It’s 1:33 PM on a Wednesday as I begin this. In front of me, Vito sits swiping through photos to submit to a contest on his iPad. We’re in a Panera Bread, which is not a place we frequent, but we were hungry and it’s next to the Sally’s Beauty Supply in York where we’re planning to peruse bleach to *potentially* dye his hair platinum (update: we did not bleach—yet). I’m drinking an Americano with steamed oat milk, my go-to drink, as Carla Morrison blares in my headphones to drown out the pop Christmas music on the speakers—the plight of anywhere-America after Thanksgiving passes.
It's the most suburban day of all suburban days. I’m not yet back in New York from Thanksgiving break because The New School professors are still on strike—the third week now without any classes because our administration won’t pay up. I’ll hop a train to the city tomorrow, join the picket line, hit up my side gig, and work in a library, but for now, I am here, in this silly chain café, while the kids are at school staring out of different windows at the same rain.
But this won’t be a post about my locational affects—there are plenty of those previous if you’re wondering what traveling between two homes is like. This post is about nothing at all really, except what life’s like for me the week before turning thirty. I was talking recently about my propensity to document my life online, how it’s always felt natural and enjoyable for me. Sometimes compulsory. I don’t know why this is, besides an attempt to make art from something mundane. Some sort of digital time capsule. Or zoo of memories. Maybe, it’s just an attempt to force all of this to mean something, to be able to look back and say, look—look at all the life I’ve lived.
If you subscribe to systems like astrology (which, um, we do around here), you know that from about 28-30 is your Saturn Return—a period in which you’re forced to ‘grow up.’ Saturn is the Sky Daddy; it wants what’s best for you and it will make sure that you’re up to the challenge of receiving it. Saturn doles out tough love; it doesn’t let us off the hook. Anything in its way gets nixed by the time your return is over. But you can rest assured that on the other side of all of the hard stuff is the life that’s meant for this next level version of you—an entire upgraded existence.
(Note for you: if you look at where/what house Saturn sits in your birth chart, it will give you an idea of the themes and tone of the challenges you’ll face during your own Saturn Return—or if you’re currently on the tail end of yours, check it and look back on the past couple years to become an astrology believer.)
All of that to say that these past two years have been some of the most difficult years of my life. I lost my grandmother, who was a second mother, at times a whole mother, and always who brought me the deepest sense of safety in my childhood. I haven’t experienced grief that deep in quite some time, and because I’ve experienced intense grief so many times before, I thought I’d be ‘better’ at it. Of course, I was not. Grief knows no bounds; it exceeds all expectations.
I also got a mental health diagnosis not long after. It’s not one I feel comfortable sharing yet (I will write about it eventually), but it’s one that I’ve suspected since I was a 13-year-old neurotic sad girl reading the DSM-IV on the mall’s bookstore floor. Only took over a decade of therapy for someone to say it out loud. The diagnosis has been affirming in many ways and given me a framework from which to see my tendencies and patterns, but I haven’t clung to it in the way I sort of expected myself to. In most ways, hearing a diagnosis aloud hasn’t changed anything. I am still who I am, label or not, and I am still consistently working to accept this self in all its wild ways. But there’s also been a sort of grieving process attached to the diagnosis that I don’t quite have words for yet.
And of course, the move to New York for grad school. It provided, first, a freedom that I was longing for, a necessary change of pace. It was an actualization of a life-long dream, and a leap towards my career. But what I didn’t anticipate when imagining living in New York City so many years ago was that the opportunity would come at a time that I was in a serious partnership. I especially never guessed that I would be a ‘step mom,’ that part of moving would be learning to manage my life with a family versus my life as a student again. What it’s all uncovered for me is two polarized sides of myself: one with a longing for risk-taking, adventure, novelty, and chaos. The other half that clings to comfort, family, stability, and home. Balancing both parts, both lifestyles, has been tumultuous. It has changed me.
What has helped more than anything this past year are the friends I’ve found in New York that feel like family, friends from all over the world, friends that have provided me deep comfort and more fun than I’ve had in years. Finding them in the city has reminded me how essential this type of found family is for me, and it has reassured me that I can create home wherever I go, so long as I’m open to connection.
