Saturn Returns
on milestones, diagnosis, and unearthing
The tl;dr:
I hit 50 subscribers this week (and counting!)—holy shit! Thank y’all for letting my often-too-long pieces spam your inbox. It’s a modest milestone, but my first big one.
I’m on a podcast! Amy Knott Parrish and I talk about AuDHD, the Gothic as metaphor for diagnosis/neurodivergent experience, intensity, autoethnography, burnout, and skill regression. So grateful every day for the neuroqueer friendships in my life.
This is a more casual, confessional-style newsletter (as “casual” as I can be, which is not very much) orbiting around my Saturn Return1, receiving several new diagnoses the past few months, and recalibrating my nervous system and the structures that shape my life. So, you know, light work.
Dear friend,
Yesterday marked the beginning of my Saturn Return.
The lead-up to this Saturn Return has not been easy. My running joke among friends has been, “If this was the lead-up to my Saturn Return, what the hell is my Saturn Return going to look like?” But in a way, it makes sense. When I was born, Saturn was at the 4th degree of Aries—early in the transit—and so it returned to the exact degree I was born yesterday as well.
Saturn is in its “fall” in Aries: meaning, it does not like to be there. Saturn is the doorkeeper, the adherer to rules, routines, time, and responsibility; Aries is the fire-starter; the initiator; the seeker of novelty; the scream of a newborn entering the outside world for the first time. The two contradict one another, in a relationship perhaps akin to my neurotype.
I’ve been writing about the “doorkeeper” a lot in the months leading up to my Saturn Return, without making this connection. Now, it slides into place. I am, myself, three selves at least, writes Mary Oliver, in Upstream:
To begin with, there is the child I was. Certainly I am not that child anymore. yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, I can hear that child's voice - I can feel its hope, or its distress. It has not vanished. Powerful, egotistical, insinuating - its presence rises, in memory, or from the steamy river of dreams. It is not gone, not by a long shot. It is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.
And there is the attentive, social self. This is the smile and the doorkeeper. This is the portion that winds the clock, that steers through the dailiness of life, that keeps in mind appointments that must be made, and then met. It is fettered to a thousand notions of obligation. It moves across the hours of the day as though the movement itself were the whole task…What this self hears night and day, what it loves beyond all other songs, is the endless springing forward of the clock, those measures strict and vivacious, and full of certainty.
…Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.”
I am, myself, three selves at least. The smile and the doorkeeper; the unruly, curious child; the third self, out of love with time, hungry for eternity.
I am not so certain I am not that child anymore.2 I feel her buzzing in my bones. Sometimes the buzzing is so loud that I can’t tell if it is coming from within our outside of me, or where my skin ends and the rest of the world begins. Boundaries collapse. My thumbprint is a table. I cover my ears to block out the sound of something emanating from within my own body.
My neurotype has been recently revised. In the spirit of casual self-disclosure (I have been trying to let myself relax by not making it an Event): in the last couple of months, my nervous system collapsed. In a sense, I felt connected to the woven threads of “hysterical” women throughout history, those who embodied the “nervous breakdown.” I prefer splicing it with system, as in nervous system breakdown, almost as a defensive mode: to remind the world I have a spine. I also think it is a more accurate term. I know when people hear the word “nervous” they think “anxious”—not “nervous” as in the system—as in that complex communication network of nerves embedded in the body. The last few months have been an untangling, an unmaking, an undoing of the nerves, which had been balled up and coiled into a shape that was not mine.
I went from dissociation to firing on all cylinders. It brought me back to myself, that sensitive little one who felt everything and didn’t know what to do with it. It brought me back to that childlike embodiment: to screaming in the car because the fabric of my clothing is touching my skin too loud, to bumping into everything, to leaving the stove on, to being unable to exist in the life I had constructed for myself.
