Saturn Return: A Personal Experience of Transformation

  Last week, I turned 28. An age that sounded dangerously old to my slightly younger self, and had some subtle but ominous connotation of slow decadence attached to it.  Twenty eight is approximately the age most people start going through their Saturn Return. What is that? In astrology, Saturn Return is an event marked by the return of the planet Saturn to the position it was at the moment of a person’s birth (since Saturn’s takes 29.4 years to complete an orbit around the Sun). It is a period of difficult transition: great inner conflict and questioning of your personal situation and beliefs, important changes on your life and crucial choices than can make or break your future and your perception of yourself.  Astrological influences aside (which I find little reason to believe in), there is a perfectly sound psychological explanation of why most people struggle through this age: at twenty eight, you are not so young anymore – in fact you are on the brink of becoming a completely full grown adult. At this point in your life, chances are that you have already accumulated at least a few truly irremediable mistakes and accumulated a solid amount of issues, bad habits and destructive patterns, that are now slowly bleeding into your sense of self and threatening to become part of your identity and your personality.  However, not everything is doom and gloom: at the same time, you are still young enough to liberate yourself from your troubles and shape your life and mindset in a renewed way while they are not yet fully crystallized. You are still in time to let go of old grudges and regrets and start over; to build a new, more fulfilling life for yourself. Saturn Return is an opportunity to transform yourself and start building your ideal life project, and to commence your transition into the best version of yourself you can possibly be. 

Getting rid of your inner demons. Mujer saliendo del Psicoanalista [Woman leaving the Psychoanalist], by Remedios Varo.

 That is exactly what I am going through right now. Actually, I think my Saturn return started one year ago. That is the reason behind the title of this blog: when I started it, I could feel the change coming; I could feel the struggle and suffering brooding in me. However, I was hopeful that I would go through it, and emerge on the other side with some enlightenment, a revealing piece of the life puzzle – that is, my own personal Satori.
In my early twenties, I struggled to find who I was, and I searched and experimented a lot trying to define my identity and assert my individuality (I wrote a bit about it in this post, with illustrative pictures!). Now, in my late twenties, I have a much more solid notion and deeper understanding of myself; the burning question that I face these days is: Am I happy with the person I’ve become? I despaired many times, doing a takedown of the things that I disliked the most about myself and made me feel unsatisfied, angry and unfulfilled. I think my biggest pitfall was constantly comparing myself to others and thinking that I was not doing well enough, and being disappointed with myself for not being the person I thought I would have become by this point.
But then, slowly, I started seeing things in a new light, and dissecting all of the reasons that made me feel that way. I started paying attention to the things that triggered my bitter emotions; I learned to be grateful for all the wonderful things that I have in my life; I learned to work on constantly bettering myself, instead of looking to the next person to see how they were doing; I finally assimilated the idea that dwelling on the past is sterile and useless: it only brings suffering and fixates your attention on an aspect you no longer have any control over.
Furthermore, I understood that when you are unhappy about your current situation, you have only two choices: do something to change it, or accept it – if you don’t have control over the thing that upsets you – and look for other good things instead. That’s it. All the worrying and fearing about scenarios that only exist in your head are completely unnecessary, and once you realize that, you feel incredibly liberated.   

Saturn comes back around to show you everything
Let's you choose what you will not see and then
Drags you down like a stone or lifts you up again
Spits you out like a child, light and innocent.

- Lyrics from "The Grudge" by Tool. 
Oddly enough, I don’t feel old anymore. My goal is to become ageless, to stop thinking about my life in terms of time limits, to stop wondering if I would be too old to do one thing or another. This is not to say that I want to become a crystallized version of my teenager self: dressing, doing, liking and behaving pretty much in the exact same way as I did ten years ago, becoming stagnant in some old version of myself that at this point would feel inadequate, shallow and juvenile. This time I want to go deeper; I want to evolve, I want to feel the change consume me, but at the same time making me intensely myself.
I feel like I am waking up to a new life, to a new and refreshed version of myself. I am thrilled to see where this path will take me, what the result of this transformation will be. What about you? Are you going through a similar struggle, or is your Saturn return something that you still have to look forward to? Does it feel chaotic to you, or does it feel like the beginning of an exciting journey instead?  I would love to read your experiences!  Thank your for reading!