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March 5, 2019

You can’t vacuum glitter

You can’t vacuum glitter. I mean you can but it won’t work very well and it’ll just forever glitter-fy your vacuum for further glitter dispersal throughout your home. If you want it clean, you’re going to have to get on your hands and knees and pick it up piece-by-painstaking-piece so you might as well start to pick up the pieces now.  

Such is life, one catastrophic glitter explosion after another. Let’s just embrace the possibility that at any given time everything could just implode into temporary flashes of light and all we will have to remember it is the tiny particles stuck on our hands… that we can’t get rid of, even, if we want to. Carrying around this beautiful handful of iridescent sparkle can be absolutely intoxicating but don’t open your fingers too wide and definitely don’t breathe too deeply and maybe just maybe you’ll have a better chance that you’ll hold it all together in the cup of your trembling hand. ‘Hold on tight’ we’re told. ‘That’s your responsibility’ we’re told.  

Life is a perfect balance of holding on just tight enough while letting go of all that’s not meant for you and being able to define the difference between those two things effortlessly. It happens in perfect synchronization with death, with light and dark, the sun and moon, right and wrong and it doesn’t stop for anyone or anything just because you have plans for it. Here you are with everything you want, maybe it’s not perfect but its it’s yours and you are going to grasp it until your fingers bleed. Then half of it disappears into thin air without reason, leaving you to wonder if you really had it to start with? Or it fades into something you don’t know anymore. Or you give it little by little to others not realizing you’re leaving yourself with none. Or some other person catches some of your glitter in the breeze and well, that’s just not fair is it?

The truth of it is that the only constant is change and if you hold on too tight when you’re supposed to let go, it’ll slip through your hands and you’ll forget why you were hanging on so tight in the first place. And while it seems as if everyone you admire is holding their handful together perfectly I promise you, we are all walking the tight rope of the ever changing dynamics of this balancing act while praying that a gust of wind, a moment of chance, or a pull of the rug won’t leave you us grasping for anything familiar. Deciding how much to let go and when to throw in all in the fire and when to invest in more is overwhelming but this I tell you, there is enough for everyone. There is infinity glitter.

The bottom line is that you’re going to lose all your glitter at one point, or find a bunch in your shower unexpectedly and not know how it got there. So you can get on the floor and try to control every speck of sparkle and where it goes, or you can curse it like the evil nemesis of art supplies that it is, or you can own that sometimes life is one big sparkly shit show and roll around it while blessing the mess.

So love the moments when you’re holding it all together and thank it for the shine it gave you while you had it and hope that the earthquake that shook up your life left just enough in the floorboards that every once in a while when the sunlight hits it just right it’ll remind you just what that shade of life felt like.

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Paula Taylor  |  Contribution: 5,795