From Breadcrumbs to Brushstrokes: The weekend my mind was blown.
This is it. All the preamble—burnout, breadcrumbs, branding breakthroughs—has led to this final chapter.
If you’re just tuning in: I’m an artist, designer, and brand strategist who hit the wall. Hard. Earlier this year, I bought a course to pivot into a guidance-based business. Days later, on impulse, I snagged concert tickets for my whole family—completely out of character. Then, around early March, something odd happened: the concept of tronie vs. avatar took root in my psyche, and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring began haunting me.
Timeline Update: 05.05.2025.
My husband just returns from a visit with our daughter, and he has a nasty cough and cold. The performance we plan to go to as a family is Friday night.
By Wednesday, my girls are messaging the family chat. “Mom, are you staying over to come antiquing with us on Saturday?”
I replied, “You girls go ahead… Dad and I are coming together and I have yard work to do Saturday.” Mom life.
I started getting teased by the gals, so I said I would check with Dad. As it happens, the old boy is still hacking up a lung, so he says it’s probably best he stays home as the other audience members and the singer probably wouldn’t appreciate the extra percussion from his seat.
Let’s go girls! I opt to stay the night on the couch and we’d go antiquing in the morning. (As an aside: Nothing makes you feel old quite like finding items you vividly recall from your childhood in antique stores.)
Friday and Saturday: Music and muse
On the morning of the concert, I am on a coaching call with one of my connections, and I am once again explaining my dilemma of not knowing what my next step is. But ONCE AGAIN, I do my tronie vs. avatar spiel and mention “The Girl with a Pearl Earring.”
Later in the afternoon the family meets up, we have a bite to eat and head to the pub to hear Jon Bryant perform. Since we are all introverts, we are heading home and off to bed before 10:30. We are up in the morning, make our list of shops to visit, and we are out the door late morning.
My son and ‘bonus daughter’ live on the north end of the city, and all the shops we wanted to see were in the south end. It was a full day that included eight shops and two Timmies stops. By around 2:30 pm we are having a coffee break and snacky snack, and we look over and see the GIANT yellow warehouse just a few blocks away.
IKEA was NOT on our list of stores to visit. But we only had two stops left, and plenty of time in the day, so we agreed: What the heck, let’s make IKEA our last stop before we pick up dinner and head home.
The fact that we were willing to walk through the entirety of this cavernous warehouse of Swedish design and knick-knacks—after eight hours of shop hopping—in and of itself deserves a medal of some kind.
We wander through IKEA and make our way to the marketplace. No one had big furniture expectations, so the little stuff would take a hot minute. I was pushing the cart lazily, brain-fried after a marathon day of vintage stores and coffee shop snacks, when I turned a corner—
—and stopped cold.
There she was.
The Girl with a Pearl Earring. Staring straight at me from the midst of a random IKEA aisle. A simple, 12x16 inch unframed, $10 mass-produced canvas print that seemed to call out to me from it’s position just inches from the floor: “THERE you are! Took you long enough.”
For those of you unfamiliar with art history, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, “The Girl with a Pearl Earring”, by Johannes Vermeer.
Here’s an even bigger kick in the teeth.
There was a yellow tag right below this picture. Want to know what the tag read?
…
NOW OR NEVER.
(I wish I’d had the wherewithal to snap a photo of the print on the rack with that tag, but I was preoccupied with picking my jaw up from the floor.)
Have you been following this timeline, this sequence of seemingly unrelated events?
December 2024: Almost put myself in the hospital from exhaustion and burnout. I am hungry to start a guidance business and stop working so damn much.
January 2025: Put my name on a waitlist for a course to start a guidance business.
February 14: Bought said course.
February 23: Bought concert tickets — completely on an impulse.
Late February – mid-March: The image of this face has been examining the crevasses of my brain since.
March 30: Discussed on Chat GPT about life purpose and how the tronie/avatar piece wove into that.
April 21: Another AI chat had my ‘future self’ tell me to continue to ‘follow the breadcrumbs’.
May 1: I break my hyper-independence mindset of not counting on others and reached out to my family to confirm our plans, something I would have struggled to do (I know that sounds silly) if not for the work I’ve been doing on my own self-development.
May 5: My husband comes down with a nasty cough.
May 7: My girls invite me to come antiquing. This Projector accepts the invitation as her spouse is still coughing incessantly and unable to go to the concert.
May 9: The morning of the concert, I once more talked about THIS PAINTING on a coaching call.
May 10: We are shopping and add the IKEA stop at the very end of the day…
And this woman leaps off the shelf in the marketplace into my cart, begging me to take her home… from above a sign that said
NOW OR NEVER??????
Look at ALL the little factors that brought me to a moment that should NOT have happened.
I wasn’t supposed to be in Calgary that day.
I wasn’t supposed to go to IKEA.
I had no idea that print would be there.
And yet—because I broke a pattern, accepted an invitation, and followed a feeling—I now have her hanging in my office.
Coincidence? Reticular activation? Divine breadcrumbs? You tell me.
But what is she telling me?
I was gnashing on this the next two days. This was surreal, how everything fell into place like this. Why was this image indelibly marked in my mind? Was I onto something with the avatar/tronie example? Am I supposed to bring Spirit back into business? Is my path to help humans connect to one another again with their marketing?
It is way too long and winding for people to read, but I felt so compelled to share it. Yet I didn’t know why. It was just a freak occurrence.
Right?
I had it on my list of blog ideas to write that avatar/tronie post since March. But again… the timing…
Then, one more punctuation mark was added to this story.
I’m driving to work on the morning of Tuesday, May 12, less than 48 hours after finding this print. I see a cube truck ahead on the freeway and I change lanes to pass it. As I come alongside the vehicle, I read the name on the side of the truck:
VERMEER.
Are you shitting me right now?
I really hope someone—or several someone’s—will read this series and share their thoughts on what the EFF just happened to me.
Has something like this ever happened to you? A moment so weirdly aligned, so drenched in meaning, you couldn’t explain it away?
I’d love to hear your story. Drop it in the comments—or message me if you’d rather share privately. I’m gathering tales of synchronicity, signs, and serendipity, and this just might be part of a bigger thread.