Who am I Becoming?

What an existential question for a blog post title, am I right?

I’m in the midst of my peak Saturn Return season. A year ago, even 6 months ago, I would have laughed at the thought of being so open and public about a pseudo scientific astrological event. Like you can’t be serious that Saturn’s placement in the sky is affecting my life here on Earth.

But I feel it, this change happening within me. And you know, maybe it’s just the nature of life–we ebb and we flow, we grow and we change. For me, it makes sense that what I’m feeling is coinciding with my peak Saturn Return Season.

I’m changing. I’m feeling more myself. More sure of myself. I turned 29 this year, and it feels good. It feels like I’m really growing up this year. I mean, legally, I’ve been a grown up for 11 years. But age had nothing to do with maturity. My 20s have been rife with challenges. Loneliness. Insecurity. Lacking a sense of place in the world. Afraid to truly take up space. An emotional immaturity I didn’t recognize in myself as I was hiding behind walls I put up to keep people from truly seeing me.

In the last 2 years, I’ve been able to see those blind spots in myself and work to heal them. They’re by no means all healed. Will they ever be? But I think I’ve made a good dent in them. I rediscovered more of my self worth. I’ve been leaning more into adventure. Flexibility. But also patience. Waiting to see how my adventure will unfold. NOT being so impulsive (something I became very good at with the help of social media and texting). I’ve been working on truly trusting the future. On feeling that surprise when things seem to work out just right with minimal effort on my part.

I’ve been feeling my feelings. Honoring my emotional process.

I don’t know what the future holds. I’m trying to let go of expectations. Those always seem to trip me up in the worst way. I have my intuition and I trust it, but I’ve also learned that life is far more than my intuition. Life is living in the present. Enjoying the moment. Embracing the good moments and the hard moments alike.

For now, I’m enjoying summer break. Oofta, I’m loving the rest and the relaxation. I feel excited to teach second grade next year. My fifth graders and I somehow made it through this last school year and now it’s time for a change. I learned so much in my first year of teaching. I’m also looking forward to teaching a younger crowd that hasn’t entered puberty yet. I also dream of a future where I can be more in charge of my schedule–being a classroom teacher has always been a temporary dream for me. I have no idea what that future looks like yet, but that’s where that trusting the future comes in.

The world is a scary place these days. War. World leaders who lead from their massively overly sized egos. Rising prices on everything. More mass shootings. More school shootings. Never ending new variants of COVID. What is this Monkeypox business? Teenagers who are depressed due to too much social media usage. I, myself, am writing this a few days after women in my country have lost the constitutional right to choose what is best for their bodies.

I’m an optimist at my core, though. Sometimes to my detriment. I’ve be learning to balance my optimism with feeling the heaviness of the world. I want to believe that the future is bright, that humanity naturally has its ups and downs. Being human isn’t clear cut. Progress, or what many of us view as progress, isn’t fluid.

And who am I becoming in the midst of all of this?

Hopefully kinder. More compassionate. Brave. Strong in my convictions, yet flexible in mind, body, and spirit–we live in an ever changing world, after all. Unafraid to take the steps that I feel are right for me. Patient. Hopeful. Inspired. But also silly. Fun. Moments of child-like innocence can be the most joyful. And I don’t want to forget the joy of life. There is a lot of fear in the world, but there’s also so much joy. I want to honor the full spectrum of emotion and take both the pain and the joy in stride. Above all else, I don’t want to forget the joy.