58. Saturnine.

the author circa 1985, Marietta, Georgia.

Today is my birthday, and I consider it a great honor and gift and pleasure to spend it writing. This newsletter—the habits of mind, the relationships, the creative space and scaffolding it has constructed in my life—remains one of the most generative and transformative practices I have ever embarked upon and I give thanks to you and for you, reader, for making it possible, for bearing witness, for seeing me.

As a thank you, I’m offering 25% off annual subscriptions to Home + the World. In addition, any donations to my Venmo will go directly to Many Lands Mutual Aid in Gaza.

I have a complicated relationship with my birthday. While it’s true that I’m a Leo and Leos are known to love the spotlight and be the life of the party, I have often secretly felt an intense and grueling pressure to be fun and perform levity for others in a way that has, historically, required copious amounts of alcohol to maintain. Without the alcohol, I’m a raw nerve: I want to connect, but everything I touch makes me wince.

Astrology has provided me with a symbolic and mythological framework for understanding this sensitivity. All five of my Leo planets live together in the 6th house of my chart, the house of Virgo: the house of work, routines, health, and service to others. Ergo: my Leo drive towards creative self-expression is channeled through the Virgoan modalities of healing, service, work and routines. In other words, I’m at my best—I shine brightest—when I’m working immersively and methodically in the service of healing, and I know this to be true.

But there is another, decidedly darker signature looming in the new moon sky on the night of my birth: the ringed giant Saturn in exact conjunction to my Sun, a formation known as a Saturn Cazimi. When any planet is exactly conjunct the Sun, its qualities are (symbolically, mythologically) said to be emboldened, empowered, and amplified by the Sun’s rays. Saturn is the Lord of Time, the Titan of structure, discipline, and responsibility; Saturn is the taskmaster, the boundary keeper, the ancient God of fuck-around-and-find-out.

To be born under a Saturn Cazimi in Leo is to be a megaphone for other people’s Saturn lessons, to be a tether to the grindstone. It’s the wisdom of no escape, a great leaden weight of Saturnine restriction and accountability waiting behind every expansive embodiment of Leonine exuberance. Sure, you may get your day in the sun, but you’ll be standing in the spotlight, shaking like leaf. No good deed goes unpunished.

To my mind, there’s really only one way through this predicament and that’s surrender. To submit myself and pray for humility without humiliation,¹ to restrict, refine, revise until it’s right. Back to the drawing board, again.

I’ll never forget something my brother said to me many years ago in the height of my years-long panic disorder, one of the times he was tasked by my mother to try to snap me out of my obvious mental spiral. He leveled with me in his signature Georgia good-ole-boy accent, making a tent with his fingers: I’ll never understand why, given the choice between the hard way and the easy way, you choose the hard way every time. He was right about that on both counts: I’ll always choose the hard way, and he would never understand.

Another language which has helped me to comprehend this Saturnine quality underpinning my way of being in the world is, of course, that of psychology. Ironically, now that I am a therapist, I have come to see mental health diagnoses as about as mythological and symbolic as astrology, but no less helpful in categorizing qualities of experience and assigning meaning to them.

The more I learn, the more the definitions fall away in favor of a general theory of trauma which articulates that virtually all mental health symptoms and disorders are in fact adaptations—adjustments made by our brilliant bodies and nervous systems to survive an antagonistic condition or event. The adaptations only become symptoms and disorders when they do their job of protecting us a little too well.² For example, in the case of panic disorder: the mechanism of panic is a sophisticated and effective response to a specific instance of threat; when we live under threat for an extended amount of time, the perpetually activated threat response begins to harm or prevent other necessary systems’ functioning, like digestion, sleep, or social bonding and affiliation.

So panic disorder, complex post traumatic stress disorder, alcohol use disorder: naming these constellations of adaptations that my nervous system has adopted in order to survive has helped me to understand the remedy, to pluck at the threads that will help to detangle my mind and heart.

In recent years, a few other labels have entered my field of vision, and, while not yet fully embracing them as my own, my ears prick and I feel an extremely familiar feeling when I hear other people describe their experiences of them: variations of neurodivergence labeled as ADHD and autism spectrum.

I can hear you groaning: oh here we go, everybody thinks they’re neurodivergent nowadays and you would be right. But much in the way that why is everybody all of a sudden gay/trans/nonbinary is actually the wrong question to ask, why does everybody think they’re ADHD/ASD/neurodivergent also misses the mark. A better question is, how many people have been abused and discarded for not conforming to a very narrow and artificially constructed range of acceptable human expression?

In other words: maybe “everybody” being nonbinary and neurodivergent is not suddenly happening because being nonbinary and neurodivergent is a TikTok trend, but because collectively we are developing language to understand that cisgender heteronormativity and neurotypical ways of learning and thinking are actually very narrow and artificially constructed norms that represent a small fraction of the infinitely expansive ways of being, thinking, embodying.

