Hi. I’m in my pajamas.
I’m in my bed, actually, and I have my lamp on next to me and it’s got this yummy warm yellow glow, and my fans are going because it’s summertime here in Arizona, and I can hear the crickets. And tonight I just — I really wanted to have a chat. I want to be humans together for a minute and think about a couple of things, kind of whimsically, without it becoming a whole lesson or whatever.
Because honestly it’s only been like twelve hours since all of this landed on me and I’m still in it. I’m still processing it. And it just felt like it wanted to be said before I slept on it.
The Greatest Showman Moment
So here’s the thing I realized today.
There’s a difference — and I don’t know that I had ever really clocked this until today — there is a difference between truly wanting to do something because you love it, because your whole little girl self lights up for it, and wanting to do something because at some point you decided that was the hoop you had to jump through to eventually get to the thing you actually wanted. And you told yourself you loved it because it felt like the price you had to pay, you know?
And the wild part — the part that really got me today — is that you can do the second thing for long enough that you lose track of the fact that it was ever the second thing. The means to the end just... becomes the end. You forget what you were even moving toward.
You know that scene in The Greatest Showman where he’s built all this success, and it was for his family, it was for his wife, it was for these beautiful reasons — and then at the absolute peak of it he almost loses everything that actually mattered to him? And he has to just snap back. Remember who he is. Remember what it was all for.
That happened to me today. In the span of like an afternoon.
She Said She Wanted Land
So Hallie and I have been talking a lot about the future of Threshold Keepers, what we want it to look like, where we want to take it — and she has been, I don’t know, she’s just been so clear. So quietly, simply, without any drama about it, just clear.
She wants land. She wants to be on the land as much as possible.
And when she said that — something in me just... remembered. Like, oh. Of course. Of course that’s what I want too.
And it’s almost like it was forbidden to remember that? Because I had gotten so deep into the pursuit of something else that I had kind of stopped letting myself want the real thing. I’d gotten confused. I thought the pursuit was the want. Seven years of online business, the podcast, the coaching, the building — and I was doing all of it with this furrowed brow, this braced nervous system, gaining weight I didn’t want to be gaining, stressed in a way that wasn’t even necessarily warranted because we actually make good money and we’re okay. It wasn’t really about the money. It was more like this low hum underneath everything, this fear that if I stopped pushing, if I let up even a little, I wouldn’t get there.
Get where, though. That’s the question that hit me today.
Hallie didn’t crack that open on purpose. She just got honest about what she wanted. And her honesty woke something up in me that I didn’t even know had gone to sleep.
The Dream
So I came home around three in the afternoon, I canceled my last two calls — I’m on my bleed, I just wasn’t feeling well — and I took a nap.
And in the nap I had a dream.
My child was missing. I had my toddler in the dream, she was there and she was safe, but there was also somehow another version of her and that one was gone. It was confusing the way dreams are — the logic doesn’t hold but the feeling is completely precise — and the feeling was just, she is being neglected. She might not even be alive. And I knew in my heart she was, but she was missing and nobody was looking hard enough and it was devastating in that particular dream way where you wake up and your chest hurts.
And I woke up knowing exactly what my psyche had just shown me.
The missing child was my inner child. The innocent, creative part of me — the one who fell in love with writing in fourth grade, the one who begged her parents to stay up late to finish her essays — she hadn’t really been present in my work for a while now. When I’m stressed, when I’m bracing, when I’m in that furrowed brow mode, she just goes somewhere I can’t reach her. And my unconscious knew that before I’d even had a chance to consciously process what had happened in that conversation with Hallie. I hadn’t even told my nervous system yet and already my psyche was like, yeah, we need to talk about this.
The Little Girl Who Begged to Stay Up Late
I fell in love with writing in fourth grade. My teacher was Mr. Geier — I remember sobbing to my mom when I found out, because he was the only man teacher and I was nervous and I just did not want him — and he ended up being honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me that year.
Every single week we wrote an essay. The whole thing: brainstorming, rough draft, revision, final draft, and then on Friday you turned in your illustration and it was done. Every week. And I was so in love with the whole process that I would beg my parents, like actually beg them, to let me stay up late to finish.
When I say that right now I can just feel her in me. That little girl. She’s right here.
She’s the one who goes quiet when I’m grinding. She’s the one who disappears when I’ve convinced myself I have to do the hard stressful thing first in order to eventually earn my way to the thing I actually love. And she was the one who showed up missing in my dream this afternoon, in a way that made my chest hurt even while I was asleep.
Here’s the thing — when I write on Substack, when I write long form especially, she comes back. Every time. That’s actually the only place lately where I’ve felt her consistently. And I think that’s a big part of why this place matters so much to me. It’s not a content strategy. It’s genuinely where she lives.
The Algorithm Is the Mormon God
So here’s the thing I said to Hallie today that surprised even me when it came out of my mouth:
“I don’t think I have felt safe in my nervous system doing online business for a really, really long time.”
