I’m part of the Saturn in Aquarius age group. I’m part of this really weird age group that went through our Saturn returns during the pandemic. Saturn first entered Aquarius in March of 2020. It’s about to leave next month and, officially, my Saturn return will be at a close. Saturn will start to return for those with Saturn in Pisces.

Everyone has been going through this pandemic together. It’s been different for all of us. Some of us were just starting our adulthoods during it. Some of us had plans that were interrupted and some of us had no plans for our lives before or after. The Saturn in Aquarius generation ended our twenties during it and entered a more adult decade of our lives.

One of the more important things that I learned during my Saturn return was that responsibility is a choice. Let me explain this a little.

I used to always feel like responsibility was a burden. I felt this way because I didn’t think that I could choose my own responsibilities. This makes sense in a way. When you’re a youth, people tell you what to do a lot. This means that an active participation in the world around you doesn’t always feel like a choice but a chore. Doing the responsible thing feels like a task that you do because you’re expected to and not because you want to.

Part of growing up is the recognition that the world around you is not an authority figure but that we are all living, questioning, and feeling entities just trying to figure things out in a way. This means that I am less easily triggered by certain things. I don’t know. This may also have something to do with all of your organs, including your brain, shrinking after you enter your thirties so sensations just aren’t as heightened as before. My emotions feel much more manageable. I don’t feel the impulse to interrupt someone when I disagree with them because I realize that I don’t need attention for my opinions all of the time. I feel fully capable of giving attention to myself and I don’t impulsively try to get it from people who I project authority onto.

Because of this, I feel more self directed about my actions and choices. I find responsibility more enjoyable when I accept that I do not control my circumstances and that I will never have complete control over the circumstances of my choices.

In the past, I always felt like exercising responsibility and caring about things was a moral choice. It still is for me. However, my morality is less black and white. This means that I don’t suddenly feel like a horrible person when I don’t have the capacity to take responsibility for something that I think I should.

Responsibility is no longer about the fear of exposing myself to the risk of punishment. Responsibility is a choice that I make when I am ready to expand my capacity.

This is the second thing that I learned during my Saturn return: I don’t need to fulfill my highest ideals in order to live with myself.

If I could live all of my highest ideals, then I’d be a perfect person living in a perfect world. I don’t live in that world because I live on Earth. I live as an imperfect person with limited choices in an imperfect world. Instead of cowering from my own disappointment and shame by pretending that I am a better person than I can be, I learned how to own up to myself and accept that I am not a finished product but a living person with an unfinished life.

I am still idealistic but ideals can function defensively particularly if they are overly concerned about who is right and who is wrong. I am less concerned about being right or wrong and more concerned about building capacity. I have always felt like politics aren’t debatable theories but a lived reality, that what makes your character known is not the opinions that you sometimes formulate to yourself but how you move through your everyday relationships, routines, and labors. Now, I have more compassion for how those everyday choices are limited.

It is better to do the best you can and to make room for your failings than to defend your moral correctness. It is better to know that you can move into a new type of care in five years time and to build slowly towards that purpose than to hide from the ways you desire to care more deeply by making excuses.

Time passes slowly. I am no longer afraid of time passing. Just because something is impossible now doesn’t mean that it will stay impossible. This is why it is important to live with yourself. Staying alive means that you are willing to see the impossible come into fruition.

I learned, during my Saturn return, that no one is really out there measuring you against some standard of being good enough or not. People really don’t pay that much attention to you at all which is always a relief. This isn’t to say that people don’t judge you. People judge me all the time. However, their judgments of me may not matter to me because those judgments may only make sense in the narrative of their own emotional history and not mine.

This is something I learned during my Saturn return: how to hold myself up. I stand up straighter now. I take up more space. My spine is straighter when I sit. I don’t hunch over so much, shrinking away from exposure or attention. I stopped leaning in, eagerly awaiting to hear from someone else how I might please them next.

I realized that the world I live in isn’t someone else’s world that I must duck and hide in. I learned that this world is also my world. It is my world too as long as I am willing to take responsibility for my own presence here.

Standing up and sitting up were two different journeys for me. When I learned how to stand up straight, I had to push myself into discomfort first. I had to hold my head up higher and actually experience the fact that I wasn’t going to be punished for not adopting the posture of shame all of the time. Learning to sit straight was different. For me to sit up, I had to learn to lean back into my chair. I had to learn that there was something supporting me from behind and that being supported instead of always trying to be supportive is acceptable. I had to accept that I got here because I am supported. I learned that I do better, more helpful, and more loving work when I am more aware of how I am supported and less desperate to earn approval.

It seems so simple—standing up straight and sitting up. I used to get yelled at for hunching over all of the time. I didn’t want to fix my posture. I felt a rebellious resistance against it—against being in the world fully.

I was really anxious about my Saturn return before it happened because I was scared that it would be about punishment. Maybe it’s the way we sometimes conceptualize Saturn. “Oh, Saturn’s gonna punish you if you don’t do the right things. He’s really going to get you.” I don’t know. For me to accept responsibility, I had to realize that no punishment was in order. I had to recognize that if punishment was always distributed unfairly, then this means that I needed a better reason for putting the effort in than just the threat of punishment. I’m not a child. I’m an adult. I guess that’s what growing up is about at the end of the day.

Some of the things that I was scared about happening during the return did happen. There was loss and uprooting. I “came out” to my parents during my Saturn return and all that jazz. I’m still here.

I’m excited to see my Saturn in Pisces friends complete their first Saturn cycle. It’ll be a trip. Good luck.