Raising Eyebrows
All brows point North!
I got my eyebrows laminated for the first time (and genuinely cannot believe I waited this long; I ran a half marathon with a spoolie in my running belt to brush my brows after. Obsessed).
Anyways, Sarah, the woman doing my brows, and I got to chatting and if you know me that’s kind of surprising. Usually I crave silence during beauty treatments - it makes it feel like more of well, a treat. But as we made initial small talk we very naturally started opening up; we filled that hour with topics that ranged anywhere from song recommendations to silly stories about ex-boyfriends.
But what captured most of our time together was talking about her path to where she is in life (career, love, home, etc.), and my path to where I am. We talked about our differences (she knew she wanted to go into beauty for a while, I had no idea what I wanted to do for most of my life until recently) and our similarities (we both ended up in the towns we grew up in, despite the opinions of some of the people in our lives, and chose service based careers).
Throughout all of this, I noticed a throughline that ran in both of our stories; when coming to a point in life when we had to make hard decisions, the decision itself ended up not being the thing that mattered the most.
What mattered most was the place from which the decision was made.
“Don’t take advice from someone whose life you would not want to live”, she told me. I’ve heard variations of this quote before but it never occurred to me, before this conversation, that maybe the unsolicited advice that I should ignore isn’t coming from my aunt at the Thanksgiving table as this quote often hints to… but rather, its the noise coming from my own head:
from past versions of myself
from versions of me, built from paths I did not take
from feelings of regret, jealousy, the human pull to “fit in”
Think of it like following an old map. At some point, the directions were right. They got you where you wanted to go. But the roads have changed since then. Some have come to an intersection, some completely faded out or bulldozed over.
If you keep following directions that were mapped for a version of you that doesn’t exist anymore, you end up somewhere that doesn’t make sense for who you actually are now.
That’s what Sarah and I were both describing without realizing it. The hard decisions weren’t hard because we didn’t know what we wanted; They were hard because the noise was loud, and the noise sounded a LOT like us. It used our voice. It referenced real memories. It brought up real fears. But it was using an old map to get us there.
The tricky thing is: the destination often looks the same (happiness, contentment, joy). BUT the road to get there has since evolved, as have we.
And so, the actual decision, once you strip the noise away, is usually pretty quiet. It doesn’t need to convince you of anything. It just sits there, waiting for you to stop arguing with yourself.
I don’t think you have to forget about the past, or comletely ignore the voices in your head who make you question, change, or pause. They’re part of you; they got you here. But maybe the next time you’re stuck at a crossroads and can’t figure out why the “right” answer feels so wrong, check the map you’re reading from.
Is this direction based on where I actually am?
Or where I used to be?
