All the Saturn Returns.
How a crisis can deliver us to opportunity + reveal the path forward.
When I was 28, the man I thought I would marry and spend my life with, left me for another woman. I wrote a bit about it here. This relationship was not particularly important or special. He was not particularly important or special. It was more that when he left me, he cracked something open in me that I couldn’t close up or heal. None of the pain was his, and yet he was the catalyst and I associate him with it.
I had been carrying around all these open wounds from being adopted, given away, not knowing who I was or how I had gotten here. There was also some childhood issues I hadn’t yet named. And back then, no one talked about trauma. My mother came from a generation that felt that the mother was always blamed for every problem, so I was careful to protect my parents from blame, and shoveled it all on myself.
In my 20’s, I was jealous. I sulked and got mad. I was clingy and insecure in relationships. I saw potential lovers as ways of folding myself into someone else to make up for all of my flaws and become a whole person. I could fantasize about breaking up with someone, but I could never leave them. Or I would draw it out until I had no feelings for them at all, and then I’d just ghost them. Leave them reeling with my complete lack of feeling, which felt abrupt to them and had been a long time coming for me. And if I thought a lover was pulling away, I would focus on loving them back in so many vital and responsive ways, they wouldn’t leave me, or would feel too guilty to leave me. Everything I did and said silently screamed Don’t let me go! which made everyone want to let me go even faster, confirming everything I already knew about myself. As you would expect, anyone who had any kind of real boundaries and healthiness got the fuck out of my life fast.
When that relationship ended, it sent me into a spiral that wouldn’t really resolve itself until I was in my early 30’s. I felt existentially unsafe in the world, as if everything and everyone was out to pummel me. I became anxious, paranoid, unable to work around other people. I felt contained and claustrophobic in offices. (I was freelancing as a writer at first and was able to work largely from home). I paced the floor for hours making up scenarios in my head of people trying to hurt me. I was pretty agoraphobic, going only in specified routes to grad school and local stores and bodegas. I had rage. Intrusive thoughts. Delusions. I had made-up scenarios in my head where I would have angry fights with people I knew about things that they did to me, that they never actually did, or that they did, but I would turn it over and over in my head torturing myself with the injustice of it all.
Ruminating. I was a pro-level ruminator.
Like some of the vulnerable people I’ve written about, there was slippage and honestly no one noticed. I was pretty good at hiding the worst of things to almost everyone, except a few people who were as fucked up as I was. I used cocaine to get out of bed. Hooking myself up at the Limelight every week with what I needed to function. When things got really bad, and I found myself losing work, I started dancing in a strip joint to make money. I thought I was able to handle it all. Wasn’t I turning the gaze back on itself? Wasn’t this trasngressive? But it broke me, one drunken, pretend, disconnected interaction with strange, gross, hungry, groping clients, after another. Laugh while they grope you. Get that rent money. My friends were Hells Angels. I stayed at the club house often. I had bikers and outlaws sleeping on my couch. I dropped out of my PhD program.
I know some things about slippage - last week’s post - and how hard it is to stop yourself from sliding into a death spiral you can’t get out of. The only thing that reversed the slippage was a single chance encounter at a Wall Street strip club, where I was working. A chance encounter that might not have happened, if just one thing out of a million little things, had happened differently that night.
It was the 90’s, there was lots of cash moving around the room, and booths filled with finance bros. I had been drinking from the bar all night, because I couldn’t do the job sober anymore. I sat down with a middle-aged guy, and as is the custom, he bought me drinks to keep me visiting with him.
He told me his story. He was a psychologist with his own demons. He was well-aware of his problems and was clear he was nursing them by being in the club. I told him mine. In fact, I told him everything. How far I had fallen. That I was at the end. That I couldn’t go on like this anymore. That I felt nothing inside. That what was me, the real essence of me, was a tiny ball, a marble, in the middle of the core of my body. But it was small, a tiny bead, and all around it, filling up the rest of my body was a moat of nothingness. My being was suspended in nothingness gelatin. I had disassociated from everything. Things even looked grey scale, like the world had shifted to a black and white TV. I felt far away and unreachable. I had this whole rage-filled inner life that was not real, but it was my only life. I told him I was nearing some kind of precipice.
