My mum has always been a very spiritual person (she does yoga teaching, she’s into meditation, and she did a lot of drugs in the 80s). This means she sends me the odd mystical article or video.
One that caught my eye was a piece in Vogue about surviving your Saturn Return. A Saturn Return is an astrological phenomenon that is said to happen every 27 to 29.5 years. As Saturn approaches the same position it was in the sky when a person was born, that individual is meant to go through a transition period to prepare them for the next stage of their life. It is a 2.5-year phase that, if you need a big shove in the right direction, can be a painful and tumultuous one. As Caggie Dunlop, author of Saturn Returns, puts it, the journey can “feel like a drop-kick from the universe”.
I’ve always been sceptical of any kind of spirituality, or even religion; in my younger years, I was the kind of smug little know-it-all-all who would listen to Richard Dawkins audiobooks, proudly class myself as an atheist and roll my eyes at my mum buying crystals.
As I’ve gotten further into my 20s, I’ve started dipping my toe in the shallow end of spirituality (the crystals, however, are still a step too far for me).
The idea that, at 28, I’m almost halfway through my Saturn Return feels very apt. I’ve had an extremely turbulent few years, all kicking off in the months leading up to my 27th birthday (around the time this process is supposed to begin), where I had the realisation that I wasn’t being authentic to myself and that nothing in my life was the right fit anymore.
The first thing I knew I had to change was my love life. And after my breakup, I spiralled into a deep depression, paralysed by the uncertainty of how I was going to change everything else.
I was getting constant job rejections, doing nothing creative, swiping my way through every man on Hinge in central Scotland, and seething with jealousy as I watched everyone else’s lives unfold on social media.
Everything I wanted felt too overwhelming to achieve, and I worried that if I didn’t fix it all, then, very soon, I would somehow miss the boat. In an attempt to feel motivated and inspired, I bought an audiobook about how the decisions we make in our 20s dictate the rest of our lives. Instead, one evening as I listened to it while doing the dishes, I broke down crying on the kitchen floor Trisha Paytas style, holding the rubber gloves to my face and covering my hair in soap suds. The mountain seemed an unimaginably tall one to climb.
As Caggie Dunlop said in Harpers Bazaar, “What Saturn seeks is your excellence, it won't let you slip by playing it safe and small.” All of the turbulence and struggle experienced as you go through your Saturn Return drives you towards living up to your potential – to ensure you achieve all you are capable of achieving when you come out on the other side.
During my time off at Christmas last year, I drafted a plan to change my life (yes, I’m a Virgo). I cleared out everything I didn’t want in my flat, started writing again, met up with people to give me career advice, and, as an attempt to get freelance work, I sent out emails to about 50 different people.
Nothing changed. I got five responses to my emails, all saying they had no work for me.
At the start of this year, after all that work and so many failed applications and attempts at self-improvement, I was still stuck in a rut.
Then, at the end of January, I got an email that changed my entire life and resulted in me moving country and changing my career a few days later.
This links to another idea that intrigues me, the concept of synchronicities (meaningful coincidences), which psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung believed mirror our internal processes and carry messages. In simpler terms, as the author Gregg Levoy explains: “When you’re on the right path, the universe winks and nods at you from time to time to let you know.”
When I started this Substack I did so to give myself a creative outlet that I had been in desperate need of for a long time. Strangely, my job offer came a week after I started the blog, and I like to believe the email that dropped in my inbox that day was a little nod from the universe that I was making the correct changes, and that finally I was ready to start walking down the right path.
As well as finding the right career, the move to London has also allowed me to re-embrace the things I loved to do as a child – writing and performing. This year, I’ve been living authentically again, I’ve reconnected with my goals and I’ve done a lot of healing.
My move felt like something that was always waiting for me when I was ready for it, a path that was already paved. It happened in less than a week, I found a flat in a matter of days (a herculean feat in the London rental market) with my now friend Az who I love living with, and at work, I met Martha, someone who I had lived in four of the same cities as, yet had never met. It was finally time for our paths to converge and she’s now one of my closest friends.
I read once that if each person’s blood vessels were laid out end-to-end they could stretch around the planet twice. I imagine all of my veins and arteries looping and intertwining for miles like infinite pathways, the endless roads I could have gone down, the different choices I could have made, all of them making me who I am today.
Ultimately, I think that everything is predetermined, everyone has a tiny part they have been cast to play in the gigantic tapestry of life, and all roads we could take eventually lead us to the same destination.
No matter what, I think I always would have ended up where I am now, which, for the first time in years, feels as though it’s exactly where I’m supposed to be.
In 2022, I burned everything to the ground. It was a year of longing, desperation and sifting through the ashes. This year, I tried to rebuild everything from scratch: I moved country, I changed careers, I interrogated lots of painful thoughts and feelings as I laid down new foundations, and as I started to live authentically again, all of the pieces began to fall into place.
This summer, I trekked to Hyde Park to see my favourite artist of all time, Lana Del Rey. I weaved through the crowd littered with cherry vapes and Lolita sunglasses in what felt like a spiritual pilgrimage for millennial women who have a citalopram prescription and own a copy of The Bell Jar.
In one of my favourite Lana songs, Chemtrails Over the Country Club, she sings, “It’s never too late, baby, so don’t give up.” I used to play this on repeat to soothe me when I felt desperate and restless, unsure if a big change would ever come. And when I heard her sing it live, it was the first moment I realised that the life I had wanted for such a long time was finally in my grasp – I had done it.
It took a lot of pain and struggle, dusting myself off, bandaging my wounds, and stumbling down unmarked roads, but I’ve finally found my way back onto the right path, and when I look up, the stars wink at me as I continue into the unknown.