My 2021 win: I got hit by a car and lived. That's it!
Hello all!
It's been forever since I sent out a newsletter update-- if you are getting this, and have forgotten who I am in the interim, you're on this list either because you signed up for it directly, or because you signed up for my Substack at some point. I no longer post new writing to Substack for reasons described here; this list provides general (if infrequent) life updates, and if you're interested in more new work at the intersection of astronomy, art, and activism, you can join me on Patreon for less than a cup of coffee.
As the subject line suggests, I really have one major accomplishment for 2021: at the end of September, I was hit by a car while walking across the street, and I lived. I posted a tweet to this effect on Twitter yesterday, which prompted some very kind "glad you're OK!" messages, but truthfully I am not really OK-- I am alive and about as well as I can be under the circumstances. I've written more extensively about the experience and my recovery on Patreon, but the short version is that while I somehow emerged from the accident with no broken bones (!), I sustained a serious traumatic brain injury (TBI), which I've been recovering from since.
I was very fortunate to have health insurance and short term disability insurance at the time of my accident, because I've been on leave from work until this past week (and I only returned to work because otherwise, my health insurance would have lapsed on Jan 1, which would leave me and my spouse uninsured in the middle of me recovering from a brain injury and during a pandemic... kind of not an option). Having said all that, my brain feels less like a tightly clenched fist than it did even a month ago, and I have a lot of ability back that I didn't have for the first several months. Reading and writing on a laptop remains very difficult, but I am lucky to have a loving partner who found me this delightful tech artifact, a Dana word processor, which makes it a lot easier to write things (no bright light, no distracting other stuff, no enforced multitasking from the endless barrage of notifications that seem to creep through even when you think they are all turned off). I've also made heavy use of Otter.ai for writing by transcribing my thoughts from speech, and Speechify for reading things to me (which is OK but needs a lot of improvement when it comes to research papers).
Of course, there was a whole year that happened before September, some of it good, some of it ugly. As we have all, in different ways, been through a challenging and demoralizing year, here's a few brief highlights of things I did or contributed to that you might enjoy:
For much of this year, I and my friends Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Brian Nord, and Sarah Tuttle led a campaign to rename NASA's new flagship mission, JWST. The campaign received a lot of coverage, including our op-ed in SciAm and this article in the NY Times (amongst many others!), and our petition has 1700+ signatures and counting. While the telescope launched with its current name (and the response from NASA necessitated me quitting the NASA Astrophysics Advisory Committee while fresh out of the ICU after my accident), space telescopes have been renamed after launch before, and I am still proud that we were able to bring this issue to the fore. Discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people in astronomy is still actively a problem, so beyond the name of this one telescope, I think it forced the community to grapple with that in a very public way. JWST launched successfully on Dec 25, and I wish the entire team continued success as we all look forward to those first incredible images in the coming year.
I've also been glad to see the call for more equitable visions of space exploration continue-- I was happy to be interviewed for this essay by Ramin Skibba in Aeon, which I haven't gotten to amp up nearly enough since it came out right after the accident. While recovering sort of derailed our plans for JustSpace, I'm excited to keep working on them in this new year.
I was also interviewed for Everlasting Free Fall, an award-winning essay by Ceridwen Dovey-- Everlasting Free Fall is available on a multimedia storytelling app called Alexander, where you can view the essay as an animation, just listen to it, or read it. To give it a try, you can watch the trailer for free here.
You can hear me in Nine Lives, a sound artwork at the Barbican, an exploration of nine strangers trying to make sense of the world around us, each in different ways.
I'm in an upcoming movie! Last Exit: Space is a new film by Rudolph Herzog and Werner Herzog about humanity's obsession with space as a utopia.
There's many more new interviews, writing, and fun aerial circus photos on my recently updated website, notnotrocketscience.com.
Lastly, I know many people detest New Year's, but I will readily confess that I love it. In general, I dislike holidays, because they often come with histories, political meanings and/or social pressures that feel bad to me. Obviously, you could say that New Year's Eve does too-- but one of the things I like about it is how arbitrary it is. Between December 31st and January 1st, nothing much changes-- but it still serves as a punctuation mark in time, a moment to, if we wish, pause and reflect. Or don't! Stay up late, or don't! It's the New Year-- or not, because it's not a new year for lots of cultures! So I hope 2022 finds you... that's it. I just hope it finds you, however you are.
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In solidarity to the stars,
Lucianne