If I could plan and execute my own death, I would do it, I said.
But I don’t have the energy or will to do even that. I’m not even sure I exist.
Sometimes when I meet young writers publishing collections out of their MFA programs or getting book deals in their 20’s and early 30’s or finding a partner and happily having a family - You know, doing their lives - I remember how I kind of fell off the world at that age. There was never going to be a 30 under 30 to watch list that I would make. Nothing ever happened. There were no milestones, no movement forward. Nothing ever changed. I couldn’t write anything or create anything, or feel connected to the world, or maintain anything stable. Unfamiliar places filled me with either unease or full-on terror. I remember how unwell I was. How I felt like wire all the time. I look at these young people doing things with awe.
I am happy for them. It wasn’t me though. We all have our journeys.
On a cocktail napkin, the psychologist in the club buying me drinks, wrote down a phone number and a name. He handed it to me and told me to call the woman on the napkin when I first got up in the morning. That she would help me. That I should tell her I met him at the club and he gave me persmission to share his story with her, even though they were colleagues. He didn’t want me to lie about anything. I called. I’m shocked that I called. I called because I had nothing better to offer myself. That afternoon I was in her office. She was a young LCSW and for the next five years I met with her, twice a week, sometimes willingly, sometimes unwillingly, as she coaxed me back to functioning. Back to a place where the little hard ball of myself, lost in a sea of disassociation, grew and expanded and then filled me again.
A friend hearing about my work in therapy said: Well, of course, this is happening, it’s your Saturn Return. I knew almost nothing about astrology and didn’t follow it much. I still don’t even think about horoscopes and readings. But something about the description of this thing called Saturn Return resonnated.
A bit about The Saturn Return.
Saturn is the planet of maturity, responsibility and wisdom. There are two to three times in our lives, when astrologers tell us, Saturn returns to a vantage point in the sky it occupied when we were born. This happens every 29 and a half years or so. We experience our first one in our late 20s. One in our late 50’s. Another, if we are lucky, in our late 80’s. The Saturn Return lasts 2 ½ to 3 years. The idea is that this is a period of intense, often uncomfortable change, that pushes us into the next phase. Without this shift, they tell us, we wouldn’t be able to move ourselves forward.
It’s crisis that begets opportunity.
Saturn Return #1 (ages 28-31)
In our 20’s, astrologers tells us, we are often still living under the guidance of parents and family. There is a lot of dating different people, moving cities, changing jobs, trying new hobbies, getting degrees and learning skills. This whole period is trying new things and figuring out who we are. This is the time we really move into adulthood, assessing what it means to be on our own, in the world. We have to decide what we really want and how to get it. The Saturn Return at this age is a deadline that tell us to stop fucking around. Get our shit together. The turmoil forces us to really get at what is holding us back and move ourselves into a better place.
Saturn Return #2 (ages 58-61)
We have lived some life. We have families, relationships, kids, jobs we have done for years, expertise and experience. We come to the second Saturn Return with some maturity, a world view, set values, things and people we love. It is too pat to call this a “midlife crisis” (as it does across the internet - ageism anyone?) This is when people right their wrongs. They see The Great Perhaps ahead, feel the tug of aging minds and bodies. They decide it is now or never.
They might divorce their spouse of thirty years, because the kids are grown and it’s time to be happy and be good to ourselves. Or someone might say fuck it and move to Mexico City or Bologna or closer to their adult kids. Or they might leave a career they have had their whole lives and open a surf shop at the beach. They might expand their couple to a throuple. Or they might be grappling with hard intense responsibilities, like a terrible diagnosis, caregiving elderly parents, supporting struggling adult or disabled children in the home, or taking care of grandchildren when their children are not able. But almost always the new versions of us that come later are born out of personal tumult, and an existential need to shift.
