On glimmers and keeping dry

tw: brief mention of childbirth (nothing graphic, but tws are in the spirit of this, as you'll see, so skip the second paragraph if you want)

Lately I have the image of my anxiety as the water level under a beach. You dig, and eventually you hit water, though you can generally walk around dry. Lately, the water level is higher. You sometimes get wet just kicking up sand with your toe as you walk. Lately, things like: my husband talking to me about a tricky situation at work, or talking to a friend whose pregnant wife is going to be induced, as I was.

Maybe it's not that the water table is high but that the beach is studded with quicksand. But another way to think of these things is as triggers. In the more traditional, narrower sense, of course thinking about giving birth is triggering to me, but should I hit water just by driving by our local hospital, looking at the large building and thinking about the rooms there, what's happening on each floor, and then remembering that the c-sections (I think) happened in NYU's basement? Even just typing this, my stomach feels nervous—the water seeping up through the sand.

I'm doing the things you do when a pandemic has eroded the beach of your... daily functioning? I don't know, this metaphor's run its course—but that's why it felt like a gift this week when I encountered the idea of glimmers. It felt so lucky, to find what I needed by happenstance: Parvoneh shared a post in her instagram stories from a ceramics artist citing the idea of glimmers, crediting it back to therapist Andrea Glik, @somaticwitch on instagram, who has a blog post about the idea in which, to carry the citations all the way back, she credits the idea to Deb Dana, creator of a therapy approach called Polyvagal Theory that makes some biological claims I'm intrigued by but am in no position to evaluate. But, beautifully, this is an idea where the mechanism doesn't matter, you can take the idea and conceptualize it however works for you: Glimmers are the opposite of triggers.

Glik writes,

If a trigger brings us into a survival state, and is also known as a cue of danger, glimmers are what bring us back into our window of tolerance and safety (cue of safety).

You read that and it's such an aha, at least for me. The ceramicist/sculptor, Caitlin Rose Sweet, put it this way:

Glimmers are the things that light you up with joy and make your nervous system settle the fuck down. Which is massively healing. When I think about what I can offer the world through my work, I mediate on bringing more glimmers into the world.

You recognize this, right? The talismans and soft blankets you've been surrounding yourself with, they have a name now, and a power. The quartz crystals I keep on my desk, which I always explain as, "they remind me to be like a person who believes in crystals," they're glimmers, I realize, they always have been. Any plant that's budding, especially the two I've recently thought were dying: glimmers. The pink blanket on the couch. The cross-stitch Emily made me, my coral-pink pomodoro timer clock. (My pink fleece jacket, too—so much pink!) The Matchbox Mars rover, doubly glimmered now that my son graffiti'd it with a ballpoint pen. 

Armed with the name and the idea, I can see the glimmers I've set around myself—a new appreciation for the extra power my son imbued on that rover when he was fucking around at my desk—but it brings a new agency, too. Glik again:

There is a reason why many therapist's offices are filled with cozy couches, support animals, blankets, fidget toys, coloring books, calming imagery, color coded books, and white noise. ... We can learn from this when we create our home spaces, no matter their size. When we choose what to wear for the day, what to carry with us in our bags, what we have on our dashboards. ... Our nervous system really is that perceptive and more. All of this makes such a big difference, especially if we grew up without it. We can create that safety, that warmth, that coziness now and let ourselves rest, settle in, and feel at home.

We are home all the time now, but we don't feel at home. Storms have been bearing down on the coastline. 

I'm thinking about the glimmers that aren't little desk objects, too, beyond pillows and candles and baths. Romance novels are glimmers, so is Blank Check, especially their current series on 90s Disney (and their Patreon series on the original Star Trek movies, god bless them for this service). The peachy orange pre-set in our color-changing bulbs called "Savanna Sunset." Not everything needs to be a glimmer—Glik writes, "our goal is to not be here all the time. We are meant to fluctuate between states, with flexibility. It’s when we get stuck in a survival state, and can't access the safe & connected place that we need help coming home..." But I'm trying to notice the things that pull me back from the water. There's a storm but I also don't have to go wading, y'know?

If you want to share, I would love to know what some of your glimmers are. (Maybe I'll share them next week? Anonymously of course.) We should appreciate how we're keeping ourselves safe.