There is a specific kind of awe that arrives not like thunder, but like a tide — quietly, completely, until you realize you are standing in water up to your chest and you cannot quite remember when the shore disappeared. That is what it has felt like to watch my friend Victor Glover pilot a spacecraft around the moon.
I have been in a daze. A beautiful, grateful, disorienting daze. Every time I turned on the television, every time I opened social media, there he was — his face, his crew, their joy — orbiting something ancient and enormous while the whole world watched. And somewhere inside me, a 14-year-old girl from Ontario, California was trying to catch up to the reality of it all.
We were the kids who talked about going to the moon and becoming president in the same breath — and no one in our circle thought that was strange.
Victor and I became friends in high school, and ours was a particular kind of crew — nerdy, big-dreaming, unbothered by what anyone thought of us. He talked about becoming an astronaut. He talked about becoming president. And not once — not once — did I ever hear him flinch or hesitate. We were so unconcerned with the ceiling, we never really looked up at it. We just looked out at the horizon.
I was often the only girl in a circle of brilliantly quirky guys. We went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo together. We wrote each other actual letters — no cell phones, no beepers, just ink and intention. And through all the seasons of becoming, we stayed.
I need to tell you about a Good Friday. Because it is the reason I am here to write this piece at all.
It was 1998. I was 21 years old, living with my parents in Ontario, raising my ten-month-old son, navigating the collision between the life I had imagined and the life that had actually arrived. One Friday night — Good Friday, of all nights — things came to a head at home, and I packed up everything I could fit into my 1984 white Ford Thunderbird, buckled in my baby, and drove four hours up the California coast toward a door I hoped would open.
Months earlier, Victor had been on the phone with me and said, simply: "You need to get back in school. You had all these dreams. If you ever want to come up here, I'll make sure you have support." People say things like that. Very rarely does someone mean it the way Victor meant it.
On the science of awe & belonging
Research on awe — that profound emotional response to encountering something vast and beyond our current understanding — consistently shows that it reshapes how we see ourselves in relation to others. It softens the ego, opens us to possibility, and deepens our sense of connection. What my friend circle gave me was a community of awe: people who kept the horizon large, who refused small thinking, and whose belief became a container for my own becoming.
I showed up at his apartment with no phone call, no warning, a baby on my hip, and nothing but audacity and desperation. He opened the door. He did not hesitate. He did not blink. He said, "Come in." And just like that, I was home.
The Phi Beta Sigma fraternity house absorbed us both without question. These men — this brotherhood — embraced my son. Victor's then-girlfriend Dionna, who would become his wife, adored my baby and always had creative activities for him. Victor and his fraternity brothers stepped in as though they had been waiting for us. His parents showed up too, with warmth and welcome, including one particular dinner at a steakhouse in Los Angeles that was my first time in a place like that — and I still remember the feeling of being someone worth celebrating.
I got denied from Cal Poly twice. The director of admissions once called me personally to tell me to stop applying. I kept showing up anyway — to events, to organizations, to community college classes in the major I intended to pursue. I took five courses in one summer and earned straight A's. And the third time I applied, I got in.
Joy, I have come to understand, is not the absence of difficulty. It is the defiant choice to remain alive — fully alive — inside of it.
That Easter weekend was my resurrection. Not from death, but into life — into the fullness of a future I had almost stopped believing I deserved. And it happened because a friend held the door open long enough for me to walk through it.
I have spent more than two decades studying joy — its architecture, its conditions, its power as both a personal and political act. And what I know now is this: joy is not a solo enterprise. It is communal. It is cultivated in the presence of people who see you as capable of more than you currently are, people who keep dreaming on your behalf when your own dreaming goes quiet.
Victor Glover is one of those people for me. So is Dionna. So are the brothers who said, "We got you." Joy, in its truest form, is love made practical, love made daily, love made sustainable. It lives in the communities that refuse to let your dreams die by neglect.
When the Artemis II crew coined the phrase Moon Joy during their mission, something in me broke open. Because joy has always been the word. Not achievement, not acclaim — joy. The particular aliveness that comes from being exactly where you are meant to be, with people who belong in the story with you.
I was invited to watch this launch in person. I was unable to be there, and that absence was genuinely hard to hold. But I followed every moment from launch to splashdown in complete awe — the kind of awe my research tells me restructures something in the brain, in the self, in how we understand what is possible. Watching someone you have known since they were fifteen years old pilot a spacecraft around the moon will do that to you.
Joia, my daughter — the same child I carried into Victor's apartment on Good Friday 1998 — now attends NC State University, the alma mater of Artemis II Mission Specialist Christina Koch, whom we met together at Victor's first launch in 2020. The thread of this story keeps weaving. It does not stop.
I want to be clear about something, because I know how this world works: I am not writing this to orbit his achievement. I am writing this because some stories deserve to be told from the inside. Because the people closest to greatness often carry pieces of the story that the world does not see — the letters written by hand, the doors opened at midnight, the decades of steady loyalty that look like nothing from the outside and mean everything from within.
What I know about Victor Glover — what I have known for thirty-five years — is that who he is in the spotlight is exactly who he is behind closed doors. Loyal to family. Loyal to friends. A person of uncommon integrity. His family is extraordinary. His wife is extraordinary. They have built something real together, and it shows in the way he moves through the world.
We are still waiting on president, by the way. That dream has not been crossed off the list. And after watching him take four people around the moon with grace and precision and that same unhesitating spirit — I wouldn't bet against him.