I could go on about the appalls of my Saturn return—the fulfillment too. The unburdening of childhood wounds. The grappling with survival mode, with learning to receive. Facing the disparities of class more than ever. The excitement of education and learning in-person again. The novelty of New York City; its wearing-off (an essential aspect of novelty). The study of home.
But here I am: thirty. Its been hanging in front of me like a holy grail for years now, the birthday I’ve waited for since my early twenties. However, just a month or two ago, I couldn’t have even imagined celebrations. I was, instead, in a hole that I’m not even sure I wanted to get out of. After a month or two of avoiding grief after my gramma’s passing, it covered me like a weighted blanket. It buried me alive. Nothing I loved was lovable anymore; I wasn’t either. I just wanted to be left alone. I just wanted to stop pretending that life could go on without my grandmother.
I just didn’t want it to.
But it did. And people forgave me despite how grouchy I always was, or they pretended not to notice, and they listened when I complained or cried about my sadness—or they pretended not to notice—and it reminded me what love really means, what it’s really like. Even just thinking of it, I find myself desperately grateful, the kind of grateful that has no where to go but out in little water drops from the corner of my eyes. The kind of grateful that feels fraudulent because I can’t really express it the way it deserves to be expressed. The kind of grateful that covers the hour in a warm, amber filter.
This weekend in New York, I will humbly work an event at The Center of Fiction and imagine the day when I’m, instead, one of the authors eating hor d'oeuvres and checking my coat. I will have my *fourth* birthday celebration of the week at a bowling bar in the Lower East Side with something like 35 people I love like crazy who I’ve only, somehow, just met the past year. I will walk through city streets with Vito, stopping to gush over the Christmas tree sales stands that set themselves up right in the middle of the sidewalks, $100 trees and all their dark green glory in the way of everyone, everyone, everyone. I will stay out too late and still try to throw together a morning. I will drink too many free Pret coffees from the subscription I share with my best friends. And in many ways it will be the same magical weekend that it always is in the center of the world where I get to live.
I will never not be the type of person who cries on their train ride back to the city because they’re so desperately grateful for what awaits them. I will never not be the type of person to throw multiple parties for my birthday, who will also complain about having to leave the house when the times comes for them to begin. I will never not be the person collecting friends in a frenzy wherever I go because this life is so lonely, so heartbreakingly dark sometimes, and I want nothing to do with it, nothing, unless I have someone to lean on, someone that can lean on me.
I expected to turn thirty as the most confident, successful, badass version of myself, but really, I’m turning thirty as the same silly me I’ve always been. The same chaotic, but ambitious mess. The same indecisive, change-my-train-ticket-three-times-a-day bitch. The same bursting ass heart. I am surely not at peak Lizz (my Saturn Return doesn’t officially end until March so like give me a minute), but I’m okay with that. I really am. If this is who I’m doomed to be at thirty and beyond, I’m sure that I can live with it.
This weekend, I will finally turn thirty amidst the same magic that has carried me through this life thus far, the same magic that surrounds and encircles and holds me, birthday or not. It is the same magic that lights the Christmas trees in December and soothes our grieving hearts when we’re ready and places inflatable dinosaurs outside of our train windows at just the moment we look up and out. It’s the same magic that brings us the right people at the exact right time, that shouts ‘moon!’ from our little niece’s mouth, that holds our face in its hands and says ‘You deserve this. You do. You do, you do.’
This magic that I call grace, and sometimes mercy, and always God.
If you’re still reading this, I hope you know just what I mean. And if you don’t, if you’re cynical or reluctant or sad, too, I hope you will know soon.
If you want to give me a little birthday gift, you can subscribe to this Substack, which I truuulyyy plan to get back on a regular schedule in the new year! It’s cheap, or it’s free. You can send it to that friend, too, who likes sentimental musings laced with astrology. I love you! Xo.
“Even just thinking of it, I find myself desperately grateful, the kind of grateful that has no where to go but out in little water drops from the corner of my eyes. The kind of grateful that feels fraudulent because I can’t really express it the way it deserves to be expressed. The kind of grateful that covers the hour in a warm, amber filter.” -- I have tears!!!! This whole piece was perfectly sentimental and self-aware. Thirty shall be magical 😍