What’s a “Glimmered Life”?
First- what’s a glimmer? Have you heard of this new trendy term yet? I first heard the term “glimmer” from a friend’s social media post. According to licensed social worker Deb Dana,
“Glimmers refer to small moments when our biology is in a place of connection or regulation, which cues our nervous system to feel safe or calm.”
A “glimmer” is considered the opposite of a trigger. They’re “tiny moments of goodness” that bring us peace, joy, comfort, and help soothe our minds -or souls- if you will. It’s that perfect cup of coffee, the first warm/sunny day after a long winter, a cotton-candy colored sunset, a warm blanket out of the dryer, the smell of rain… get it?
Glimmers are everywhere and when we take the time to notice them, they cue our nervous systems to regulate our bodies. In other words: triggers wind us up, causing our fight-or-flight systems to activate whereas glimmers relax, soothe, comfort, and bring us happiness.
If this is the first time you’re hearing about glimmers, you’re welcome!
Now, buckle up.
About a year ago I found myself in the midst of a “midlife unraveling” as Brene Brown calls it. Between our family deciding to sell our house, purchasing my husband’s childhood home acreage, packing, moving + the whole process of designing, remodeling, and putting up additions on a tight timeline, raising/nurturing 4 “spirited” kids, managing their activities and educational needs, supporting a vast caseload as an Educational Audiologist, enduring farm season cycles, navigating generational family challenges, and balancing all-the-things that rested on my shoulders as Mom, [inhale], I wasn’t able to see it coming- MY unraveling. Brene describes it perfectly,
“The truth is that the midlife unraveling is a series of painful nudges strung together by low-grade anxiety and depression, quiet desperation, and an insidious loss of control. By low-grade, quiet, and insidious, I mean it’s enough to make you crazy, but seldom enough for people on the outside to validate the struggle or offer you help and respite. It’s the dangerous kind of suffering—the kind that allows you to pretend that everything is OK.”
I wasn’t OK. But I didn’t look like a person who wasn’t OK. In an instant, during a routine Tuesday, I broke. I suddenly felt this overwhelming sense of uncertainty in who I was, what my purpose was, and if I was happy. It was an out-of-body experience. My mind screamed as it tried to maintain control. It justified that I had achieved bliss! The American Dream! I had everything I ever wanted, everything I had sacrificed and worked so incredibly hard for. Quite literally: The framed doctorate hanging in my home office, a custom-built designed-by-me farm house. Four healthy kids, evenly balanced of course; two boys, two girls. The 75 pound golden retriever who thinks he’s my soulmate. Married 14 years to the husband who adores me even at my worst, who brings me caramel lattes in bed on Saturday mornings, fills my gas tank, warms my car on frigid mornings, takes me on bahama-mama sipping beach vacations, volunteers for our kids’ sports teams, stays up late glueing together last minute school projects, and never tells me “no” even when I tell him I’m going to start my next “new” [read: expensive] hobby.
So why did I suddenly have this overwhelming gut-punch feeling that I didn’t belong in this life? Like I was meant to be somewhere else? “You’re happy!” exclaimed my logical brain, while my heart whispered, “That’s a lie.” It was the first time I remember hearing two separate, distinct voices from within me. Hadn’t I followed my heart and my brain BOTH, together, to get here? I thought so. But now they were two different beings playing tug o’ war; Heart vs Brain.
Reflecting on that moment, I have come to understand that my survival instincts and coping strategies developed from life’s experiences and traumas had silenced Heart and left me with loud, overwhelming, bellowing Logic. Logic so deafening so to force me to persevere; protecting me from feeling emotions such as hurt, loss, grief. Logic I had learned from my own dysregulated family and society. Logic shouts, “1+1=2, Work hard, go to college, find the one, get married, have a family, start a career, climb the ladder, buy the house… and so on, and you’ll reach happiness.”
