On a hot and humid summer night in 2018, I was in the pool with my family when I thought about space a little bit too hard. I sat in silence, looked up at the sky, and thought about black holes. I knew Earth going into one would mean certain death for me and everyone I loved, but I thought surely we could spot it beforehand and do something, right? Wrong, a quick Google search on my still-new iPhone 7 told me that they are invisible.
Now I know that black holes are detected by observing how the matter around them is affected, but at the time, it felt like death could be lurking around the corner, and that at any moment, everyone would die. This sent me into my first episode of intense anxiety, where only the song “One Sweet World” by the Dave Matthews Band would help. Eventually, after a couple of months and a trip to Hawaii that showed me just how big the Earth is, and consequently the universe, I made peace with the idea.
Still, I refused to look up at the night sky. I was afraid of comets, asteroids, and anything else that could come flying out of the darkness and kill everyone and everything. There were car rides where everyone would see a “shooting star,” and I genuinely wouldn’t see it. Looking down became my default.
In the summer of 2025, my life took an unexpected turn when I had to face my fear of space in an astronomy class for a science requirement. I took the version of the class that included playing a video game for most of the instruction, and from learning, I found myself fascinated rather than terrified. Since then, it’s seemed like the stars have aligned for this love to grow.
A few months later, in January 2026, I saw an Instagram ad to join NASA’s Artemis II as a virtual guest. Along with a virtual guest pass, your name would go on an SD card to the moon and back with the Artemis II crew. Immediately, I jumped at the opportunity to be part of something without actually needing to face the fear of going to space. There was something about an extension of me leaving Earth that felt surreal and breathtaking, even if all I had to do was sign up online.
During the mission, my Instagram and TikTok feeds were full of updates from NASA and videos from the crew in space. Christina Koch, one of the Artemis II crew members and the first woman to travel to the moon, had been posting about the mission on her social media. My personal favorite post of hers shows her braid and the Earth behind her. Seeing another woman, who served as a mission specialist, putting her hair in a braid and taking pictures, hit something deep inside me.
The combination of the normalcy of a braid, the girlhood of doing your hair and then taking a nice picture, and the peace she seems to exhibit in the picture inspired the previously scared twelve-year-old inside me. Although my love for space has grown, I still have no intention of ever actually leaving Earth. Still, for a second, it felt like maybe I could. It made me feel capable.
After this came Project Hail Mary, for me at least, since I watched the movie in theatres a month after it came out is when I finally gave in to the change and admitted that I was now obsessed with what I once avoided at all costs. Seeing Ryland Grace fear death and space so much that he would rather have a quarter of Earth’s population die, only to fall in love with it, was like watching a much more dramatic and intense version of my life. The arc from intense fear to admiration to a point of no return felt relatable in a strange and comforting way.
Project Hail Mary is also one of the only space movies I’ve seen where things don’t constantly go wrong. Grace and Rocky experience love, admiration, anger, happiness, sadness, and fear as they build an unlikely friendship. The movie depicted space as less of a death trap and more of a place where wonder and opportunity exist, too. Walking out of the movie at midnight, it was impossible not to look up at the night sky.
In many more ways since that astronomy class last summer, space has found its way into my life and introduced itself as peace instead of fear. Since the shift, I have found myself searching for space-themed screensavers to study or fall asleep to, and I am much more interested in learning about everything that once frightened me. I think one of the most important things I learned from this change, however, is that nothing will ever change by sticking your head in the sand. Looking down, your problems only grow, and you’ll wait forever if you’re expecting space to disappear. You’ll also look silly for a few years, fearfully denying the existence of aliens to cope with your anxiety (speaking from experience). But when you look up and face your fears, even learn about them, you might be surprised by the world, or in this case, the universe, of information you’ve been missing out on.