Saturation

Saturation is a much more interesting word than one might think. To be so filled that nothing more can be absorbed. To such a full extent that it’s no longer necessary or desirable. The purity of a color.

In qualitative research (which is part of my day job expertise), there’s a phenomenon known as saturation, which happens when your research comes up with the same concepts or findings, and nothing new is emerging.

I think we’ve all felt saturated by something or someone at some point.

In writing, saturation is quite a magical thing. Having spent years wading through the depths of a story that I didn’t fully understand at first, I feel like I’ve finally reached a saturation point – which is an achievement. It means that I know this story now, know all of its guts and gore and beauty and sublimity. Now it’s about assembly and making sure all the right pieces are in the right places and the general creative mechanics that come along with an intense revision process.

But there’s life, too. I think sometimes saturation in life is a good thing – I remember an older person of my acquaintance once saying that she had no regrets when her husband died, because they knew each other so well and so intimately that there was nothing that she wanted to say to him that she hadn’t said, nothing that they hadn’t experienced together, nothing that was unresolved between them. She mourned and felt sadness, certainly, but no regrets about the relationship. I thought there was a real beauty in that sort of saturation – I know you so well and we’ve been through so much that there’s nothing left to say because it’s been said, or it’s known.

Perhaps a more romantic way of looking at it is – you make my colors pure. You help me be the most vivid version of myself that I can be. You color me intensely so that I can luminate.

Source of visual.

I think there’s beauty in deep familiarity – and I do have those sorts of relationships. The kind of friend you can not see or speak to for a long time then pick up where you left off. Twenty years spent sharing a life with a person. That’s not the sort of thing you stop because it’s saturated. That’s the sort of thing you celebrate and cultivate.

Then, there’s the definition that I use in my work life – that there’s nothing more here to learn. Nothing new is emerging; it’s just a lot of the same, over and over. Which, in research and sometimes in life, means it’s time to stop.

There’s another kind of saturation, something that’s sometimes quite pernicious, where the weight of all the things you’ve absorbed is not only pulling on you, but it’s not yielding any new insights. No new dimensions. No new knowledge. No greater depths – it is all that it can be. It has been revealed in its entirety. Sometimes those are the ones you need to let go of. I mean people and experiences.

I had a moment recently where I realized…I can’t listen to this anymore. The thought just went ripping through my brain, and I was sitting on my bed and it was late evening, and I suddenly realized…I just can’t. It’s been the same conversation for many years, the same fixations, the same patterns, and mentally, I’ve moved on. Ever meet someone like that? Where even if you try to introduce something new, they’re in such a rut that they can’t see outside of it anymore? So you either join them, or you climb out.

Beware, in particular, of the things that allow themselves to saturate you, but pour you out in return. The ones that aren’t interested in absorbing you, but expect absorption. The job that takes too much out of you. The friend that only wants to talk about their life or their problems. The situations that you have to constantly mediate that leave you drained. The person who ghosts you or breadcrumbs.

Sometimes the fullness of saturation is comfort and stabilization. Sometimes you need to just pour it out.

Apathy, I think, may be the emotional opposite of saturation in this sense. The other thought I recently had was I don’t care. And that’s not fair to anyone. There is someone out there who will want to absorb the person that I want to wring out of myself. The relationship served its purpose, but I’m saturated now. I can’t do it anymore. I have no more space left.

It’s a color in my color wheel, and there was a time that it burned into me an intensity that I do still carry. But now I’m saturated, and it’s just beading up and rolling off. I’m tired of trying to find ways to make it fit. It doesn’t anymore.

I’d rather spend my day celebrating – my writing, which is so close to being in its final form, which I’m so intimately familiar with now that the rewrites get easier and easier. A long-standing relationship that is saturated with the sort of mutual familiarity that keeps me afloat and steadied. Reconnections and new connections. Here’s to that. Fill me up with those things.