Between this week and next I'm moving salons.
I want to say upfront, there is nothing bad to say about where I've been. Nothing went wrong. Nobody treated me poorly. Objectively, everything was fine.
And for a long time, at least in the salon world, fine felt like enough. I didn't know there could be more for me. Fine is what you aim for when you've had experiences that were less than fine. Fine means no conflict, no drama, no reason to complain. Fine is safe.
But there is a difference between a space that tolerates you and a space that actually fits you. Between people who are perfectly pleasant and people who are genuinely aligned with you. Between fine and something that feels, when you walk through the door, like you can exhale all the way.
The new space I'm walking into has that. The owner, the other stylist, me…we are aligned on things that go way beyond hair. The energy in that salon is something I felt before I made any decisions, and it was one of the clearest signals I've had in a long time that I was moving in the right direction.
I think a lot of us spend years in fine. In the job that pays the bills but doesn't light anything up. In the friend group that's perfectly nice but never quite sees you. In the relationship that has no real problems except that you feel, somehow, a little smaller in it than you do everywhere else. We stay because fine is defensible. Because nothing is technically wrong. Because the bar we learned to measure by was only — are people being cruel to me? And when the answer is no, we think we've found something worth holding.
What I've learned, slowly and sometimes reluctantly, is that the absence of harm is not the same as the presence of alignment. You can spend a long time in spaces that are not hurting you but are also not holding you. And the difference between those two things is something your body knows before your brain catches up.
That feeling when you walk into a room and something in you settles, that is information. The feeling when you're around certain people and you come away feeling more like yourself than when you arrived, that is information too. We are not always taught to trust it. We are often taught to be grateful for fine, to not rock the boat, to measure our expectations against what we've survived rather than what we actually need. Especially as women.
I'm not saying blow up everything that's merely fine. I'm not saying comfort and stability don't matter, because they do. What I am saying is that it's worth asking not just whether something is working, but whether it fits. Whether the people around you are ones you feel genuinely seen by. Whether the spaces you occupy have room for all of you, or just the version of you that's easiest to accommodate.
Sometimes the move is geographic. Sometimes it's a conversation, or a boundary, or a quiet decision to stop shrinking yourself to fit something that was never quite your size.
Mine happened to involve a salon. Yours might look completely different.
But the feeling of the exhale, the alignment, the sense of finally being in the right room…that part is universal.
With love,
Cerissa