Prompt 263. What I Learned from the Astronauts
The author and illustrator Oliver Jeffers on the overview effect
Hi friend,
This summer, my brother Adam moved to Tunisia to teach at an international school—the same one we attended when we were young. A few weeks ago, my parents joined him there, and it makes me happy for so many reasons. I’m thrilled that my parents are no longer consumed by caregiving for me, that they can return to the life and the projects they were pursuing before my relapse. And I’m so proud of Adam for going back to his roots, quite literally—he’s working with kids who grew up like us, between cultures and continents. I wish I’d had a teacher like my brother, both because of his awareness of that kind of liminal living and also because he’s the kindest, funniest, all-around best human there is.
Yet along with the pride and the joy, I carry a sense of sadness and longing. Because I haven’t received all of my post-transplant immunizations, I currently can’t travel to Tunisia. Even more than not being there, it’s that I can’t be there that makes my family feel so far away. We talk on the phone regularly, but it’s no substitute for sitting around the table together and sharing a meal. My heart is on a different continent.
If I think about it, that’s always been true. I was born in the U.S., but as the child of immigrants and with all of my extended family living abroad, the concept of home always felt so fractured. As much as I wished for total assimilation, that just wasn’t possible. My family spoke French at home, so when I spoke English—which I only learned to do in kindergarten—it was with an accent. On top of that, my parents didn’t follow traditional American customs, and they cooked “weird foods,” as some of my classmates put it. Such othering only intensified after 9/11. I cried with the rest of the country at that terrible footage of the planes hitting the Twin Towers, but the very next day, in the hallway of the Saratoga Springs High School, a kid asked me if it was true that my dad was a “sand n*gger.”
Yet it’s not like I could pass as a native of Switzerland, where my mother is from—I’m too “exotic.” In Tunisia, my father’s homeland, I’m too white. For many years, that made me feel alienated from others—and sometimes even from myself. I became a chameleon, shifting to fit what I thought was expected in order to blend in.
But as I got older, I began to see the benefits of being an outsider. It made me open, curious, and eager to bridge the distances between people—qualities that have served me in both my work and my life. I became a student of human behavior, observing people, studying their idioms and customs, the way an anthropologist might. And as I began to embrace who I am and the particular struggles and gifts that come with it, I felt liberated, free to create my own path, to inhabit a new world. Rather than alienated, I began to think of myself as an alien, and I could build a community and make my own home among other aliens, artists, and seekers, including my husband Jon, who didn’t have the rootless childhood I did—he can trace a long lineage in New Orleans—but was always a misfit in his own right.
Likely we’ve all experienced the sensation of being on the outside, to varying degrees, for varying reasons. But one of the gifts of a creative practice is the power of taking such moments and transforming them into something meaningful, even beautiful. I consider today’s contributor, the bestselling author and illustrator Oliver Jeffers, a brilliant practitioner of this kind of alchemy. His searching gaze and illuminating insights have helped readers of all ages see things from a new perspective.
In a few days, Oliver is publishing his first illustrated book for readers of all ages, Begin Again (available for preorder), which is a very brief history of humanity and his dream for where we go from here. Today he’s sharing with us a gorgeous essay that tells the origin story of Begin Again, his own origin story, and the powerful insight that came from looking at the world from far outside its confines. To discover what he learned from the astronauts, read on.
Sending love,
Suleika
The Isolation Journals Chat—
It’s been a year since we introduced the Isolation Journals Chat, our very own social space where we connect and share ideas and have meaningful conversations. We’ve mainly been using it for our beloved Friday ritual of sharing our small joys—some of mine are pictured above. As one community member wrote, it’s like “sitting in a giant web—all these interconnected threads that vibrate with everything kind about life. We all move the web and we all feel moved. It’s wonderful.”
But I have some exciting, new things planned for this space. I recently started a new book project, and in the Chat, I’m going to share what I’m learning (or re-learning) about getting a big creative project off the ground. I’m also hoping to hear from you—about your struggles, your victories, and your tried-and-true tips for getting through. The easiest way to join us is in the Substack app, which just got a really lovely redesign. I hope to see you there!
