I was only 17 when I moved out of my folks' house. I was ready to leave—desperate to leave—and landed in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood in the early '90s. This was back when apartments there were still big and cheap and the whole neighborhood had recently transformed into a haven for artists and musicians and weirdos. It was, in that moment, a perfect place. Sure there were pretty regular gunshots at Duks Red Hots down the street and the park itself was something you walked past quickly at night, but it felt like a place that was ours. (Of course, it was someone else's first, and the displacement that we brought to the neighborhood would be echoed by wealth displacing us years later, but that's a different story for a different day).

Knowing that you had to leave home and knowing what you were doing once you got out are very different things. I was so young, still a child really, and there was so much I did not know. My art school roommates and I were all too young and too broke to go out much, so we stayed home most nights, sitting on a crusty old hand-me-down couch and watched fuzzy reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Channel 50.

When news of the death of Patrick Stewart—who I probably don't need to tell you played Captain Jean Luc Picard on the show—hit yesterday, I was instantly flooded with memories of being 17 and trying to figure out how to walk in the world and it made me realize just how interlinked those memories are with The Next Generation.

You never totally know where the lessons you learn might come from, but definitely for me, impossibly young and on my own, a lot of them came from this kinda corny low-budget show that claimed to be about space exploration, but was really about seeking knowledge and helping where you can and about possibility and kindness and wrestling with what it meant to be a person trying to do all those things and not always succeeding.

It was a deeply human show and a lot of that was thanks to Patrick Stewart, a Shakespearean actor who came from a fucked up home and found refuge, and himself, in the arts (a story that, looking back on it now, feels familiar). Stewart brought so much more to the role than the material—especially early on—warranted and, in the process, elevated the whole show to his level.

I was never a Trekkie, and beyond Deep Space Nine I didn't continue to follow the voyages of the Starship Enterprise or the many other Starships that followed. But that part of my life—that inflection point where you move from a child to an adult—is so intertwined with Captain Picard saying "Make it so" that it's hard to untangle the two. And maybe I don't want to.

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