After Davd had a heart attack in 2020, he went through a period of crisis about what it meant to be healthy and he used that anxiety to re-tool his whole life, and ours. He has done a significant amout of research around health, has an eating schedule and an ingredient protocol, does intense strength training, cardio and sauna, takes supplements, has prioritized his health and testing for disease, has stopped drinking and taking edibles, and monitors his sleep and heart. He recently got a cold mattress pad for his side of the bed and has seen a huge improvement in his heart rate variability.
The crisis begets the opportunity.
This is the time, the astrologers say, to mentor, to pull people up the ladder behind us. We might change how they eat, how we move, how we spend our free time, how we keep our sanity. We might start a dance class or take up an instrument or focus on losing weight, improving our health. There is a lot to process during this time. It can feel intense and overwhelming, but it’s also something else - an opportunity to reinvent ourselves, to see ourselves anew.
Saturn Return #3 (ages 88-91)
Astrologers say this time is about legacy, distilling lessons into storytelling, taking stock of good and bad things that have happened. This is the time to make peace and connect to the idea of the universe, make amends, settle the last bits of business, attend to our relationships to things greater than ourselves. To be with family. To value small and important moments and live them fully.
Does this feel right for you? I’d love to hear from readers who are here. When I read this, I think that this feel like preparing for the end of our lives, which is important, but a lot of the folks I know are preparing for their next marathon or day out volunteering or the next big wave to surf. They are getting on with the business of living, soaking it all up the ways they can.
Does this feel introspective take feel outdated? What is the last Saturn Return going to feel like?
I came to my second Return, this year, with traction, connection, love from my partner, from my kids, from my friends, and some experiences that made me feel like I had accomplished some things. But I was caught in a weird place between old and young. Not quite ready to let go of youth, not so ready to embrace getting older. A kind of denial. This Return didn’t feel like a crisis, exactly, like the first one. But a couple weeks ago I felt myself slip a little.
I did that thing, that old unhealthy habit, where I heard something and then made the thought a reality inside my head. Ruminating again. My old comfort response. David off-handedly said: I think you are getting dementia. Silently, without anyone noticing, I spiraled a little. I convinced myself I was probably in the early throes of dementia. The world got grey. I got somber. I started imagining myself walking around not knowing people, slowly losing my mind and my purpose. I wrote goodbye letters to my kids. I picked apart every forgotten name, every time I entered a room and thought: Now what did I come in here for? I fell into a mini-anxious depression.
Finally I talked to David, who was like: What? I didn’t mean it literally. LOL. And my therapist who made me do EMDR around it. This was a blip, really. It’s not as easy to go off the rails with the support I have. I am no longer alone. Not being alone might be the most important resource we have, I am convinced.
As I live the last months of my 50’s and embark on a whole new set of numbers, I’m grateful this second Saturn Return has been less messy, much less painful. And still, opportunity awaits. Reinvention awaits. I think of Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet who wrote: As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.
The Saturn Return, if nothing else, is an idea that forces us to take our first small steps toward something new, with intention, as more road appears and more road appears and more road appears under our feet, until we find ourselves where we are meant to be.
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END NOTES:
Next week, I will be speaking at Nevada Department of Agriculture, a department committed to promoting high standards of nutrition for infants, children, adults in daycare, and seniors here in Nevada. I will be speaking about the co-mobidities of hunger, and longterm effects for children and adults experiencing it.
After that, I will be hopping on a plane with Edie, who is home from Germany before starting college, for a quick mother-daughter long weekend. My essay for next week will be my talk from Nevada Ag, which is important in light of all the prospective cuts to Medicaid and SNAP in the ridiculous “Big Beautiful Bill.” Then, I’ll be back to regular programming the following week.
I chose the art of Tracy Emin for this essay, because I feel like the terror, saddness and disconnection of a tough transition is so illustrative in her work.
Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim
I loved this and definitely related to a lot of it. There's a whole movie/novel in that conversation with the psychologist. Incredible.
Good article. I believe I came to my Saturn Return #2 at the age of 61. I had decided to leave my husband and it just so happened that on that particular momentous day my husband fell ill and died 3 weeks ago. It was just at a time I was beginning to "right my wrong" in staying with him for 41 years to begin living a happier life without him. My life since then has never been better.