It's time for you to get real about life

About growing up too fast, chasing time, and learning to breathe again before Saturn comes knocking.

When we’re all born, Saturn’s somewhere and the Saturn cycle takes around about twenty-nine years

That’s when we gotta wake up and smell the coffee

Because if we’ve just been sort of relying on our cleverness

Or relying—, you know, just kind of floating along

Saturn comes along and hits you over the head, and says, “Wake up”

Aha, it’s time for you to get real about life and sort out who you really are
— Diana Garland

The more intensely I feel alive that my blood is pumping, that the pages of my calendar are tearing away faster and faster the more I feel how much time I’ve already wasted.

For as long as I can remember, death and transience have always seemed to me to be something tangible, a warm breath on the back of my neck. Every day, when I had a cold, was tired, or was sad, I would lie in bed and absentmindedly scroll through the internet and think: I am wasting time that others would give anything for.

I grew up in a family of workaholics for whom time is sacred and rest is a sin. There is no second place. Either you are the best or you are nothing.

For years, I watched my mother work herself to the bone at a job she hated, and my father picking up every side gig so I could have everything.

And myself in the mirror with dark bags under my eyes, which I learned to cover with makeup at a too-young age. With the ritual of making coffee and the first gray hairs at the temples.

---

I started school at six and finished at fourteen.

I started high school as a child and finished as an adult, 18 year old with a lifelong plan.

A bachelor’s degree by 21. Then a master’s. Maybe a PhD before 30.

Because thirty is almost half a life, right? (Or so I thought at the time.) You have to achieve something by then.

In high school, I had a routine: waking up at five, putting on coffee and makeup, classes, tutoring, studying until I fell asleep with a book on my face. By the end, I felt so much pressure on myself that I felt embarrassed to go to bed any earlier than fifteen hours on my feet.

I considered those days wasted, no matter how much I accomplished. I think what I needed most back then was someone to lock me in a cage and throw away the key. Someone who would say: fifteen is not the age to chase expectations.

But I had a mother who just wanted me to “at least manage.” I managed, I always did, but at what cost? And when I left for college, everything slowed down—and sometimes, when I feel like I’m suffocating again, I think back to that breathless run. We never stop orbiting our parents’ expectations, even when we think we’ve broken free.

---

I started thinking about my own death. I quickly calculated the age difference between my grandfather and me. I was ten years old.

My grandfather was seventy-five when he died. He was thirty-something when he started a family. It turned out I didn’t have much time left. I’m one-seventh of my grandfather’s life and I’m just a stupid kid.

— from my novel

I remember the first time I started thinking about death. This feeling comes back to me constantly in moments when I suddenly feel like my body isn’t mine, that everything is temporary. Then I start trembling with fear. In a panic, I start planning how to leave my mark.

I’ll write something great.

I’ll do something great.

I’ll become an anecdote, a memory, a legend at the family table.

Anything to avoid dying. As long as this time I have doesn’t slip through my fingers.

---

When exactly should we take a breath in life?

Is there even time for that?

When do we need to know who we are?

Sometimes I feel like in this rush, we shouldn’t even look for a moment to breathe. Because to understand that we’re already adults, sometimes you have to inhale so deeply that your hands smell of mascara and your mouth smells of coffee. It’s a cultural tradition that turning twenty is the moment when you have to know who you are and where you’re going.

Which is absolute bullshit.

Since I was twelve, I dreamed of writing. And yet, I strayed from that path so many times that I thought I’d never even touch it. People think I had it easy that I simply stumbled upon a college that fulfilled my childhood dream. But fulfilling that dream cost me disappointment in my mother.

Sometimes I think I lost my relationship with her because I walked alone down a path she didn’t know. But isn’t that what parents want? So that we can move forward – even if not in the direction they dreamed of? Maybe that’s the part of adulthood we never thought about earlier. We are losing our relations with family, friends, and ourselves? Or maybe you can never be ready for losing — family, time, friends, chances. We all believe in second times but there is none which scares the shit out of me.

But maybe adulthood isn’t about stopping being afraid of death, but about finally starting to live without the thought that everything has to be done in time. Because time will catch up with us anyway.

They say Saturn returns to remind you who you are. Maybe that’s what this all is — a reminder. That I’m still here, still figuring it out, still learning how to live in a body that runs on borrowed time.

Maybe Saturn doesn’t hit you over the head to hurt — maybe just to wake you up enough to realize:
you’re alive.