Prompt 263. What I Learned from the Astronauts by Oliver Jeffers
There is a phenomenon known as the overview effect, where any human who has been far enough from the surface of our Earth tends to have the same shift in perception. In the first days onboard the International Space Station, astronauts take to pointing out their hometowns and cities, which shifts outward to their countries, then the rough continents that represent “home.” Finally a dawning realization plants itself firmly in their minds: this one object, floating in the cathedral of space, is home.
I grew up in the politically divided and violent city of Belfast, Northern Ireland. I know all too well the destructive patterns of an “us” and “them” mentality—how two opposing communities become insular and defensive, how their own identities become dependent on the existence of an enemy. “I don’t know who I am, but I know who I’m not” all too often spills into violence.
Raised as a Northern Irish Catholic, I am somewhere in the middle of that turbulence of fortune. I’ve experienced much of the grace and advantage that comes from being born into the body I inhabit. But I also come from a British colony—indeed the original British colony. For the best part of the twentieth century, Northern Irish Catholics were treated as second-class citizens in their own homeland.
But by the mid-1980s, the origin of all this conflict was lost on me. It had always seemed obvious that it was never a religious war, and by the mid-90s, it wasn’t clear that it had come from a class struggle either. Partly because I’d been told some of the stories, partly because I hadn’t been told others, and partly because I’d compared these stories with others far and wide, it seemed more like political terrorism on two fronts than anything else. Sophisticated gangsterism with good PR.
Years later, when I moved to New York City, I was shocked and hurt that no one on the other side of the Atlantic seemed to know or care about the divided and violent history of where I came from. But when I learned that British and even Southern Irish ex-patriots in New York were also broadly ignorant about our current status, I reached a new level of frustration. We were killing each other to be part of either a larger Irish or British identity, but outside the few hundred square miles of our province, no one seemed to care. What to take from that disheartening message?
Not much—until I started reading about astronauts.
I was researching for my book Here We Are, and I immediately recognized the way they described looking at the Earth from space was the same as how I’d been talking about Northern Ireland from across the distance of the Atlantic Ocean.
The summer after my son was born, there was growing violence building back in Belfast. As I watched news footage coming from across the ocean and saw that, like when I was growing up, it was kids who were hijacking and burning buses, throwing petrol bombs, rioting with each other and with the police, I wondered what these teenagers truly knew of the 800-year-old conflict. The reality is they probably didn’t know much. They’d simply inherited a story from their parents that was validated by their peers. They’d been told who to hate. This, I told myself, was not the story I was going to tell my son of where he came from. And as an artist, it was perhaps my biggest epiphany—that the most powerful thing we can do as civilized human beings is change the story. We can always, always, change the story.
Your prompt for the week:
Think of an inherited story that needs changing—in your own life, in your family, in your hometown, in your country. How was it told to you? How will you tell it differently?
If you’d like, you can post your response in the comments section, in our Facebook group, or on Instagram by tagging @theisolationjournals.
Today’s Contributor—
Oliver Jeffers is a visual artist and author working in painting, bookmaking, illustration, collage, performance, and sculpture. While investigating the ways the human mind understands its world, his work also functions as comic relief in the face of futility. His critically acclaimed picture books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller and Time Best Book of the Year Here We Are, have been translated into over fifty languages and sold over 14 million copies worldwide. Photo by Yasmina Cowan.
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What a beautiful story in every way. Thank you. It prompted me to write a bit of my own, just now, which I rarely share, so thank you all for the chance to post, to put this outside of my circle, to risk the vulnerability.
