The Final Frontier

Why I May Never Get Off This Rock (And I’m Finally Okay With That)

I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek lately, bingeing the original series and Next Generation during the pandemic, finally starting on Deep Space Nine and taking my time with it, and getting extremely into two of the newest series, Discovery and now Picard. The shows are as comforting to me as they are genuinely entertaining, and sometimes as challenging as they are gently goofy. For me, Star Trek’s longtime vision of a logical, utopian intergalactic federation of peaceful planets originally created more than fifty years ago feels both more necessary and yet more impossible than ever.

Space itself has always called to me. When I was little I would bask in full moonlight that cast shadows around me without a single star visible, and get dizzy gazing up at the creamy twinkle of the Milky Way on a moonless night at my grandparents’ farm in rural Northern Kentucky.

While I love the concept of outer space, and all the science and philosophy and mystery that comes with it, it’s always been out of reach, far beyond me, figuratively and literally. No matter how much I think I want to try to understand it and be part of it, no matter the implicit dangers it presents to tiny, fragile human matter, it eludes me.

I convinced myself long ago that I do not have the aptitude for numbers, the baseline element of all things related to space. Just the stories for me, thanks, the fantastical but wholly plausible and just ahead of my own puny lifespan.

What a sad set of limits I put on myself at such a young age.

As billionaires build escape pods to leave this burning, drowning rock populated by a species intent on destroying itself and everything else, part of me aches for the clean simplicity of space. The elegance and frequent frustration of logic, and those who listen to it, who seek it, and appreciate it. I want to embrace possibility that maybe humanity will survive this mess of our own creation and make it out beyond our own small satellites and even our solar system, to boldly go and find new worlds and yet still strive to understand them, to learn from them, to advance with them instead of destroying or conquering them out of fear.

But as much as I’ve dreamed of space above and beyond the physical demands of this planet, the most space I’ve ever occupied is that of my own head, my immediate surroundings, four walls with a door and window where I could sit alone and quiet, to do as I please. The microcosm really did reflect the macrocosm in my teenage room, as I floated blissfully unaware in worlds of my own making, orbiting around books and journals and magazines and movies and CDs, atomizing my favorite bits and putting them back together based on my own desire to create new things and inability to actually do so, enjoying the calm breeze of a sunny day in a sleepy midwestern suburban nowhere, two trees outside my window rustling encouragement and approval.

My inner space expanded atomically into the immediate atmosphere around me. I could spend hours alone, absorbed in the early angst and alienation that should have been one of many clues to my undiagnosed neurodevelopmental disorder that would later find me in dark holes of depression, unable to bring myself to move from that same room due to a self-loathing and despair so exhausting I could only sleep and cry silently to pirated episodes of Dexter on my laptop.

Not the best way to work on my mental health, I now realize, but I needed that confinement, that small room with a door I could close.

My mom came in and checked on me, as she always did, even when I didn’t want her to, even when I begged to please just let me be alone, sobbed so uncontrollably it worried her even more. I remember very little of that week or so I spent in bed sometime around the holidays, unable to muster energy or enthusiasm to even entertain and engage myself within those four walls, behind that door and the small window, the previously approving trees bare and silent. I remember her opening the door to check on me in the darkness and me not even able to tell her to leave me be.

I also don’t remember how I got out of that missing time lost in the bedroom of my youth, the space where I carved out silent solace for so many years as an escape from a world full of loud people and emotions that felt too big for me to process and loneliness that the outside world only amplified but seemed contained and manageable there on my own. In my room, the loneliness felt more like just aloneness but I didn’t fully understand just how willingly and completely I isolated myself for all those years. The ability to exist in my own company, to not need to speak or leave that space to find comfort and entertainment and maybe even enlightenment if I read enough books or wrote enough poems, was a blessing at the time, but now? I’m not so sure.

I managed to get out of that room and back my apartment a hundred miles away, dragging myself back to my adult job and my adult life that left me hollow. You’d think a whole apartment would be an upgrade from just a room, as I thought at the time, but I’ve only recently learned how wrong I was, and how much I need a room that is simply a self-contained room, not something built off an attic or attached to a bathroom.

