The only way out is through

Saturn returns eventually, and so can we: on mothering your own self through both the burning and the becoming.

“And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.”

Raymond Carver, Late Fragment

They say life moves in seven-year cycles, and so does the grief that echoes through our bones.

Seven years ago, I flew to Los Angeles to bury the monster and begged it to set me free. Out in the desert, the hurt dislodged itself from my ribs and dissolved into red dust, promising only to return if I could bring myself to face the rest of it. The body keeps the score, doesn’t it? I’d been keeping count for the better part of my twenties, and if I were the kind of person who told the truth I would tell you I knew what was coming.

In March 2023, I outstayed my welcome in denial. The monster resurrected itself cell by cell, hollowed out my insides from within, and asked the one question I was never quite able to answer. When the fuck are you gonna take responsibility for the life you say you want for yourself?

Here’s the thing about personal responsibility — we’ve all just spent five years trying to survive our collective wreckage and there’s a non-insignificant chance that soon enough, the only kind of life we want for ourselves might be reduced to a whispered prayer for a livable planet and a swift fall of the fascist world order we’ve sleepwalked into. There’s no running from any of it, for any of us, and that’s exactly why I’m convinced our individual choices have never mattered more.

“Collective liberation is the only thing that will save us,” writes Chani Nicholas. “I pray that enough of us have learned just how powerful and devastatingly misdirected unhealed collective shadows can be, and that this knowledge makes us all more dedicated to our personal and shared healing.”

There can be no shared healing without personal responsibility, but there’s no individual healing that doesn’t begin and end with taking a sledgehammer to the idealized comfort zones we build our lives around. I would know, because sledgehammering is all I’ve done for the last two years.

Come closer.

Let me enjoy this.

I’ve been waiting so long to tell you about my own personal crumbling.

I want to tell you how I spent the last two years wrestling ego death more than I did anything resembling living, and how I had every intention of refusing to question the bile permanently stuck in my throat until life did what it always ends up doing and slammed me in the chest with the answer.

I haven’t told the truth since I made up imaginary friends at four years old. I made up entire selves as a profession, and then entire worlds, but that’s no way to live and it sure as hell is no road to collective liberation.

I’m giving up the ghost.

I’m choosing an act of grace over an act I couldn’t keep on performing.

I want to tell the truth.

The day I turned 31, I started crying as soon as I woke up and didn’t get out of bed until 11:40 AM. I dragged myself to the corner café for a zabaione cream puff and I did the math again and again, like I’ve been doing most days since March 29th, 2023.

677 days in, god knows how long to go.

I put both my hands on my womb and felt the warmth of it rise to meet my palms outstretched in prayer. I thought of the psychic in San Francisco who told me I needed to start mothering myself, how I’d wanted to laugh then but I sort of get it now.

I’m not asking you to believe in astrology. I’m telling you that I was born with Saturn in the fifth house of creativity and self-expression, and a Saturn return —when the planet completes its orbit and returns where it was at the moment of your birth, which it does every 29 years— is known for asking you to reckon with your life choices and authentic identity. You might be forced to face the kind of lessons and challenges that reveal which foundations of your life are solid and which will crumble under pressure, and boy, will you truly have no choice but to actually face them.

I’m telling you that for what could reasonably and entirely be non-astrological reasons, two weeks after the planet that’s known as the stern teacher of the Zodiac waltzed back into my life I moved a document called 'Book draft' from my Desktop to the Trash and abandoned a life plan I’d spent a decade building.

In March 2023, I huddled under the shower spray, brought my knees to my chest and my forehead to the cold tiles, staying until numbness crept from my skin to my ears and every single nerve in my body. I asked my creative support group if they’d still have me even if I never wrote another word again, then deactivated all my social media accounts and turned my phone off for such a long time that a friend had to call my mother to check I was still alive.

Writing had started to feel like acting did right before I quit for good, which is to say suffocating, terrifying, devoid of joy, and entirely devoted to gathering evidence of my worthiness in the form of soulless external validation. When I was in Los Angeles, I’d begged the monster to let me live and swore I would give up the applause in exchange for a chance at rebuilding the raw architecture of my being. I would fill up that core worthiness wound with my own mothering comfort. I would never look outside myself for my own goddamn reclamation again. I would fill pages upon pages with affirmations, I would do the work. It was a valiant effort, and if not for the fact that I was 23 years old and not even halfway into a decade spent excavating ancestral trauma, it might even have worked.

Seven years later, I was asked to make good on my promise and pay up interest.

What I thought would be a month-long break became a permanent address within a grief so overpowering I could barely recognize myself through its distortion.

I said to hell with a decade of eating disorder recovery, I won’t survive this without a little help from my old friends. I couldn’t stop eating. I couldn’t stop myself from starving.

I just couldn’t stop hurting myself, my body both rebellion and battlefield, my hunger both enemy and ally.

I dyed my hair blonde. I got new tattoos. I watched a two-hour-long real time CGI animation of the Titanic sinking every night for four nights in a row. I went to see a celebrity acupuncturist, a psychedelic guide, two mediums and three separate “intuitives.” I read a lot of books about trauma and the body and ancestral patterns. I started running again. I completed an intensive 400-hour training and became a breathwork facilitator. I cried a lot. I heard Taylor play “Long Live” at Wembley, and I screamed back I had the time of my life with you like I used to sing into my shampoo bottle at sixteen.

I had three separate minor medical emergencies that forced me to investigate my paralyzing fear of death and the voices hiding somewhere deep in my DNA whispering that maybe I deserved it. I swam with whales and had a panic attack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I hosted dinner parties. I did a lot of solo travel. I made banging playlists. I turned 30 in Paris. I got engaged. I met my friends’ babies. I spoke a lot of French. I learned some hard business lessons. I started journal after journal by writing “New Life Plan” on the first page, and then abandoned each one. I watched every single season of 11 or 12 different TV shows. I wasted too many hours than I care to admit scrolling the cesspit that is r/nycinfluencersnarking and making myself sick. On hot summer nights, I finished work early to drag myself to the outdoor city pool. On a few separate occasions, I didn’t leave my house for a whole week.

