I know what it feels like to want out — and to be terrified the leap will only make things worse.

My name is Christine. I'm a Canadian expat living in Albania with my daughter Summer, and I've been helping people think through big life changes long before I made one myself.

This is not a story about someone who had it all figured out. It's a story about someone who jumped anyway — more than once — and learned something real each time.

And it ends the same way every time I talk to someone standing at that edge:

The first leap

In 2016 I was broke. Not "cutting back on lattes" broke — I was about to lose my apartment and my car with a fifteen-year-old daughter depending on me. My commission-based job had dried up. Every application came back overqualified or underqualified. And ads for teaching positions in China kept appearing in my feed.

So I took one. I packed up Summer and we moved to China.

We stayed for almost 7 years. Summer was fifteen when we landed and thrived in ways I didn't expect. We built a life there — real friendships, real routines, real belonging. And it permanently changed how I understood what home could mean.

The years we got stuck

In 2022 we had to return to Canada. Bureaucratic reasons, complicated by China's zero-COVID policies and the reality of travelling internationally with dogs. We told ourselves it was a reset.

It turned into three years of watching the walls close in again. We couldn't afford to leave. China had changed. Europe had always been the dream but it felt out of reach. Summer — who had already lived what freedom abroad actually feels like — was done with Canada. So was I.

I know exactly what it feels like to have tasted a different life and then find yourself stuck, watching it slip further away. That feeling has a name: it's not laziness, it's not ingratitude. It's knowing how good things can be somewhere else and feeling like the system is rigged against you getting back there.

How Albania found us

YouTube, of all things. I was deep in research mode — expat content, cost of living comparisons, anything in Europe that was actually liveable on a real budget — when Albania kept appearing. I looked at where it was on the map. I looked at what staying long-term actually required.

That was the moment. Summer was fully on board before I'd finished the sentence.

We arrived in 2025. We've been here nearly a year. It has not been perfect — nothing real ever is — but it has been ours. And almost immediately, people started asking how we did it.

Why I started consulting

I didn't move to Albania because life was good and I wanted it to be great. I moved because I was out of road. And I've learned that's actually the version of this story that resonates most — because it's the version most people are quietly living.

People kept finding me. Strangers in Facebook groups, viewers who slid into the DMs with seventeen questions, friends of friends who'd heard I'd actually done this. I answered all of them, for a long time, because I genuinely wanted to help.

At some point I looked at the hours I was spending and the depth of what I was giving and thought: this is real expertise. Six years navigating life in China. Three years planning our escape from Canada. Nearly a year living the Albania reality day by day — the paperwork, the services, the people you need to know, the things nobody warns you about. That's not just enthusiasm. That's something people can actually use.

But more than the practical knowledge — I understand the fear underneath the question. I've sat with it myself. And I know what people who are thinking about this are really asking isn't "how do I get a visa." It's:

And my answer, every time, is the same:

I started consulting because I've been to the other side of that fear — twice — and I know how to help you think it through honestly. Not to sell you on Albania. Not to promise you it'll be perfect. But to help you figure out whether the leap makes sense for you, and if it does, to make sure you don't go alone.

Where Summer fits in

Summer is 25 now. She shows up in my videos — especially the on-location ones — because she's genuinely part of this story and always has been. She was fifteen when we landed in China. She was the one pushing hardest to leave Canada the second time. She was fully on board for Albania before I'd finished explaining it.

The consulting is mine. But she's woven into everything, the way she always has been.