The Glitch as the Turning Point: Death, and the Flickering Edge of Becoming

There is a glitch, a flicker, a rupture in the smooth unfolding of what we think we know. A brief snag in the fabric of reality, a skipping frame. It stutters, breaks, and, there it is. The turning point. A beginning disguised as an error.

Every birth, every rebirth, starts here: in the glitch.

I was in conversation recently, reflecting on the dying process, this sacred dance that we as death doulas enter, not as bystanders, but as mirrors. The journey of holding space for another’s transition inevitably becomes your own. You release pieces of yourself into them, even as they release themselves into the void. It’s not just death. It’s birth.

But not the “what’s next.” It’s not the answer. It’s the glitch itself.

This has been sitting with me, how death, the crumbling, the release, is not a clean ending but a flickering edge. A wild moment of interference before focus emerges. In the glitch, we see the shape of what might come. The flicker is birth and rebirth tangled together. Death is both exit and entrance, a hinge swinging open.

I remembered how I recently picked up a VCR to experiment with glitch art, recording analog videos and breaking them into digital fragments. The idea of taking something “whole,” something linear, and intentionally disrupting it, breaking it, pixel by pixel, feels like a love letter to the process of becoming.

Glitch art speaks in flickerings. It beckons us into the space between, where nothing is stable and everything is possible. It feels ancient and futuristic all at once. It’s messy. It’s raw. It’s the perfect metaphor for the work I do.

As a death doula, the process of walking with someone toward death isn’t static or linear. It’s all flickers and glitches. You move through the interference, and in the end, you both change. I’ve held space for their death, but what comes next isn’t mine to hold. I can’t midwife their rebirth, that’s their journey. My role is to witness the glitch, the turning, the flickering edge.

The glitch is the soul contract.

It’s wild to think how much art and death parallel each other. We think of endings as something solid, but they’re not. They’re always breaking apart into something new. The work of glitching a video feels almost ceremonial, breaking an image into pieces so it can re-form itself into something unexpected. Something alive.

And maybe that’s the beauty of being drawn to glitch art now, as I spend my days working with grief, death, and liberation. There is liberation in the glitch. Liberation in the refusal to be complete, to be static, to be one thing forever.

So, here I am, flickering alongside the process. Part of me dies every time I guide someone to the threshold, and something is reborn in the flicker they leave behind. We are co-creating glitches, interferences that reshape the whole.

This is why I’m here: for the glitch. For the sharp, aching beauty of it. For the chance to catch the flicker before it settles, to witness it in its raw, transformative moment. Because that’s where all beginnings are.

A glitch, and then rebirth.