My 27th birthday was the eye in the middle of a year-long storm. I had just experienced the most devastating loss of my life, a few months after the most liberating breakup of my life which itself came a few months after completely uprooting myself to move across an ocean to the United States. Everything changed, and somewhere between learning to fall in love right and learning to love myself right I found myself at a bar with my friend M. telling her that I finally felt like I was on the right path.
She nodded like she knew something I didn’t. Saturn’s return, she told me - a name that, for some reason, I remain incapable of pronouncing. Satan’s return? Say-turn’s return? Don’t even try to get me to say it correctly. The phase I was in, it seemed, was cosmically defined as a moment of great change. She’d had it, too. Everyone else who’d heard of it had, for that matter, although maybe there’s a bit of selection bias there.
My cousin Rona, who is the definitive authority in my life over anything astrological and (it follows) the only person to have ever convinced me to do a birth chart explains the Saturn return as your break from your family of origin. From a purely physical standpoint, it’s the moment when that damn planet the name of which I absolutely can’t get right returns to the same place in the sky it was when you were first born. This, Rona says, marks the break that turns you into a full adult, from the family you were born into and to your own lifestyle.
I don’t need astrology to believe in the concept. Even those of my friends who don’t explain it in cosmic turns speak of a moment, well defined, where a personal crisis led them to fully step into their own. Your early 20s: a first foray into independence defined by a certain amount of fear - are you sure you’re allowed to do this? - and, as a result, a good amount of trial and error. There’s a delectable panic to growing up, testing the boundaries of who you think you are and finding either a cliff to recoil from or solid ground to be explored. This stabilizes some two to three years after you’ve started working, I think, once the magic of living parentless gives way to the responsibility of your first promotion, your first job change, your first grown up move.
It’s a little like a bone that’s healed wrong, this Saturn’s return. You’ve settled into some semblance of adult life that’s an amalgamation of reflexes acquired somewhere between your first hangover and your attempts at remembering how your parents did it and none of it exactly fits but it’s served you well enough, this haphazard attempt at a structure, until one day you wake up and are no longer offended by all of the responsibilities someone, at some point, shouldered for you. You have accepted that the dishwasher is yours and the trip planning too and as you shrug off the constant confusion of your early twenties you realize it doesn’t all quite fit. Maybe you’re dating someone who gave you support when you were just a stumbling idiot, but whom you now outpace. Maybe you live somewhere you’ve outgrown. Maybe some old habits of yours, funny in university, no longer make you laugh, but they’re so embedded in your every day that breaking them requires, well, breaking that mishmash of a routine you developed for yourself. Maybe it isn’t you who initiates it - someone dies, you lose your job, you get bad news.
This is how it starts: with the same amount of panic you used to feel before you were a certified grown up, each foot unsure of where it should go next. Rona got on a plane to Hawaii. I travelled for two months. M. up and moved to New Orleans.
The physical shift helps, I think, even if it’s temporary: it forces you to put some distance between who you were and who you want to be. It isn’t just the one event you reckon with, at that point - it’s a confrontation of who you think you are to how you’ve been living and it’s unpleasant, always, since the comparison is rarely flattering.
Okay: so now you know you need to change. That’s only the first part of the journey, though. The hard part is building up all the muscles you need to actually do it. The airplane resistance to fly 6 hours East and 6 hours West of where you are at least once a month to go see the people closest to you. The emotional resilience to learn how to do your favorite thing in the world, giving, without feeling taken advantage of. The willpower to wake up every Sunday morning to do something that isn’t staying in bed, because the other thing about adulthood is that it’s a constant movement and that absolution of responsibility you used to get once a year during the summer holidays as a kid simply doesn’t exist anymore which is, now that I think about it, probably why so many grown-ups with otherwise reasonable taste choose to go on all-inclusive vacations. That’s the problem with actually choosing how you live: you’re choosing a certain level of discipline you didn’t need to before, when you were being dragged forward by the unforgiving fact of your age.
One morning during the summer my Big Change started I was leaving Venice. It was 5am and my grandmother’s memory permeated the sunrise on the water and I thought, how liberating, that I get to redefine who I am now that I’m not running from childhood anymore.
Maybe that’s the Saturn return, really: a certain ability to spring forward before life nudges you there that makes you feel like you’re more than just hanging on. It’s at least as painful as the time doctors told me they’d have to re-break my big toe because it had re-fused crooked and, before I had had a second to compose myself, did it. I’m glad for the suddenness: there’s only so much thinking that’ll get you to the life you want to live – but that’s a topic for another Tiny Thought.
What about you: did you have a mid-twenties Big Change? What was it? How did it feel?