I missed out on life as it inexorably went on without me being able to function as anything but a witness to it, and an unreliable one at that.

I missed calls and parties and chances and sunrises, each one another barrier I was building between myself and everything real. Each one a small death as I waited, and waited, and waited for my creativity to come back to me.

I tried to cheat my karmic debt but the monster said, sorry, not this time.

Alanis said it best in her own Saturn return album: the only way out is through, bitch.

Only after taking a sledgehammer to my whole life did I find the courage to start looking into why I didn’t believe it possible that I could actually build a different one, a life built on ease and joy and community and purpose.

Was it the Catholic guilt I’ve inherited from growing up in Holy Italy? Was it a chemical imbalance? An utopian ideal we were never supposed to reach for in the first place?

I’ve come to believe that the worthiness wound is both a societal and ancestral black hole, an heirloom passed down generations with more care than wedding china. I investigated the three decades I spent genuflecting at the altar of external validation, and traced it all the way back to when —and why— I started collecting gold stars like breaths of oxygen: accumulate enough and you might be allowed to survive.

Be smaller. Be smarter. Be quieter. Bargain with your own reflection. Our DNA cells know that one wrong move could get us exiled from the tribe, so we perform our acceptability like it's keeping us alive — because once, not that many generations ago, it did.

Good little girls get to eat.

Good little girls get to live.

Good little girls don't get abandoned.

But do good little girls abandon themselves?

The way I see it, when Saturn comes around it asks that you stop fucking around because you already know the answer.

Jung said that the soul will do anything to avoid facing itself, so we banish the unacceptable parts of us into the shadows and call it survival. We splinter into more palatable selves that won’t be punished, won’t be too loud or too needy or too real. We contort and adapt and call it ambition, but the truth is we are just running, and the only way back to worthiness is through that reckoning. Through whispering to every disowned piece of yourself: I see you. You belong here. Thank you for showing me the way.

If your ears are ringing, let them scream at you: you're allowed to drown in the sweetness you've been denying yourself. You can gorge on joy like it's your birthright, because it is.

Your worth lives in your breath, not your accomplishments. It's in the stubborn persistence of your lungs, expanding and contracting whether you remember to notice them or not. It's in your heartbeat, your digestive system, your ability to heal a paper cut. Your body has been advocating for your right to exist since the moment you were born, and it will continue until the moment you die.

Worthiness sits beside you in the wreckage, in the stillness, in the moments when there is nothing left to prove. It was stitched into the fabric of your being before you ever learned to measure yourself against someone else’s yardstick, and if you dare turn toward the shadow instead of away from it, you will know this was always the case.

Why does this matter? We can’t heal the world if we’re still stuck in the same old patterns of self-doubt and shame, trapped in the same stories we’ve been telling ourselves about not being enough.

Every time we choose to break free, to unravel these stories and stop asking for permission to exist, we make it that much easier for someone else to do the same.

Liberation is contagious. It ripples out. The more of us move towards it, the closer we get to creating the world we want to live in — a world that sees us, honors us, and finally sets us free. The rest is just noise.

In the midst of my breakdown, I read a quote that made me want to put down the sledgehammer: “When I stop trying to contort myself into the shape of success the world has outlined, I come into alignment with what true prosperity looks like. I allow my heart’s deepest desires to be fulfilled, and my life transforms with grace.”

As a New Age Steinbeck riff, it works for me. Now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good. And now that you don’t have to be good, doesn’t it feel so good to just be?

You're alive now, so fucking act like it. Not because you've earned the right or because someone finally gave you permission, but because the alternative is a half-life spent waiting for an approval that will never fully satisfy you.

Choose the full-throated yes to your own existence.

Choose the road of least resistance.

Call all the fractured parts of yourself back home.

Some days I still can't recognize the face in the mirror. Some nights the shame is so thick I can taste it, and I still believe I'm one mistake away from unraveling completely. But I've learned to breathe through the discomfort instead of against it, without trying to numb it or run from it.

Healing comes in moments — a sunset that breaks my heart open, a conversation where I speak my truth without flinching, an exhale where I let my belly fully expand and release without reservations.

Each time I’m tempted to go back on my word, each time just for now threatens to turn to I guess things could stay like this a little longer, I ask: Will this choice bring me closer to or further from who I want to be? And if the answer isn't clear, I wait until it is.

In those quiet moments between panic and epiphany, I start catching glimpses of a woman emerging from a chrysalis of self-destruction. Her edges are harder, her boundaries are stricter, but she is wide awake.

The self in flux is a terrifying thing, but isn’t it so freeing?

Isn’t it all worth it?

I waited so long to write this because I wanted to make sure I meant it, and I do now.

I'm done with this deadening now. Done contorting myself into shapes that were never meant to hold my full potential, done starving myself of joy after rationed joy.

These days, my truth awakens on a high boil, and I hope yours does, too.

If this all amounts to anything, I hope it’s telling you to take everything that's making you less real, less expansive, less alive, and burn it all to the ground. Be willing to parent your own rebirth. Walk yourself home.

I want to tell the psychic in the Mission District, I understand now. Mothering yourself means holding space for both the burning and the becoming. It’s cradling your own heart like it's the most precious thing you've ever held, whispering into your own darkness: I see you, I’ve got you, I'm not going anywhere this time.

What's here now? You are.

Saturn returns eventually.

The lantern burns eventually.

The heart remembers eventually.

And motherfucker, so do I.