And I’ve been making these compromises, right — oh, the algorithm needs this, I have to talk about this sensitive thing or I won’t grow, I have to show up consistently or I won’t find clients, I have to perform this particular version of myself or nobody will follow me. And you just — you have to be so careful that your life doesn’t become one long series of compromises toward a destination you’ve stopped actually believing you can reach. Because that energy, for me, feels honestly a lot like the Mormon God.
I say that with a lot of respect, and I know that’s a loaded thing to say. But it’s the same internal architecture. If I just obey, I’ll get what I want. If I don’t obey, I won’t. And underneath all of it is this terrifying question you never quite say out loud: what if the universe just doesn’t give me the thing I really want? What if I don’t deserve it? What if I have to earn it through suffering first, prove myself first, perform consistently enough first?
And so you negotiate with life. You tell yourself the hard way is the right way. You furrow your brow and brace and grind — not because you’re lazy or asleep, but because it is genuinely excruciating to be that open with the universe. To just want the thing. To trust that you can have it without bleeding for it first.
Getting off Instagram was one of the best things I’ve ever done. Substack is helping so much — it’s genuinely rehabilitating my relationship to what I actually want to do. But today I saw how deep the pattern goes. How far back it actually started.
Jamee and the Question She Kept Asking
Years ago I went on a retreat and they paired us up for this exercise, and my partner was my friend Jamee Andelin — I think that might even be how we met, actually. She sat across from me and the only instruction she had was to say my name and then ask: what do you want?
No response. No reaction. No follow-up. Just Lizzie, what do you want?
I remember fidgeting. Feeling kind of silly. Looking around the room. I said something like, I want a boat — I don’t know, it was something that wasn’t real, something surface, because honestly it felt too vulnerable to take seriously even though I didn’t understand that at the time.
And she just kept asking: “Lizzie, what do you want?” as she’d been instructed to.
After three or four times I stopped giggling….and I really dropped into it. And this whole vision came forward —
I was on Lake Tahoe, I had a little cottage there
and I had this regular practice of going alone for a week at a time, just to write. No agenda. Just me and the water and the page….
—
I had just barely gotten certified as a coach at that point. That vision felt completely insane. And also completely true!!
I think about that exercise all the time.
I think about what would happen if we kept asking ourselves that question — not the polished answer, not the responsible version, not the one that requires the least vulnerability — just kept asking until the giggling stopped and the real thing came forward.
(Reader…. what do you want? But really, what do you want??)
What I’m Sitting With Tonight
What I’ve remembered in my child heart is: I want to be on and with land. \
I’ve wanted it since I was a little girl, honestly.
Not just a yard. Like, enough to walk for maybe a mile or two — maybe not all on my own land, maybe shared land, community land, I don’t know exactly — but somewhere I could have a relationship with the same trees. Somewhere safe and beautiful and mine in the way that only a place you keep returning to can feel like yours.
I think I just assumed I couldn’t have it. And so I got very busy building toward a version of a life I thought would eventually get me there. Furrowed brow, bracing, hustling — not toward the thing, but toward the conditions that I hoped would eventually produce the thing.
StarPath said something to me today — (StarPath is my FAVVVVOrite astrology-based, legit AI tool/guide. Love her.) She said something like:
“Sometimes it's so vulnerable to hope for what we really want that without even meaning to, we settle into something a little less. Not because we don’t want the real thing. But because it is excruciating to be that open, vulnerable, and that trusting with The Universe.”
I’m sitting with that tonight. In my pajamas, in my bed, with the lamp and the crickets and the warm yellow glow.
And I just want to ask you — gently, the way Jamee kept asking me — what does your inner-little-girl actually want? Not the version that makes sense on paper. Not the one that comes with a business plan attached. The real one from when your life was happiest, when you were the most true to your soul, the most innocent.
…Is she in your work right now? Is she present? Or has she gone a little quiet while you’ve been busy doing the thing you think will eventually get you to her?
Find her, rescue her, and never leave her. She will bring the magic and the inspiration like you can’t believe. Don’t let her get buried in the adulting, and don’t let her go.
~Lizzie
About Lizzie
I’m a psychic medium, spiritual teacher, and writer. I take people between the worlds — between the conscious and the unconscious, between who you’ve been and who your soul is becoming. My writing lives at the intersection of the psychic, the somatic, and the sacred feminine reclaimed.
I co-founded Threshold Keepers with Hallie Madden — a Mystery School for women who want to return to an ancient rhythm of becoming that was systematically erased. Death and rebirth. The phoenix. The ego death that the ancient Egyptians considered the moment you become truly alive — not a fringe concept, not a crisis, but the most natural thing your psyche can do. The self-help industry sold us a linear path. This is the spiral one.
Our 12-week program, The Sacred Art of Coming Undone, opens for its second cohort in September 2026. If something in you just said yes — come find us.
🗝️ thresholdkeepers.com book a consult as your next step
📖 Threshold Keepers on Substack
⭐ StarPath — my favorite astrology tool
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