GLITTER POLITIC

Glitter Politic. It’s kind of like a super power. From the minute we are born, the world injects us with poison. This poison takes the form of self-hatred, fear, disempowerment, loneliness, and worthlessness. The poison has become part of us, and has corroded us from the inside. Embodying a Glitter Politic is the act of taking those parts of ourselves that feel toxic – those deeply terrifying, seemingly ugly parts – and seeing ourselves as whole. It is about having compassion for the impossibilities within and around us. It is about throwing those parts of ourselves that feel infected back out into the world in the form of beauty, like a weapon.  In doing so, we suddenly have the power to unlearn, challenge, and redefine what is beautiful.

When we re-imagine, re-define, re-create beauty and share that with the world, people internalize it and it incites a chain reaction. It becomes its own virus – a glitter pandemic. When we become aware of the ways in which our world privileges certain bodies over others, and actively reject those destructive value systems, we have within us the power to annihilate beauty as we know it.

Self-love is volcanic. When we externalize our love for ourselves, we erupt love from its cold, ashy hollow and it surges forth, hot with promise, into the hearts and minds of others. Self-love collapses the imagined borders and walls we have built with the hope of protecting ourselves. It unravels the ropes that bind and isolate us from each other. Suddenly, our interconnectedness becomes profoundly obvious. Through self-love we can shatter the dominant narratives that tell us we are autonomous, non-connected individuals. Self-love in the face of fear and hate cracks open a space teeming with possibilities for connection and transformation.

It’s time for us to turn our feelings back on. Embodying a Glitter Politic is about returning to the body. It is about willingly entering a space of vulnerability, that place of uncertainty and ambiguity. This place is terrifying because it is mysterious, shifting, inexplicable. What does it even feel like to be in love with our bodies? What does it feel like to see our bodies as liminal, as shaky, as undefinable? What does it feel like, inside our bodies, to exist in this marginal place? Are we raw here? Are we scared here? It is in these indiscernible places that compassion – a recognition that in our loneliest moments, we are not alone – becomes possible. Embodying a Glitter Politic is a challenge, a call to action. It is a mission to begin the journey of engaging with ourselves fully. Only from this place can we connect, and only then can we see change.

-Ashley and Majestic

I’m (Ashley) super self-depricating.  Sometimes it’s really funny.  And sometimes it just gets awkward.  Majestic likes to point out how my self-deprication often walks the thin tight-rope line of self-loathing, and I really appreciate that she does that.  It reels me in and often slows the feeling that I’m on a downward spiral.  I find that self-deprication allows me to laugh at myself and not take life and my extreme feelings so fucking seriously all the time.  This is a poem that makes me laugh and check myself when I get into a funk and loving myself is like a distant oasis in a dessert of loneliness and self-pity.  It’s by Phillip Lopate. And it goes like this:

We who are

your closest friends

feel the time

has come to tell you

that every Thursday

we have been meeting,

as a group,

to devise ways

to keep you

in perpetual uncertainty

frustration 

discontent and 

torture

by neither loving you

as much as you want

nor cutting you adrift.

Your analyst is

in on it,

plus your boyfriend

and your ex-husband;

and we have pledged 

to disappoint you

as long as you need us.

In announcing our

association

we realize we have

placed in your hands

a possible antidote

against uncertainty

indeed against ourselves.

But since our Thursday nights

have brought us 

to a community

of purpose 

rare in itself

with you as

the natural center,

we feel hopeful you

will continue to make unreasonable

demands for affection

if not as a consequence

of your disastrous personality

then for the good of the collective.

The other night, some surprising tears escaped Majestic’s eyes. We were talking about being kids, and she was telling us stories of how she used to play. She talked of rollerskating in the concrete basements of government housing, sliding down hills into alleys in blow-up swimming pools with her neighbour friends, and playing imaginary. I don’t remember a lot of times in my childhood. I don’t recall being a very joyful kid. I spent a lot of time wishing I was a grown-up so I spent my time reading, hanging out with my friends’ parents, and singing and choreographing sexy dance routines to Mariah Carey’s Emotions alone in my bedroom.

Majestic recalled having conversations with her cousins in which they processed the loss of their imaginations. They knew, when they were children, that things were changing. They knew they couldn’t create these stories anymore, because they knew too much about the world around them. While I don’t remember a lot of the games I played, I remember the last game of barbies I played with my sister. I remember exactly what they were wearing, what colour their hair was, what the story line was, who was who, where we were sitting, what room we were in. I remember the knowledge that it would never happen again. I remember cherishing that game with my sister.

Those tears rolled at the thought of losing our imaginations. It’s easy to feel heavy-hearted at a loss like that. We are torn out of this place where we can escape, where we can be whatever we want to be, to laugh and play. Our connection to this place is severed at a young age and we start to learn that there are very few characters that are acceptable to play out in the real world.

We become distanced from our imaginations. But I am not convinced that we ever truly lose them. As we are pulled farther and farther out of our worlds of play, those special places become fuzzy and blurry. Colours meld together and what we could once hold and know and smell and feel becomes intangible and unidentifiable. I believe that our imaginations are still within our reach. They have simply changed and grown with us, and sometimes in that process, they become unrecognizable.

How can we reconnect to our imaginations? What tools do we have to engage with them? I think that self-love takes a lot of fucking imagination. I think that looking into the hearts of others and meeting them with a compassion that is unfamiliar to us takes imagination. I think reframing and re-articulating the ways that we feel and express love for one another takes imagination.

We are imagining a world where there are places that we can go to play together, to laugh together, to see each other as whole. I think we need to honour that imagination and we need to gently hold its hand. Because, it’s going to be what guides us through the most terrifying, unfamiliar, and ground-shaking losses. If we let it, it can teach us how to survive again.

-Ashley