I was unfocused or scattered or could not commit. But because I have always allowed curiosity to guide me. I have, apparently, no qualms with a side quest. I have moved through law, startups, festival production, business development strategy, podcasting, archival research, and now doctoral study, and every single time I showed up somewhere new, people would tilt their head and try to figure out where to place me. Like a beautiful, but peculiar tchotchke. Always finding me fascinating, but unsettling. Like something about me stirred something within them that they’d rather lie inert.
People have often described me as brave. Breathlessly. With a hand to their chest (or perhaps I imagine that part).
I have never known quite what to do with that. Besides give a nervous laugh or a tight smile, all the while silently commanding myself not to roll my eyes.
Because when I hear brave, or worse yet, courageous, I think about blood. I think about the ability to withstand pain. And I have a low pain tolerance.
So brave is not the word for me.
It is an easy word to grab and fling at a woman you do not understand but feel you ought to be impressed by. So it gets bandied about my head in flattering tones, as I bob and weave to avoid the hollow expression. What people are actually reaching for when they say brave is that my career trajectory does not follow a recognizable linear path. Law school. Law graduate. Startup employee. Business trade missions to Namibia and South Africa. Independent consultant working with — and I say this with full affection — the woo woo of the woo woo: meditation teachers, yoga practitioners, studio owners, artists, and creatives of every variety. A festival called SeekerFest. A podcast that became an archive that became a methodology that is becoming a dissertation, which I produced because the idea interested me, and that is genuinely all the reason I needed. Nearly nine years abroad, and a career that has continued to develop, expand, and evolve in a “foreign” space.
That is what they are looking at when they say brave.
But that is not bravery. That is curiosity, unfettered.
In 2014, one year after graduating from law school, a job I was supposed to take with a startup in Malaysia fell through. Malaysia, Christine?! I thought you were from Atlanta and attended law school in Miami. How did you get to almost moving to Kuala Lumpur? Look, it’s a long story for another essay, but quite simply, curiosity. I know, annoying, but hopefully you’ll be satiated by the end. And if not, please leave me a comment about it.
Anyway, I was hiking in a park near my mother’s house in metro Atlanta, trying to figure out what came next, when the idea of walking the Camino de Santiago came to me. I was not one of those people who had watched the movie about the pilgrimage with Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez and gotten swept up in the craze. I had heard about it through a friend at brunch and promptly dismissed it as nothing I’d ever be involved with.
I was not particularly outdoorsy, outside of having brunch on a patio. But the idea, for some reason, felt compelling in a way I could not explain except that I needed to go on a very long walk and figure myself out. So, a month after the idea arrived — against all prior evidence of my character — I was in Bordeaux, France, making my way to the start of the French route of the pilgrimage. After crying hysterically in the bathroom upon landing, getting lost on the way to the train station despite very clear signs, in English.
Walking the Camino was not inspiring. Not at first. I had not adequately prepared or trained for the nearly 800-kilometer (500-mile) trek across Spain. The first two weeks were troubling — deeply emotional in a way I was not used to, because I am not typically an emotional person like that. I found myself questioning myself in ways I never had before. I had always done things that were expected, so the self-questioning was new territory. What the Camino produced was not a bucket list achievement. It was a quiet confidence in myself that I had not previously possessed, and a sense of adventure about my own life, with the understanding that I could put myself out there, push my edge, gather data from the experience, and be okay (barring the tendonitis in my feet).
That experience has been instrumental in everything I have done since.
Bravery (noun): readiness to face and endure danger or pain; heroic courage. From the Latin barbarus, originally suggesting a wild, untamed quality — the willingness to go where the risk is known and go anyway (e.g., Tommy Pickles from Rugrats).
Curiosity (noun): a strong desire to know or learn something. From the Latin curiosus, meaning careful, diligent, curious — rooted in cura, meaning care. To be curious is, at its root, to care enough to look (e.g., Chuckie Finster from Rugrats). A necessary aside: I have always felt a kinship with Chuckie, who many labeled a scaredy cat but who was, in fact, a deep thinker, sensible, and, deep down, curious.
This is not really about semantics. I’m simply calling attention to the fact that if building something “unconventional” requires bravery, most people will reasonably conclude it requires something they do not have. Bravery is romanticized and deemed extraordinary. You either possess it, or you do not.
But if building something “unconventional” requires curiosity — which to me is a practice, a muscle, a form of attention that can be developed and sustained — then the door is much wider than the word brave allows. Curiosity does not require you to bust down the door and smack a—… make declarations. You get to peek around the corner, dip a toe in, try it on for size, decide nah, and keep it pushing with all the knowledge you gleaned from that experience.