I always claim I will be casual and plain before launching into poetry. Perhaps poetry is a genre of demand avoidance. Let me try again. This February, I went to the emergency room because my spine felt like it was on fire. They didn’t really know what to do with me there. Around the same time, with sensory overload threatening to upend everything, I began a neuropsychological assessment process that proved both traumatizing and affirming. I emerged from the fever of this portal with four new identities, all in a gestaltian interplay with one another, entangled in accordance with my nervous system.
I’ve joked that I’m collecting diagnoses like infinity stones—another defensive mode. Another scripting in attempt to mitigate the excessive unreality of it all. It is excessive, just like me. Before this year, I had relaxed into the identity of obsessive-compulsive disorder diagnosis, even knowing it didn’t quite explain everything. The OCD is still there, but it’s not as encapsulating as I had previously thought. Instead, it emerged as a coping mechanism, a set of hands tugging my nerves into proper place like reins.
I’ve also joked that, in seeking formal diagnosis, I Am Become Document. This pursuit, in which I have sought to map and encode my body into diagnostic criteria, may very well be a death drive. It is to cast yourself as the role of lab rat in the cruel theatre that is diagnosis (often poorly directed), submit to the dance of being a “compliant patient.” I did a bit of what I’ve been calling a “DIY neuropsych”; given the utter inaccessibility of a full neuropsychological assessment3, I received these diagnoses from multiple different providers after what seemed like endless doctor’s appointments. I could not, in good faith, recommend this to someone with my presentation (a complex psychiatric case!), even though I am glad I did it. I emerged out the other side both validated and deeply traumatized. I did, in the end, find what I was looking for. In piecemeal fashion, I was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder; then ADHD; then fibromyalgia (with a possibility of more chronic pain/illness) as a fun side-effect of it all. It strikes me as fitting that fibromyalgia is often seen as “pain without evidence”—as if my fascia decided to embody the story of my life.
ADHD and autism tend to mask each other, to the extent that you can almost “pass” as neurotypical. But they still tug at you, in opposite directions. Pain without evidence. With the OCD, you can wrangle and manage the two fighting children within you—that is, until they plan a coup. When you are finally overthrown by the little rebels, you then have another problem: you were too good at wrangling, and now no one believes you. You are mothering children who do not exist. With the outdated notions, stereotypes, and diagnostic methods, especially around autism, the fact that I was formally diagnosed seems like a miracle. I feel like one giant despite. I am sick of holding that word.
I am thrilled—to an embarrassing extent—at this newfound understanding of myself. It is akin to coming out, to that “cringy” baby gay energy. Every day there is a new thread in my history, woven into the tapestry of my neurotype. Everything is autism! Also akin to coming out: the constant fielding of questions. The “why do you need a label?” The doubt. The “you don’t look/seem _____.” Within this exhilaration I am embarrassed, hypervigilant, and grieving all at once—and still, somehow, clocking into my 9 to 5.
In a poem “Catastrophe is Next to Godliness,” Franny Choi writes:
Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.
I want an excuse to change my life.
Entering my Saturn Return, I have the clarity of the catastrophe now—the excuse to change my life—but I am still cleaning up the mess of the catastrophe. I want to relax into clarity, but there is still debris in the corner. I can almost ignore it sometimes, that mess in the periphery of my vision, but I can’t ignore the deep knowing that it’s still there. It likely always will be.
This week, I hit 50 subscribers on this newsletter/publication. I started this newsletter about five months ago. Since then, my life has completely changed. In so many ways, my writing brought me back to myself and reminded me who I was. I remember the intense panic of not wanting to lose this when I first started—of not trusting myself to keep going, keep writing, keep making something new. I still feel that, but there is a gentle trust in my own rhythm now, and several long-form pieces in my wake. I trust the visceral abundance of life to bring me something beautiful, even if it’s tracking the winding trail of an ant on the coffee table. Everything is poetry.
In a sense, hitting 50 subscribers feels profound because of the relative modesty of the number. Not only is it special because it’s my first momentous subscriber milestone, but there’s a kind of intimacy in a number so small and so abundant at the same time. None of you are subscribed to me because you’ll be gaining some kind of cultural cache. You are all here, to some extent, because you care enough to be invested in what I write. Even if you barely open these, thank you; I am so so grateful that you are here.