In 2005, I was flattened with a serious illness no one could explain. Grand mal seizure; unable to write my name, could only walk half a block, and that, only with help of a kind person holding my arm and tracking my rocky footsteps. The medical explanations were flimsy – including things like “you drank too much water "- that was a favorite -- words, I see in retrospect, spoken by doctors who couldn’t just say “I have no idea,” because they were taught they were supposed to know, and they couldn't admit they didn't because that would somehow make them question their identity and status as "the ones with answers." Sad. The experience was life changing in the most disruptive of ways; I couldn’t’ go back to my home, which was in a small farming village 60 plus miles from medical help. Friends in town close to help offered me their son’s room – he was in college – but my dog couldn’t come with me, so he was boarded with a friend whose own dog wasn’t happy about the company, and eventually attacked him. I was often on the verge of collapse. Friends, and how lucky was and am I to have had sch loving people around me, had to take turns babysitting me because it wasn’t safe for me to be alone. I remember once, two friends had to help me get out of a bathtub because I was stuck and not strong enough to get out.
Once my brain started to work a little better, I remembered a book I’d once read by the fascinating Carolyn Myss called "The anatomy of the Spirit: Seven Stages of Power and Healing. ". I asked a friend to bring it to me from home -- from the house I loved and lived in – and, it turned out, to which I’d never be able to return. In the book was a chapter about “Tribe” – the people you come from. It posited the notion that we carry our tribal stories with us, often unconsciously, and they affect our. health. So as time went by, in those long, painful hours of isolation, no clue about what was wrong or where I was going to live and whether or not I could get my dog back because letting him go would be worse than succumbing forever to this mysterious illness, I let the concept filter through what was left of my mind. It wafted through the holes in memory and ability to think,. Hints of words appeared but didn’t connect, some days there were no thoughts because I was in physical survival mode, and at that moment survival was about “how can I get up off of this - thank you my friend for letting me stay here -– bed in your son’ts room” and make it to the bathroom. Then, somehow, it occurred to me that, absent a diagnosis, true survival required me to find a pattern in my past that I could use to understand my present. And as that notion sat with me, and sit it did, one day it became clear: I could see my mother, my sister, my grandmother – that was our household – a father only present for a few early turbulent years. Their faces were above me, before me, neutral, as though allowing my examination. And in a quick flash –whose validity I never once questioned because it hit so clearly, and sat in my as though it were a truth I had always known but never turned my eyes toward it to see, I realized I came from a long line of unhappy women who all got sick young. I tooked up at their faces with love: “I love you, I said, but I can’t go with you --- cannot go down that road. I’m choosing another way.” I didn’t want to leave their memory behind, but I could not succumb to their pattern and still live.Loyalty to myself, I decided, would elevate them too. I wasn't well, but I still had a will.
It wasn’t that pledge, that realization, that cured me. But the pledge affirmed my intention and path. Some time later, I was diagnosed with the neurological form of lymr disease and suspected herpes 6 Encephalitis. Years of difficult healing work followed. The losses were enormous, on every level. I still have bouts of unexplained unwellness, if I can call it that. But the story changed, and that intention, along with an enormous amount of luck and grace, brought me forward to the miracle of this day.
First of all I had to write the author!s quote : Sophisticated gangsterism with good PR. It hit me in the heart because that’s what I feel is going on here in the USA except with lousy PR! I do remember reading in the papers, when folks actually read newspapers, the violence and strife in Northern Ireland and again the similarities here, and we can’t seem to tolerate or listen or speak to people with opposing points of view. I know I’m having a difficult time because many of the opposing points of view are so violent and full of ignorance. Even though I’m white, Jewish and a Buddhist I have always felt like an outsider in my own family, mainly because they were all silent about the elephant in the room and when I spoke about it I was told I was crazy. My sons and their families are disconnected as a family, and I know that many times the only one I can have somewhat of a conversation in depth is with my younger son. I realize in many indigenous cultures women are honored, but I just came to the realization in my own family I just began understanding honoring myself, but my family doesn’t have a clue about honoring me and themselves. Now I live in Harlem and when I first moved here 15 years ago I wanted to get involved in the community, especially politically, and I did, but I began to see I was one of the folks who gentrified Harlem that I was to be ignored and not trusted. So what do I do with all of this reality that’s quite painful? Honestly I’m trying to work it through, sit with it, not try to aggressively change anyone, and still be as loving and committed to be the best person I can be. Reality is painful but for me in some big way “the truth will set me free.” I’m a work in progress. Bless you all. 🙏❤️🌹💪🏽