Leave Town With An Orange

The term ‘glimmer’ has been cropping up in my social media timelines recently. I desultorily clicked on a link and read that a glimmer is now being defined as the opposite of a trigger. We are being exhorted to look for glimmers now. Those moments in life when instead of our blood pressure rising to ‘fry an egg on her face’ levels and our kidneys marinading in the sharp, acrid tang of adrenaline, we feel calm and relaxed. Like when Bill Bailey swallows The Little Book of Calm in Black Books: ‘Add some lavender to milk. Leave town with an orange. Pretend you're laughing at it.’

I struggle with the whole ‘wellness’ industry. I’ve been on the lunatic fringes of it since I was a child. My parents were ostensibly quite buttoned up hippies who although not eschewing Findus Crispy Pancakes and antibiotics with a firm hand, did embrace organic foods before they were even a thing and regularly whisked me off to see a homeopath. My aunty frequently saw dead relatives in the pantry and my dad once went on a spiritualist holiday to a B&B in Llandudno. The food wasn’t very good and he didn’t want to go in the spirit cabinet because it was basically just a glorified wardrobe. Trip Advisor - 1 star.

I grew up thinking all this was completely normal and I have always dipped in and out of both worlds, taking what suited me and leaving the rest. I am equally open to the idea that science may have some great answers, but also a woman called Marjorie who talks to her cat might well end up solving the problems of the universe. Who am I to judge?

What I am quite judgey about is fanaticism and rampant commercialism, both of which swell around in great, nauseating tides within the wellness industry. Those people who do a course in 'crystals for cancer,’ at the local adult education centre and then incessantly proselytise about big pharma and how shoving a piece of rose quartz up your nose will cure leukaemia. And you only asked them for the time.

Then there are those people who want to sell you everything that will make you better because if there’s one thing we know about wellness it is that it only works if you can buy it. The nice thing about capitalism is that it tiers down, so don’t worry if you can’t afford a Gwyneth Paltrow Vagina candle for £800. Give it four weeks and you can have Minge for £4.99 from the middle of Lidl. One will smell like patchouli and the dreams of dead gurus. The other will smell like one of those traffic light air fresheners from the Seventies, but rest assured they were both made in the same Asian sweatshop by four year olds. It’s a calming thought for sure.

It is actually wonderful to want to be well and there are some really lovely people out there, doing really lovely things that genuinely help people. It’s just a shame we have to wade through all the crap to get to the good bits. The awfulness can leave such a bad taste in your mouth, and for some people, stop them going further and finding things that could really help them. Even I, who grew up with astonishing amounts of woo in her life, find that I am fatigued by so much of what the wellness industry offers. I have become cynical and dismissive and that doesn’t help at all, because I am a woman so often in need of help. Which is where glimmers come in.

When I first read about them, I sneered. I immediately imagined a roll call of Instagrammers and TikTokers and all the twee content they could churn out off the back of this. I did a bit of internal chuntering and went for a lie down. Even though I had dismissed it as nonsense, my mind kept hooking back to it. What is wrong, Katy? I asked myself, with finding things in your life that give you joy and focussing on them? Don’t you already try to do that anyway? Are you throwing the baby out with the bathwater because you are a grumpy old bastard? Obviously the answer to that was yes, yes I am. I am a fool to myself. etc. forever.

So I did a bit of reading around glimmers. Apparently there is some science, which is exciting for those of us who love a lab coat and think longingly of the time we all believed that most things could be solved within the confines of a test tube. It’s all to do with our nervous system and something called the Polyvagal theory. The vagal nerves carry information between our brain, heart and digestive system but are also quite busy with our parasympathetic stuff, which involves things that trigger the shit out of us at one end, and things which calm us like a lavender soaked orange on the other. The goal is to move away from the ‘my toaster is trying to kill me’ feelings and towards ‘That is a really lovely tiger, I think I will have a ride’ feelings. According to science, these exist in a ladder.

These feelings do not exist in a ladder, do they? What are these scientists? People in fancy costumes, crazed with the belief that they have the answer to everything? Why yes. We have established this in our readings about Quantum shit. Science is religion is rose quartz woo. That’s a ladder.

And Numberwang.

What I believe to be true, because it is true for me and I create my own lived experience, is that I get what I focus on. I want to focus less on murderous toasters and more on happy, ride gifting tigers with deeply velvety fur, great toe beans and rumbling purrs that go right through you. I haven’t seen any in Canary Wharf yet, but you never know. I once thought I saw a witch flying on her broomstick at a wedding. Turned out to be a man in a paraglider, which was not as much fun, but for one moment there, I was right at the top of my Vagal Ladder, glimmering like Roisin Murphy crossed with a glitter ball. It was fabulous. More of that. Call ‘em glimmers. Call ‘em magic. I don’t care. They’re free, they’re good for me and I’m all in for glimmering like a good’un.