Identifying your own curiosities and giving them space — pausing when something catches your attention and asking what that is, writing it down, sitting with it, Googling it at midnight — is a form of self-esteem. It is a way of saying that even the vague (perhaps vain) imaginings of your mind are worthy of investigation. That your instincts are worth following. That what interests you is a signal worth reading.
There has been a lot of conversation lately about being multi-passionate, about “portfolio careers”, about embracing the reality of having professional interests that do not fit into a single category. I understand what these concepts are trying to do (give you permission to be yourself?), and I reject most of the language.
Actually, I don’t reject these concepts. Several income streams, several roles, no single employer? Sure, that’s often just a Tuesday for an entrepreneurial creative.
I want a word, a concept that does more work. So I’ve been using a different one among friends and clients for a while now. I call my path, my career, a constellation.
Constellation (noun): a group of stars forming a recognizable pattern, used historically for navigation; also, a group of associated or similar things. From the Latin constellatio, from con (together) and stella (star). The constellations have no objective existence as grouped objects in space; they are human interpretations imposed on scattered light. The meaning is made by the person looking.
I like constellation career better than portfolio career for reasons that are mostly aesthetic but also somewhat substantive.
The aesthetic reason (first, obviously): a constellation feels airy. There is space between the stars. Room for things to become. Portfolio feels like a filing cabinet — dark, finite, closed.
The substantive reason: a constellation requires mythology. You are not just listing professional experiences or income streams. You are making them make sense together. Identifying the guiding stars — the interests, commitments, and values that orient the whole — and telling the story of how they form a pattern that is recognizably yours. And it’s more whimsical and alluring.
For example, the common denominator throughout my career, the thread found in my mythology, has never been the industry or the medium or the credential. I connect people. I am genuinely curious about and interested in people, and I delight in connecting others for social occasions and professional collaborations. I have the nose for people — to hear what they want or need and often instinctively know who they need to speak to, hire, or work with.
I connect dots. I make complex ideas digestible and big ideas executable. When the information I need does not exist, I go get it myself — which is how I fell into qualitative methodology, into oral history, into a longitudinal archive of Black women’s migratory experience before I had the scholarly language to call it any of those things. I yearn for information, and I investigate and generate it when it is not there.
What I produce, across the podcast, consulting clients, the doctoral work, the trade missions to Namibia and South Africa, is legibility. For individuals who cannot yet see the pattern in their own professional lives. For institutions that have lost the thread of their own story. For communities of women whose experience has never been adequately named. I am not a podcaster who also consults, who also researches, who also writes. I am someone who listens, connects, and produces clarity.
The context changes. The method does not.
What connects all of it is this: if I’m being honest with myself, I have always been building toward my own flourishing. Not as a destination. As a practice. Every project, every side quest, every apparent pivot is an expression of the same underlying impulse: create the conditions, intellectual and physical and spiritual, for a life that is genuinely worth living, and build the architecture for it deliberately.
Continuing my analogy, my most prominent star — the one I currently navigate by — is Flourish in the Foreign, the podcast and oral history archive I have been building since May 2020. Over 150 life-history episodes spanning more than fifty countries across six years of production. Internationally critically acclaimed— earned media only — featured in Vogue Arabia, Black Enterprise, and Business Insider, ranking in the top 1.5% of podcasts globally.
What started as a personal inquiry — I was living in Spain and could not fully account for the gap between the life I had assumed it would be and the one I was actually living — became something I did not have language for until several years in. Not just a podcast. An archive. A methodology. A body of primary source evidence from which theory emerges.
The work that earned me an artist residency in Lisbon in December 2025, where I conducted preliminary fieldwork. When I arrived in Lisbon, I had this surreal moment: a podcast got me here. Except it was never just a podcast, and the longer I stood in it, the more clearly I understood that the work is so much larger than I am. My hunch had been right. Or more precisely, my hunch had found receptive audiences, in academia and in the public at large. The thing I had been building alone, out of nothing but curiosity and the refusal to stop listening, turned out to be the thing the moment needed.
If you want to know what the work actually is, it is this. When I built the Wellness Abroad compilations, Part 1 and Part 2, I sat with dozens of these conversations at once and listened for what rhymed and what refused to. What became obvious is that these women are distinct. Their migrations are distinct. How they landed where they landed is distinct. The meaning they have made of those decisions is distinct. And yet something underneath resonates across all of it, humming at the same frequency even when the lives could not look more different. Holding both at once, the distinctness and the resonance, the commonality and the disparate, without flattening either, that is the practice. That is the listening. The synthesis is not a summary. It is the finding.
