You don’t understand, when I was at my worst with my depression, and every time I looked up at the night sky and grew scared of how small we are, how alone we might be, how short our time is, how I couldn’t comprehend infinity, how everything will end eventually, how everything I see way out there is long gone, I would panic. I would break down. The stars themselves scared me. But one day doctor who was put on Netflix and a comment on a deviant post reminded me of a deal I made with another user. If I watch doctor who they’ll watch the time travel show I thought was cool. I watched it on a whim, I’m not sure I’d even encountered it much on tumblr yet. But it made me feel less small. I began to actually look at the night sky without abject terror. I thought about how if you looked at it more like, idk, a learning adventure? When you heard new things about it, it wasn’t as scary. Something that could inspire writers to create such adventures and have normal people characters tag along… I got less scared. When everything started being galaxy print I thought it was pretty and not horrifying. It’s long been a trendy pattern of the last decade or so, perhaps a bit less, but I still see cool looking art inspired by images from space telescopes that were made to have different colors for invisible wavelengths so that humans could see… idk. It makes me happy. It’s like I’m less scared, and now I don’t even feel like I need there to be life on other planets for me to stop feeling alone, because there is so much life on this one! Even if I was the only human on earth, I still wouldn’t be alone just from being on this life filled planet. And I’m not the only human.

That’s not an experience I’ve had from many stories, it was one of those things that you encounter at just the right time for your view of the world to be changed for the better. Something that lodges itself inside of you and makes you better than you were before. I’ll always remember it fondly because of that. I know there is a lot I never watched and maybe one day I’ll catch up, but the fact is that what I DID see was enough to change me as a person. To make my existential dread just a little bit less all encompassing and inspire more curiosity in me.