All of this is to say: I’m exploring, casually, what it might mean for me to understand myself as neurodivergent. It’s casual because I don’t have a sense of urgency about it; it actually seems so painfully obvious to me now that I don’t feel the need for a big aha moment. When I hear and read phrases like inner sense of relentlessness and perceived as being extremely rigid about values and integrity in reference to traits of neurodivergence, the feeling is more duh than wow. Like of course, obviously. There’s also a great feeling of relief.

So when my friend

Un Kyong

recently shared this Venn diagram about the common and overlapping traits and features (not to be confused with diagnostic criteria) of autism, ADHD, and “giftedness” by Katy Higgins Lee, MFT with me, the feeling of relief, of identification, deepened. As a former “gifted” child, as someone who was constantly told as a child that I was too much: too sensitive, too talkative, too dramatic, too emotional, that my interests were weird, that I asked too many questions, this diagram really made me feel seen.

Similarly, I really appreciated reading

Bronwen Wyatt

’s recent newsletter on, lol, how to start a cake business. While I absolutely co-sign everything she had to say about that based on my own experience of starting a cake business, what struck me most was her brief description of rejection sensitive dysphoria in reference to the first time she got negative feedback from a customer: it felt like I was going to die. I understood completely.

I love these ways of knowing ourselves. I love these keys that open doors to knowing ourselves, to alleviating the shame and stigma that so often accompanies difference.

This time last year, I wrote about falling down, and about a friendship rupture, and it remains my most-read piece:

Recently I’ve had the opportunity to revisit some of these themes again as another, somewhat parallel friendship rupture has recently occurred. And what I have noticed is what is different this time around: a marked absence of shame, a measurable increased tolerance to someone being mad at me, a refusal to internalize it and weaponize it against myself, a refusal to compromise my values to avoid rejection.

I think Palestine has taught me that.

Shame grows in isolation; orienting and co-regulating with others brings that shame into the daylight and allows it to transform. When I saw the video of US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib standing utterly alone, the lone dissenting voice in a chamber of hundreds of lawmakers cheering Netanyahu, the man actively perpetrating genocide upon her people, it reminded me that other people’s opinions and social norms are never the litmus test for moral integrity (and thank you to

Laura Chung

for this excellent analysis of Representative Tlaib’s Leo placements!):

iamlaurachung

A post shared by @iamlaurachung

The friend who I wrote about last year had dahlias at her wedding, and ever since, dahlias have reminded me of her. Yesterday, when I went to the u-pick fields of my farm CSA, I discovered a field full of dahlias, and I picked them for me, for my home, my table, freeing their meaning from just one thing to many things at once. I remember early in my sobriety, someone in my program said: in recovery, you can gain back everything you ever lost, everything, and more. And I think she was right.

Today, on my birthday, I’ve spent the day just as I choose: writing. Tonight Duncan and I will go to dinner and a play. Through many revolutions of change, through learning the hard way, every time, my life is quieter now, and I don’t feel the need to escape. I have no persona to perform, no hoops to jump through. Just a narrow path, followed by a great expanse. Amen.

---

Home:

I was gifted a small envelope of native Passionflower (passiflora incarnata) by the Philly Forests CSA, and planted it in the small garden bed between my front porch and the sidewalk. Now in its third year, it is absolutely voracious, and I have to tamp it down every day: pulling new shoots out of the cracks in the concrete and snipping the coiled tendrils encroaching between the lavender fronds and choking out the marigolds. I’ve starting to harvest the leaves and flowers for tea, using some fresh and putting some up to dry, as an aid for sleep, anxiety, and perimenopausal hormone regulation. And I’m thankful to be growing in relationship with this plant—not just consuming a pharmacological compound or even unwrapping a paper package of tea, but growing and tending, attentive, through the seasons and through the years, giving nurturance, studying behaviors and preferences, and then receiving nurturance back, a conversation, not a quid pro quo but a symmetry of giving, a fractal expanding in all directions.

passionflower leaves and flowers for drying

The World:

I’m currently reading and recommending:

• The latest issue of Hammer & Hope: A Magazine of Black Politics and Culture. The whole issue is amazing, but if you only read one thing, read this: Gaza, the Democrats, and How to Fix our Wretched Politics, for how it situates and orients our current political moment in its global and historical context.

• This explainer on abolitionist social work in Inquest Magazine.

• What It Takes to Heal by Prentis Hemphill.

• And, of course, it wouldn’t be brat summer without All Fours by Miranda July. 🥵

Home + The World is a newsletter by Jodi Rhoden featuring personal essay, recipes, links and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake.

Dear Temperance is a new Tarot advice column for paid subscribers! Send your burning life questions with the subject line “Dear Temperance” to homeandtheworld@substack.com or through the contact form at my website www.jodirhoden.com. If your query is chosen for publication, you will receive a year’s paid subscription for free. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you.

⚔️❤️ Jodi

1. with thanks to Luciann Waldrup

2. This systems theory of mental health is supported by the findings detailed in Gabor Mate’s book The Myth of Normal.