Shiny, Sparkly, Glittery Trauma
When I was living in Brooklyn as a dancer, we used to rehearse pretty regularly at this black box theater called Triskelion Arts. When you walked from the lobby into the theater space, on the door, there was a short printed list of studio rules. They were the standard rules to expect in a dance space: no food, no drinks except water, etc. Then next to it, on a separate sheet of paper, in font that was 4 times the size of the other rules, was a printed sign that read:
“NO GLITTER. EVER!!!”
I rehearsed at that studio pretty regularly on and off for the 3+ years that I lived there and that sign made me laugh every time.
If you’ve ever worn glitter, crafted with glitter, or had loose glitter anywhere within 6 foot radius of your being, you will understand why this sign was posted here. That shit WILL GET EVERYWHERE. What starts as fun quickly devolves into what feels like an endless battle.
One does not simply clean up glitter - for it will not be contained.
It sneaks into crooks and crevices and you will scrub your skin and hair in dozens of showers, only to have it disco-fy your shower floor and bedazzle your bath towel. Then months later, when you’re sure it’s over, and you feel safe and unsparkly again, you’ll look in the mirror to see a little silver sparkling speck on your ear, taunting you.
The last two weeks in our YSD facilitator training, we’ve been giving our practicums on trauma, shadow work, and the sexual shadow. In her presentation, one of the other students used her PhD-level botanical knowledge to explain that she thinks of some trauma as rhizomes - the roots of some plants that have the ability to send shoots and stems out underground, allowing them to sprout up feet or yards away from the original plant. You might find a plant growing seemingly out of nowhere, with no idea where it came from or how it got there.
When she was describing this analogy, I randomly thought of glitter, and the sign at Triskelion Arts. I saw all the times I had familiar feelings and thoughts when I've been in my work with my traumas:
“Where did this come from and how did it get here?!”
“Surely this can’t be from that one thing - that’s all the way over in this other area of my life!” Or “it was so small! Or so long ago! It can’t have been powerful enough to get all the way over here”
“I feel like I’ve been working on this one story for so long; when am I going to finally get rid of it?”
“Why is this back?! Why is this still coming up for me? I thought this was over.
"I thought I was done dealing with this.”
The truth of the matter is that trauma is sticky and tricky and we can’t always explain why our systems have a trauma response to some things and not others. Or why we have a trauma response to things that other people’s systems don’t. And as much as we’d all love to walk around with a printed sign that says “NO TRAUMA. EVER!!!” we all know that’s just not how this works 😂.
Trauma is a natural, human by-product of our body’s desire to keep us safe, in every environment. And one does not simply clean up trauma. All we can do is have patience with ourselves the next time we find ourselves working through a story that we thought we had fully processed long ago. (Bonus points if you can start to love and embrace your fabulous, sparkly, glittery-ness along the way. 😉)