When we’re young, Heart is much louder than Logic. It sweetly sings, “Dance!” and we dance. “Jump!” and we jump. Swim. Run. Explore. Play. Travel. Indulge. Love… then… one time we jumped, and we fell. We scraped a knee. Twisted an ankle. Bruised our Heart or our ego. Logic stepped in, cleared its throat and warned, “If you don’t jump, you won’t fall. If you don’t swim, you can’t drown. If you don’t love, you can’t bruise your heart. So, let’s not do that again.” Slowly we’re conditioned to play it safe, remain compliant, stay the path, smile big, celebrate the ‘standard’ achievements and before you know it, you’re a monthly Amazon subscribing, Starbucks drinking, Instagram posting, Pinterest pinning, meal-planning, mini-van driving mom living in desperate dysregulation with no self-care. Then one Fall day, while Logic is distracted with opening fruit snacks, creating mental to-do lists, and balancing google-sheet budgets, Heart seizes its moment and hums,
“WHO are you? What are you doing? Is this it? Aren’t you meant for something more? What is your purpose? Are you happy?”
Whoa.
It was an involuntary, all systems failure. I dropped [almost] all of the balls I was juggling. Not only was I not able to “do it all” anymore, I reached a point where I didn’t want to- and THAT was uncharted territory for me as a people-pleasing, high achiever. I felt frozen, distressed, hopeless, resentful, exhausted, and just so incredibly unhappy. For those who know me in “real-life,” this probably comes as a surprise. Or maybe not. Maybe I wasn’t as good at masking it as I thought. As so many of us humans do, I found myself going through the motions and routines, touched-out, burnt-out, and really struggling with connection, my identity and my purpose. But damn it if I wasn’t going to still show up with a smile on my face and snacks in hand for the classroom Halloween party.
I “lost it” as they say. I went for a walk, sobbed, hyperventilated, vomited, and then surrendered. I slipped my sandals off, stood barefoot in the grass, and focused on breathing in and out until I didn’t feel like I’d black-out from all systems overload (shout out to my 7th grade health teacher who taught us meditation). I sent a text to a close friend for a therapist recommendation- then requested my first-ever therapy appointment.
There was (and still is) a LOT to unpack in therapy. The Reader’s Digest version went something like this: I discovered I was really good at taking care of others, but not so much myself. I was so good at it in fact, that I had spent a lifetime of sacrificing my own wants and my own needs to the extent that I had molded myself into an inauthentic version of myself that had even fooled ME. I hadn’t really dealt with many of my past traumas, pain, and regrets…
Spoiler alert- my coping mechanisms and lack of healing caught up to me, and I “unraveled” into a mess.
My therapist encouraged “self-care” which sounded trendy and very surface-level. How the *F* was self-care going to help fix me? And how on earth was I supposed to practice self-care when I had designed my life around caring for everyone but me with barely enough time to shower?
Ultimately I decided I had no choice but to lean into it. So I started small and chose to document in a notebook my “one thing a day” that brought me peace or joy: Admiring a sunrise. Enjoying my latte. Taking a walk. A few moments of meditation. Reading a few pages in a book. Drinking more water. Then I had a thought- instead of writing about it, I’d take a picture or a video of it. And soonafter- I started a TikTok account for myself, and began recording these brief moments in photo/video format so that I could watch, remember, and re-live all of my “tiny moments of goodness”. I dropped my mask, so desperate for change, and didn’t care if it made sense to anyone else. It was my first declaration of putting myself before anyone or anything else.
Fast forward many months down the road. I came across a friend’s social media post about noticing life’s “glimmers" and it took my breath away- THAT’S IT!! GLIMMERS! Glimmers are what saved me. A sunset turned into a drive to grab my favorite latte and melt into a book. A mani/pedi appointment and phone call to a friend forced me to carve out time and space for myself, helped me set boundaries, led me to buy the concert tickets, pick up my camera more often and rethink photography, start writing, get the tattoo I always wanted (x2!), and book a trip to Scotland (yes, seriously). Glimmers have led me to lean in to what makes ME feel alive and become a more authentic version of myself and build a life that I am happier to exist in: One that is finally starting to feel like my outsides match my insides.
Now, don’t believe for one second this has all been literal “sunshine and rainbows”, because it has been far from that- filled with tears, hard conversations, and mistakes. I’m still healing and have a LOT of work to do. But… I’m a long ways from that person I was a year ago and so grateful for it. The next piece of it all for me, is/was writing and connecting with others through shared experiences. I began to wonder if some of my healing is tied to my purpose? Or perhaps my purpose is tied to my healing? What if my vulnerability could encourage a community of humans who have felt paralyzed and hopeless to “unravel” together into that “something more” I was so desperately searching for?
Spoiler: That “something more” isn’t a thing or things. It’s not a place or a person. It’s a connected, authentic, satisfying life.
FULL of glimmers.
A glimmered life.