In a beautiful synchronicity, hitting this milestone lined up with another milestone: my first podcast episode feature. Amy and I met through our writing group, Cody Cook-Parrott’s “Landscapes” (it is not hyperbole to say this writing group changed my life). Amy is also a late-diagnosed Gifted AuDHDer4. We began talking when, after I bashfully mentioned going through the Autism evaluation process, she reached out to offer support. From there the endless info dumping commenced, and the beginnings of a beautiful, neuroqueer friendship. We are at two very different stages of life: she at 54 with children, me 28 and childless, but there is an uncanny, delightful resonance between us. It’s like waking up in a strange, unfamiliar new world and stumbling across an old friend. Ecstatic relief. You, too?!
Amy is the creator of “Rebelling,” what she describes as “a neurodivergent-centered ecosystem that's about talking, researching, imagining, and working on a new emerging future that is made for us.” Within her ecosystem are multiple interconnected, teeming life-forms: a website, newsletter, coaching business, and newly launched podcast. I’m so honored to be a part of the lore within this ecosystem.
In our episode together, called “When Pretending Stops Working,” we talk about autoethnography, the Gothic as metaphor for diagnosis and neurodivergence, skill regression, burnout, and, of course, my evaluation experience.
There is nothing I love more than to theorize and have my words be met with understanding. It is, admittedly, more difficult to experience what I theorize about (Lord, I confess I want the clarity of the catastrophe without the catastrophe). But finding the people who have experienced it, who follow you when the thoughts tumble out a mile-a-minute, is a relief. It is a relief to be read. It is a relief to be followed.
I pulled an oracle card called Our beloved depths this week. The guidebook, from Abacus Corvus’ Wild Chorus Deck, describes the card:
A pale snake pokes out of an underground cave. We see the strata of the earth in layers above this hidden burrow, and within it are dark amethysts and sparks of light that mirror the stars outside. This card beckons you inward and downward to encounter a part of you that lives under those layers of history, in that space of darkness that also holds shine and shimmer. There is magic here, but to find it you will need to befriend this snake who is its guardian. You may find the guardians of your pain are also the guardians of your magic.
Trust serpentine learning—sideways, curving, always grounding back into the earth, the guidebook reads. It asks you to face this snake, nose to nose, and be willing to know it.
It is an apt metaphor for unmasking: something spiralic and winding, always grounding back into the earth, refusing the arbitrary notions of time. Burrowing into the strata of the earth before coming up for air, skin pale and vulnerable to being scorched by the sun. It reminds me of Heather Morgan’s essay “Shifting my Unmasking from Revealing to Unearthing." She writes:
Language is incredibly evocative for me, and having permission to write my own words and definitions for my experience has been an essential part of the process. I find that the word “unmasking” no longer fits me. I once told someone, “I’m not unmasking; I’m conducting a whole archeological dig.” I still use the term “unmasking” publicly because it has an essential and established shared context, and privately I imagine a process of “unearthing” instead.
Unearthing also speaks to the speed of my process. To unearth precious things without damaging them, we have to go slowly. Unearthing me means making aligned choices, knowing I will not always do it perfectly. I am no longer stuck between a dichotomy of assimilation vs. opposition. Instead, I’m gaining the ability to make deliberate and conscious choices rooted in my access needs and values.
I am trying to remember this as I sit in the airport for the first time since diagnosis, traveling with my family. Only one of them knows. The airport is small and not crowded at this point: good. It is filling up and slowly becoming louder and more cramped as I sit here: bad. A man sitting directly across from me at the gate is talking loudly on the phone—so loud that it still reaches me beyond the noise-cancelling headphones and “Vagus Nerve Healing Hz” in my ears. He’s a mover—really enjoys spreading himself out, shifting around, bouncing his leg, reaching into your personal space without warning to pick up the glasses you dropped. I would appreciate this, perhaps even empathize with the need to move the body around, if I wasn’t already overstimulated. I am on vacation, technically, but every second I am running calculations. The man’s leg. The wind from the car on the ride over, still pulsing in my ears even now. My therapist, late on sending back my medical leave form. My family, sitting next to me in all my regression, and me trying and not trying to let myself be changed. My relationship between masking and unmasking right now is still sloppy. What is the balance, in a place where I require the most regulation but don’t feel comfortable embodying it?
