3 July 2024
My Saturn has returned
When I turned twenty-seven
Everything started to change— Kacey Musgraves, “Deeper Well”
When I was 13, my friend’s mother scolded me and said that I was irresponsible. This word has haunted me ever since, and my life has constantly felt like a push-pull, revolving around this particular critique. Is she right about me? Is she wrong? More than a decade later, I still carry her words like a knife in my back pocket to hurt myself with when I feel I most deserve it — an emotional self-harm habit I can’t seem to shake. I no longer remember what she looks like, but I remember the tone of her voice when she said it and I remember that she pulled her daughter out of school afterwards, at least in part because of me.
I turn 27 today and am on the cusp of what astrologists call my Saturn return. I’m just shy of it by a year or two, but this past year has felt like what could be considered the approach. The Saturn return is a mirror. It forces you to face yourself and re-evaluate. It is also said to be a time of revisiting old wounds, self-transformation, and growth. It ushers in new phases of life. One of its greatest lessons is that of responsibility.
I find myself, for days at a time, marveling at how young I feel. How immature. I am deep into my 20s and still crying over the same things! The same old hurts and abandonments rise up and I can’t seem to shake off my teenage self. At times, I feel even younger than that. Like I am eight, sprawled across the tiles, throwing a tantrum, eyebrows and nose flushed red as giant cartoon tears spill down my cheeks. But just as I slip into that girl-me, I am forcefully reminded that life moves on, the bills must be paid, and there will be more earthquakes and hurricanes and wildfires next year. Whether I cry or not does not change the need for food, shelter, job applications.
I am not typically sad on my birthday, nor am I particularly afraid of aging. However, this year has been different. For the past several months, I have been gripped by an intense fear. As I stare up at the dark ceiling each night, images of the people I love dying flash through my mind, and I consider what it would feel like to lose them, or to die myself.1 What sort of sadness and pain would accompany those experiences? What nothingness would engulf me? I think about the days of my life playing out in the blink of an eye. So short, this life. So long, too. What am I doing with it all? How many days do I have left? Have I been a responsible shepherd of this earth? Of its people and animals? Of myself?
Today feels tired.
Nietzsche proposed a thought experiment: what if your life was to be repeated down to the last detail, again and again. Pleasure and pain and cruelty and joy. Every tear and scrape and kiss. All in the same sequence. All on a loop. Nietzsche considered this eternal return “the greatest weight,” as the consequences of even your smallest actions would reverberate forever. Every thought, feeling, and moment would become impossibly heavy, laden with its perpetual repetition.
“The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
But the thing about eternal return is that it isn’t necessarily a theorization of reality as such, but rather a litmus test.2 How would you lead your life if it were to eternally recur? What would you do and say and think and feel? The only person who would agree to or embrace such a proposition would have to be someone who has embraced life completely. She would approach her life with full acceptance and responsibility.
I am not her. I am a girl in a body that has brought me along the tides of life for nearly three decades now. I want flowers, fresh bread, good butter! I get sad when I should be angry. I don’t call my mother enough. I don’t want to work. I regret my words and actions. I am irresponsible. Life played out ad infinitum terrifies me.
But I have gotten this far, anyway, haven’t I?
It’s true that I cannot turn back, pause time, or see into the future. Life is full of the bramble bushes of uncertainty, ready to tear apart my vulnerable and crabby3 skin. But like I said, today is a tired day. I am tired. Of the regressions, whining, and picking at old scabs. Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo that his “formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati:4 that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it… but love it.”
It may not yet be my Saturn return, but I am trying to close an old chapter and begin anew. I want rebirth. But to do that, I am first trying to accept things for what they are and to take responsibility for my life, in all of its decisions and indecisions.
Do you hear that, Ms. Friend’s Mother? I am trying to grow up.
No regrets, baby, I just think that maybe
It's natural when things lose their shine
So other things can glow
I've gotten older, now I know
How to take care of myself
I found a deeper well
This isn’t really new for me, but it’s become much more concentrated and acute lately.
This is just one interpretation among others.
I’m a Cancer sun.
Latin for “love of one’s fate.”
Tired days are ok, I know what you mean. Growing up is work, just by existing. Hope this new year is filled with many good things for you.
Kacey gets it! <3