And from that, the doctoral work emerged. I did not go looking for a PhD. The insights evolving on the mic produced one. Somewhere a few years in, it became clear that I had built a body of evidence I did not yet have the language to interrogate, and the questions it kept generating, about Black women’s voluntary migration generally, which led to a specific interrogation of Black American women's voluntary migration, about Lisbon and Accra, about migration as liberation versus migration as relief, had outgrown my recording studio, my apartment. It didn’t necessarily require an institution for validation, but more that these life-histories, these inquiries, these theories deserved to take up space within the academy. And the book is downstream of all of it. Still in development, which is not a weakness (I tell myself 4 years in). It is evidence that I clearly do not rush the work.
Then there is the business development and consulting work — the oldest star, starting in law school, the one that has made the others navigable. A decade-plus of advising organizations, senior professional women moving into entrepreneurship, and institutions trying to tell stories about communities they do not always understand from the inside. Organizations and global mobility firms are beginning to ask what integration actually requires of the people they move and the communities receiving them. The question is always the same: what is the story that is actually true here, and who needs to understand it? I listen, connect the dots, name it, and build the architecture for what comes next.
The women I work with one-on-one — senior professionals entering entrepreneurship, women repositioning their expertise, women who have spent careers being brilliant in structures that were not built for them — are almost never lacking in competence. The competence is not the issue. The issue is overthinking and underdoing. And the overthinking is structural, not personal: most Black women, most women of color, have been so consistently undermined that they have learned to overprepare, overperform, and overjustify their existence. That is hard programming to shake.
What I do is convert the overthinking into curiosity. I give them questions instead of answers so they can generate their own data and make decisions from it rather than from fear. I give them permission to be beginners. I give them a mad scientist’s relationship to the work — you try something, it does not work, you learn something, you try again, that is the data. The goal is to get out of the hypothetical and into the doing. What they leave with is not just strategy, but also traction. A different relationship to their own expertise.
The self-direction sounds aspirational. The devotion it actually requires is something else — that you be so genuinely, uncomfortably honest with yourself that it functions less like discipline and more like a practice. Something to return to daily, imperfectly, but still return.
The way that ancient people relied faithfully on the stars for direction, not as a romantic endeavor but as a survival technology, as the only navigational infrastructure available — that is what devotion to your own curiosity actually is. Not inspiration. Not romantic at all, unfortunately. It is infrastructure.
My grandmother migrated from Trinidad to the United States. My mother’s family migrated domestically. My own move to Spain in August 2017 was the first time I understood that I had inherited not just a family history but a set of questions that would take me decades to properly ask. The devotion to capturing Black women’s migratory stories in their own voices is personal reckoning that became intellectual project that became theory. I did not plan it that way. But looking at my constellation, I can see it could not have gone any other way.
Through consistency, curiosity, and a willingness to follow the thread even when the destination was not yet visible. Not through bravery. Not through a portfolio strategy. Through attention to what mattered and the discipline to keep showing up for it.
I will say this about the women of Flourish in the Foreign: these women across countries, life stages, economic contexts, and vastly different relationships to Blackness, womanhood, and place — largely have constellation careers too. I did not set out to document that. But it is what the archive shows. Women who have taken skills, expertise, and education and leveraged them in ways that would not have been viable, or perhaps not even imaginable, at home. Women who have created their own mythologies around their professional lives and garnered, in the process, a sense of self-esteem that keeps them not only abroad but continuously building.
If you are specifically interested in how this plays out in the entrepreneurship space, the archive has a dedicated compilation — Build a Business Abroad — that draws from across early seasons and features women building companies, practices, and creative enterprises outside their home countries. And Season 7, Episode 2 features Keki, a corporate career coach working on international placements and multinationals — a conversation that gets into the mechanics of building a career legible across borders.
So if I were to offer anything from where I am standing, it would be this.
You do not need to be brave. In fact, I do not recommend trying to be brave, because it implies you are doing something so out of character that I genuinely wonder whether it is sustainable.
What I recommend is being curious. Respecting your curiosity enough to follow it. Developing the discernment to know which threads belong in your constellation and which are just interesting — and understanding that both categories are legitimate. Not everything that catches your attention needs to become a project or a career. But everything that catches your attention is worth the pause.
This newsletter is where I think out loud and show my work.
On Building is the series where I get into the actual machinery: how a personal inquiry became a podcast, how a podcast became an archive, how an archive became a methodology, and then a dissertation.
I’ll write about podcasting as a diasporic technology rather than a content strategy. About what a listening practice actually is. About the difference between an archive and a feed, between oral history and a highlight reel. About the day qualitative research stopped being something I read about and became something I do.
If that sounds like a lot of words for “I make a podcast,” good. That is the point.
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I love the use of the word constellation! Onward and forward into further curiosity!
Excellent piece! Thank you for this brilliant introduction to your world. I feel a familiar kinship here with regard to your curiosity, the constellation career and the compulsion to collect stories. Love it all!