Over the past few months I have cultivated rituals that have fed and soothed me amidst tremendous distress: rituals that almost made me believe I had reached a turning point. You can almost succumb to your woven myth that you have been mothering nonexistent children. When the overstimulation starts to set in after a week like this, it feels like a demand—a threat. Something in me hanging on by a thread, whispering, No no no no no.
I almost wonder if it’s the Autistic part of my brain’s last gasp before a week away with sixteen extended family members in an unfamiliar place—a week where the ADHD part of my brain will almost certainly take the reins.
Parts work, or Internal Family Systems (IFS), can be useful for someone of my neurotype. We tried it out in my last therapy session, where I learned the hard truth: that parts work is all fun and games until you have to do parts work. We started working with my hypervigilance: my inner doorkeeper. The guardian of my pain and the guardian of my magic. From inside the portal of my body, I watched myself wriggle and writhe, grasped the organ of my skin to make sure it was still sealed. A wild snake, thrashing at the threat of being held; resisting the shedding of its skin.
Writing in the present tense feels immediate, like everything else. On top of the moment. Layers upon layers of strata, every second a new unearthing. The problem, of course, is that time passes anyway; writing can do many things, but it cannot collapse the forward press of time (or can it?). Writing nonlinearly in present tense, as I do, stealing snatches of time, is bound to be confusing. For instance, I am no longer in the airport. Later in this piece, you will read a passage I wrote this morning. All these moments stick together in their own formation of temporality. They are all now.
In a moment I am figuring as now, I am leaning against the railing of a porch, wine glass cradled in one hand, facing east toward the water. Like any white woman raised in the suburbs, I am wearing a cardigan that I wrap across my torso while I stare, contemplative, at the sea.
A dolphin breaches in the darkening waves, and I let out a shriek of delight. Look! She surfaces again and again, showing off. I have swam with dolphins before—pink dolphins, the color of flesh. They were different, these dolphins, more reptilian than their distant bottlenose relatives. I remember they emerged from the water with a fervor, visceral and urgent. Need. They were hungry, I think. I remember they had teeth. I remember their robust muscly middles—stained with grey sediment, but slippery and smooth, brushing up against my legs unexpectedly in the murky water. They still smiled, toothy-beaked, as they breached, playful dinosaurs out of love with time. As I remember them, I catch myself grinding my teeth again, clenching my jaw. The doorkeeper again, grasping at reins. I try, to no avail, to let my jaw hang relaxed in space. It does not want to. Hungry for eternity, it longs for something to sink its teeth into.
It is the moment just before sundown, when the sun is low but not yet set. I am grateful for this angling of light, this moment in the day, when she is no longer blazing in your eyes; when she lets you rest. I can gaze at the sea without pins prickling at my eyes.
The ocean is an organism, I think, watching her crash upon the shore. How she gathers up the waves and bits of herself and rushes at the sand, pummeling soft ground. I cannot help but anthropomorphize the action, and I also cannot help but correct it on a technicality, in my head. The ocean is not an organism but an ecosystem, holding within her entire worlds. But then again, so are we. But then again, I cannot let go of the rhythm of my original sentence. Sometimes, even when the semantics of a phrase that pops into my head does not make sense, I keep it anyway, the rhythm of syllables feeling like some crucial truth. The meaning will reveal itself in time.
I think of Rachel Pollack’s figuring of The World card, “The Shining Woman.” In Tarot, The World card corresponds with the planet Saturn. It is the card of completion, the tail of the Major Arcana. In Rachel Pollack’s iteration, the Shining Woman holds within her everything: a turtle, a bird, a tree, two snakes, a geode, a fish, a sword, a spiral. Swimming in her bloodstream.
