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.

Because The Next Generation offered a glimpse of a future that was better than the world we lived in then and certainly the world we live in now. It offered a vision of a world that was less cruel and more equitable, a world where people weren't struggling to survive and instead worked to better each other's place in it. It was, of course, a fictional world but it was a good fiction to believe in as I sorted out how to navigate the world outside my apartment.

I miss its optimism.

Or maybe I miss my own.

I've written before about how unrelentingly negative the internet feels now. It is, of course, a reflection of an era that is, itself, unrelentingly negative. We live at a time when cynicism reigns, where burnout is rampant, and where disengaging feels like the only option.

We live at a time where we are constantly questioning what is right in front of us. Where gaslighting is prevalent, and where insisting that the things that you see are the things that are there is harder than it looks.

In thinking about all this after hearing the news of his death last night, I was brought back to what I think is the finest episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Chain of Command," a two-parter that sees Stewart's Jean Luc Picard taken prisoner, interrogated, and tortured by the Cardassians, a race of militaristic lizard-like fascists.

During the interrogation, Picard's Cardassian handler asks him how many lights are shining in front of him. Squinting, Picard responds that there are four. The Cardassian insists that there are five lights, and tortures him.

Every time, endlessly, the same question—how many lights—elicits the same answer—four—and the beatings continue until, finally, Picard seems well and truly broken.

In the hands of a less accomplished actor, the inexpensive sets, syndicated TV lighting, and reptillian makeup might have made the torture feel less visceral, but Stewart made you truly feel his spirit breaking. Skinny and weak, wearing a torn tunic that hung off his body, he is asked one last time: How many lights. Picard is gasping, blinking, you can feel his confused, tortured, anguish.

It feels like it takes forever before he finally screams, "There! Are! Four! Lights!"

I've thought of that scene so many times over the years, as those in power try to insist that what we see right in front of us isn't what is happening. It was a story that is as resonant now as it was then, when I began to see the home I left in a new light. The exhaustion that comes with insisting that reality is, in fact, reality and the punishment that can come from standing by that insistence is very, very real. Then, now, forever.

We have all lived through so much—I'm reminded that one year ago was when ICE was at its worst right around me—and it would be so easy, so simple, to just fall for it all. It would be so easy to give up, to give in, and to admit that there are five lights.

But of course I can't, you can't, none of us can. No matter how hard it gets—and whatever the results of the election on Tuesday it's going to get harder—we can never forget the lesson that Patrick Stewart taught us: There are four lights.

There are four lights.

There.

Are.

Four.

Lights.