Part Two: The Years I Survived Alone, and the Circle That Is Finally Closing

A little cartoon echo of a moment in time, back when a college newspaper featured me as we searched for funding to keep our little college poetry magazine alive. Funny how even then, I was fighting to keep art breathing. Some things never change, they just evolve.

There are moments when the stars ask us to look back, not to reopen old wounds, but to understand why they were there in the first place. When I learned on Monday that Saturn prepares to move direct this week, crossing the same degrees of Pisces it traveled when I was a young woman trying to survive the mid-90s in the USA, I felt an unexpected pull inside me, an invitation, almost, to remember the young woman I once was.

I did not go searching for her. She found me.

When I learned about this transit, I thought it would be about endings in the abstract, the gentle dissolving of what no longer fits the life I am building. But instead, it reached into the quiet corners of my memory and placed a hand on my shoulder and whispered:

Look. It is time. And so I did.

I remembered the winter nights on Highway I-90, the hum of the heater in my silver Honda Civic barely holding back the cold, the endless driving through the night just to stay warm. I remembered choosing my car over returning to Mexico to a home that did not know how to love me without wounding me. I remembered the ache of being an international student with a 20-hour work limit, earning $4.50 an hour, paying double the tuition per semester because belonging, even on paper, had a price I could hardly afford.

I remembered eating once a day and stretching every dollar like it was elastic. And even when I had the option to get a fake social security number to work more hours and make ends meet better, I chose to figure out how to survive with what I had. I remembered slipping into the poetry magazine office, where I was the co-editor and had a key, arriving before sunrise after the cleaning crew had done their rounds to sleep on a patch of carpet. Then I would quietly slip into the gym for a shower before heading to class or my on-campus job, with a smile that hid far too much.

I remembered the hunger, the exhaustion, the fear, but even more than that, I remembered the determination. The strange, stubborn flame that refused to go out, no matter how cold the nights became. I lived between schoolbook pages and headlights, between poems and survival.

And in the middle of it all, I wrote a small poem in 1995. Looking at it now, I recognize it as a confession from a young woman who felt too much and had nowhere to place it. A message I left for myself before I had any language for trauma or cycles or nervous systems.

Here is the poem exactly as I wrote it then:

The Person Who I Am

by P

The person who I am has courage and faith, passion and hate.

The person who I am is worthy to be trusted and suspected as well.

The person who I am is lonely and also afraid because she loves with the same intensity as she hates.

The person who I am accepts joy as she welcomes pain.

The person who I am sees everything but chooses to be blind as the rest of the men.

The person who I am celebrates life but anxiously awaits death.

All of these I'll allow myself to say…But I'll not allow myself to say

that I feel guilt for what I am.

Reading it now feels like discovering an old letter I sent forward through time. A letter from a young woman who had no idea she was writing the earliest lines of the woman I am becoming now.

That young woman loved fiercely and hurt deeply. She was trying to make sense of a world that seemed to take more than it gave. She had no idea she was leaving breadcrumbs for the future version of herself.

For years I never allowed myself to feel the weight of what she carried. I survived it, so I assumed it did not affect me. But survival is not the same as healing. And as this new Saturn cycle echoed the old one, memories rose quietly to the surface, not to drown me, but to free me.

It is strange how the body remembers long after the mind has moved on. It is strange how trauma freezes until the soul feels safe enough to thaw. Strange how I lived decades believing I was fine, when in truth I had simply postponed my grief.

Only now, after building a life slowly and painfully from the ground up, and after the soul excavation I have done over the past five years, do I feel steady enough to look back without collapsing. Only until last night did I understand why I stood on those train tracks seventeen years ago, waiting for a train that never arrived. I was not trying to die; I was trying to end the weight of carrying everything alone. The young woman who survived Illinois I-90 was finally pleading to be seen.

She was not asking for a way out. She was asking for rest.

And the universe, mercifully, intervened.

This week, as the energies of Saturn and Neptune dissolve and reshape the foundations inside me, something I had never given myself permission to feel began to unravel. Last night, I cried for the young woman who drove all night to stay warm. I cried for the young woman who was hungry and proud and determined and alone. I cried for the young woman who chose temporary homelessness over returning to a home that wounded her. I cried for the young woman who wrote poems in the dark because she did not know how else to speak.

But I also cried because I realized something else:

My creativity was the thread that kept me from breaking.

And this is where everything began to make sense in a way it never had before.

The Thread That Never Let Me Fall

Looking back now, I understand something I never had the language for until this moment. My creativity has never been a hobby, a skill, or an escape. It has been the one unbroken thread that held me when the rest of my life felt like it was coming undone.

In the 1980s, before I knew what trauma was, writing became the quiet translator of a childhood I did not know how to survive. While the adults around me spun confusion into normalcy, I tucked truths into notebooks like small secret prayers, trying to understand a world that often made no sense. I did not realize then that every poem, every line, every scribbled confession was my spirit trying to anchor itself to something real, something gentle, something mine.

Then, in the mid-90s, specifically '93-'96 when I was surviving nights in my car, driving Illinois I-90 through frozen darkness to keep from freezing, creativity rose from inside me like a second heartbeat. I wrote because it was the only way to stay human. I edited poetry in the College's poetry magazine office because it was the only place I felt alive. Even when hunger hollowed me out and fear tightened its grip, my words refused to abandon me. I had so little, yet I carried this small, trembling spark, the one thing that did not collapse under the weight of everything else.

And now, in 2024 and 2025, as I walk the final degrees of the same Saturn cycle that once broke me open in '93-'96, I can feel my creativity returning not as a whisper of survival but as a guide, a steady inner compass leading me toward my own healing. Writing, painting, melting glass, creating music, they all feel like portals. They feel like the language of the soul I silenced while surviving. They feel like every version of me reaching across time to say:

We made it. Tell our story. Set us free.

This morning as I made my coffee and was thinking about what surfaced last night, I imagined all my younger selves sitting with me now, the teen from the 80s clutching her notebook, the young woman from the 90s shivering in her car with a book of poems in her lap, the version of me who stood on the tracks waiting for a train that never arrived.

If I could speak to them now, I would say:

I am here because of you. I did not forget you. You kept the flame alive when the world grew cold. Every word you wrote was a lifeline you were throwing into the future for me to hold.

You thought you were alone, but you were not. I am the continuation of your courage. I am the home you never had. I am the safe place you were searching for.

And the creativity that held you through every shadow was never just expression. It was your soul refusing to disappear.

Because the truth is this: my creativity has always been the bridge between the human part of me and the eternal part. It is the place where pain dissolves into meaning, where memory transforms into medicine, where the past and the future hold hands long enough for me to walk myself home.

It has been my companion in every lifetime within this lifetime. The interpreter of my childhood, the voice of my survival, the guide of my healing, and now the portal of my becoming.

My creativity is how my soul stayed intact. It is how I remained whole in the places life wanted to fracture me. It is how I return to myself again and again, each time closer to truth.

And now I understand. This was never just about poems or songs or pages. This was the way my spirit chose to evolve. This was the way I learned to stay alive. This is the way I am learning to become free.

The girl on Illinois I-90 survived. The woman I am now can finally feel why that matters.

And for the first time in my life, I can say this with certainty:

I am no longer running. I am no longer freezing. I am no longer pretending it did not hurt.

I am finally coming home to myself, to my story, to the light that refused to let me go.

☥