It is 7:54, and the sun is setting over the marsh to the west. The ocean keeps watch from the east. There is a certain romance in being cradled by two bodies of water. I have had 2 glasses of wine. The rhythm of my thoughts, caressed by slight intoxication, have settled into a somewhat hyper-associative delirium. She was going to bed, in the room opposite, my brain narrates, watching the sun tuck itself into the horizon. Virginia Woolf. Before the diagnosis, I wrote a piece in which she was stuck in my nervous system. She kind of is. Dancing in the shining waters of me, like the bird and the branches and the snakes and the spirals. She was going to bed in the room opposite, the sun, and Big Ben had struck the half hour, and it was strange, yes, to see the old lady (they had been neighbors ever so many years) move away from that window, as if she were attached to that sound, that string. Gigantic as it was, it had something to do with her.
It is toward the end of Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa’s revelation. She has retreated from her party, and is gazing out the window, contemplating Septimus, a man very much like her, a man who had killed himself, and watching the old woman in the house opposite.
That’s the miracle, She thinks, And the supreme mystery… was simply this: here was one room, there another.
She felt along the green marble of the day for the hairline crack that might let her out. This could not be forced. Outside, the air hung swagged and the clouds sat in piles of couch stuffing, and in the south of the sky there was a tender spot, where a rainbow wanted to happen.
Then three sips of coffee, and a window happened.
— Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This
The next morning, after capsizing in the porch hammock (twice), I watch my uncle from the third floor lookout. He is walking toward the ocean with a cup of coffee in hand, across the winding sandy shortcut. Just thirty minutes earlier, I had walked the same exact path, coffee cup also in hand, to be alone with the waves. He trods along the path of my footprints. I don’t know why this moves me. He also has a relationship with diagnosis, albeit a physical and much more serious one. Mine has threatened my life as metaphor, as way of living; his has threatened his life literally, as access to the world of living. He stops for a moment at the peak of the dunes. For a moment, I almost decide to ruin it: snap a picture for the family groupchat, captioned with something like Spy nest, call out to him. It is not in preservation of the moment’s purity that prevents me from doing either, but a lack of resources: not knowing where my phone is and not wanting to shout. And it is too late anyway; he has already turned and continued walking out of my line of sight.
The ocean this morning was calmer. Still waking up with a sleepy smile, the sun’s glow gently kissing her good morning. The ocean is often figured as something unknowable, often raging and crashing, sweeping us away, forcing us to surrender control. But here she seems so childlike that I almost want to hold her. I want her to know that feeling. In her calmness, the gently flowing waves, the teasing sea foam, maybe I could swell to someone a million times my size and cup her in my palm, billions of worlds swirling together. Just an organism; just something living. When I hold her, waves will brush up against the spirals of my thumb pad, the ticklish edges of my palms; the moon will tug and she will leak over, inevitably, spilling back out with a new story, a story of I was held once.
Pssst. This newsletter is completely free and likely will continue to be. But if you want to support me, you can subscribe for free, leave a heart/comment on an essay, or share my work. Any of those will quite literally make my day. Or if you want to financially support me, you can gift me a coffee or a book, or commit to a paid subscription!
As always, meme for the road:
You see what I did there?
Hello, double negative!
Do you want a neuropsych? Are you sure? Are you sure? Do you not think you’re being a little dramatic? Alright fine…that will be $2500 and a two year wait. No, you cannot choose your assessor.
As in the neurocomplex interplay of giftedness, autism, and ADHD. I was ID’d as twice-exceptional (aka gifted + disabled) in my autism assessment, which is kind of funny considering I am no longer in school. Like autism, it is a label for the purposes of self-knowledge, and perhaps total reconstruction of your life.
"When you are finally overthrown by the little rebels, you then have another problem: you were too good at wrangling, and now no one believes you. You are mothering children who do not exist."
Geez...great writing, friend.
❤️