A bed, four walls, a window, a door that can be closed completely.

I’ve had apartments and houses of my own for nearly two decades now, but none of them have had just a room for me and me alone like that of my youth. I know it’s cliche, but I would give just about anything for single room all to myself.

Maybe it was just that I only needed to worry about the room itself back then, not the whole house or all the things in it that kept it from falling down around me. With a house there is the constant threat of water in the basement, critters in the attic, yard work to be done, and everything always needing to be cleaned endlessly, over and over again. Whoever said homeownership is the American Dream has never owned a house.

Maybe it was that simplicity of my room as my own little space that calmed and comforted as much as the idea of endless, infinite space and starlight thrilled me. Maybe it was a portal or my own tiny escape pod from the bigger world around me and everything scary in it.

Now that the world is scarier and more illogical than ever, outer space seems so much simpler than this terrestrial life — the only goal is to just stay alive and anything you happen to learn or encounter along the way is just bonus. Unable to find protection within a confined space of my own, I’d rather fling myself into infinite space, further and further away from this stupid, pointlessly beautiful little planet and all of our mind-bogglingly minute and petty problems.

But then the idea of endless space always seems more accessible in twenty-two episodic increments, from the deck of the bridge of the Enterprise, warmly ensconced in gender-neutral knit jumpsuits color-coded by rank and skill, cradled by the renewable energy of dilithium crystals under the noble aim of knowledge.

I don’t know if I’ll ever find that version of space I yearn for, especially not in this lifetime, nor do I know if I’ll ever be able to recreate the safe quietude of my adolescent room and its perfect size, shape, and function to shield me from everything that scared me while still offering opportunities to do and be more than just a solitary confused and quiet girl within those four walls. To read all the books I could get my hands on, to find the nuances in music that made the chambers of my heart ache with inexplicable emotions I still can’t name to this day, to create stories on blank CDs with song titles and moods, to spill my guts into notebook after notebook in sparkly pastel gel pen, embellished with magazine collage cut-outs glued so hard the paper tended to wrinkle and stiffen underneath it.

Looking back, it was not a perfect space, no matter how nostalgic I feel for it or try to recreate it my own adult spaces. Even now when I go back to that room, still in my parents’ house, it’s no longer that same place of protection and privacy that helped me contain all the things about myself that I didn’t want to try to understand back then.

Maybe it’s that a utopian space federation is becoming less and less likely for a civilian who never made it past college algebra and has never been proud of it, only glad that I was able to get through it so I could focus on English and writing and more importantly business and marketing, the only things I knew I was sort of good at and could probably get paid for, even if they kept the skies beyond my reach except for business trips and workshops in windowless conference rooms. What would they need a digital marketing strategist for on the Enterprise? My own pointlessness in that hypothetical future space becomes less of a dreamy escape plan with friendly aliens and important insights on humanity itself and darkens into more of that same empty nightmare I couldn’t pull myself out of so many years ago.

So that’s a space I will never be able to find again, and another space I will not be able to see in my lifetime. What does that leave me, then? Is the rest of the planet I’ve tried to close out and eventually escape from entirely the space I’m meant to occupy? Its bigness scares me, more than the vast infinite of the cosmos, despite its extreme tininess in comparison. The Earth is the only space left for me to explore and to find new places for myself in, where I cannot be wholly alone or self-contained, but must rely on others and worry about things I need to fix and what I must to do to maintain and improve the space for all of us. It’s daunting for just one person who wants nothing more than to willingly lock myself away within four walls, behind a door and a window, and create a smaller space all my own.

Maybe that’s precisely why I can no longer lock myself away with the knowledge that everything else beyond that singular space is in danger.

There’s danger out in the galaxy, and there’s comfort within the confines of my skin and its immediate surroundings, but neither of those are as important anymore. It’s the scary space here on earth, in my town, in our country, that I must explore more and work to improve, and not just for myself and my own comfort. It feels impossible, even more than light-speed warp to galaxies millions of miles away, but it is immediate. It’s not the future, it is right now, and what I’ve learned is that I can no longer truly find and enjoy the privilege of escape.