Matters of the heart aren’t usually associated with science, but in this week’s episode, both of our storytellers turn to science to cope with heartbreak.
Part 1: When Anna Peterson gets dumped she takes a job with two national wildlife refuges in remote Alaska to prove to her ex he made a mistake.
Anna Peterson is originally from Colorado, but has called Atlanta home for nearly 2.5 years. She obtained her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in 2019 from the University of Tennessee, and has studied parasites and pathogens in everything from salamanders to rats to humans. In her free time, she enjoys hanging out with her dog Hank, running long distances very slowly, and discovering the city of Atlanta by bicycle.
Part 2: When Moiya McTier’s fiancé breaks up with her weeks before their wedding, she turns to the Milky Way to heal.
Dr. Moiya McTier is an astrophysicist, folklorist, and science communicator. After graduating as Harvard’s first student to double major in astrophysics and mythology, Moiya earned her PhD in astronomy at Columbia University. Moiya’s mission is to help people better understand the world around them through science and facts. She does that through her podcasts Exolore and Pale Blue Pod, a mythology show for PBS called Fate & Fabled, and her hit book THE MILKY WAY: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy.
Episode Transcript
Part 1
I'm lying in my tiny little bed in my tiny little bedroom staring up at the ceiling and I'm having a lot of feelings. I feel nervous and afraid and excited and hopeful. It's just all welling in my chest and I just can't keep it in anymore. I whisper out into the dark how much I love this person that's lying here next to me.
I hear the sound of my heart and my breath and that deeply uncomfortable silence of somebody pretending to be asleep.
But I am undeterred because I am in love. So, I spend the next couple of years trying to convince this person to love me in the way that I love him.
Anna Peterson shares her story at Waller’s Coffee Shop in Atlanta, GA in May 2023. Photo by Rob Felt.
I'm a couple months away from finishing my Master's degree, just a few months out from graduation. I don't know what I'm going to do next but I know that wherever I am, I want to be where he is. He is making these grand plans to move to Brazil next year to work on his PhD research and so I'm making these grand plans to go along with.
Then, one day, we sit down and we talk about our grand plans and it becomes clear that his vision of his future does not include me. So that's the end of that.
I am devastated. I am so sad. But even more than that, I just feel so small and diminished. I spent all this time trying to prove to this person that I am worthy of his care and affection. It just feels like no matter what I do, I am just never ever going to be enough.
I'm lost and the only thing I can think to do is to run as far away from the pain as possible. So I apply to every single job I can find and I manage to land a position working for two national wildlife refuges in remote Alaska.
I think, “This is perfect. I am going to move to Alaska and I'm going to become such an incredible badass. This guy is going to rue the day, he will rue the day that he ever let me go.”
So, I packed my bags, I get on a plane and the further and further north I had, the landscape outside the airplane window is just wider and wider as we pass these incredible mountain ranges just covered in snow and ice. I can see the glaciers from 30,000 feet and I start to think, “What have I done?”
Then we land down in Anchorage and I get into this tiny little plane that's taking me out to the town where I'm going to be living. This town is off the road system, so what that means is the only way in or out is by boat or by plane. And, once you're there, there's about 20 miles of road that goes out to the lake and to the dump and to nowhere else.
I envision that I'm going to be living in some little cabin in the woods, communing with nature. Then I get to my housing and it's the basement of this government fourplex. I have no internet or TV or cell phone service there but I can hear everything that everyone else that lives above and below and around me are saying and doing at all times. I go into my little bunk bed and I just have never felt so alone.
But I'm trying to be optimistic. I'm going to go in to work. I'll make some new friends there. I'm going to build a new life.
Then I get into the office and every single one of my co workers is a middle aged man. They don't really know what I'm doing there. I don't really know what I'm doing there. I've been sent in from this like national office to come in and write a report about the wilderness area and they don't really get it. They just kind of shove me in the corner and ignore me.
And so I spend most of my days just sort of clicking through Excel, counting down the hours until I can walk to the public library and go on the internet and look at pictures of my ex boyfriend on Facebook, like a badass.
Anna Peterson shares her story at Waller’s Coffee Shop in Atlanta, GA in May 2023. Photo by Rob Felt.
I continue on that way for a couple weeks and then I hear that I'm going to be getting a new roommate in the basement. That the refuge has hired a new manager who's coming in to take over the whole place and this person is moving up from Arizona and their house isn't ready yet so, in the meantime, they're moving in the basement with me.
That's how I meet Susanna. It becomes quickly clear that, unlike me, Susanna is an actual badass. She's worked her way up for her whole career from a lowly biologist, now, to be head of this national wildlife refuge that's the size of the State of Rhode Island, becoming one of the only, if not the only woman in the state in that position.
And I don't know if it's just because we're stuck in this basement together or because she takes pity on me, but Susanna starts dragging me around with her everywhere she goes. It's awesome because Susanna has a truck.
So Susanna and I, we drive out to the lake. We drive out to the dump. We drive out to the dump. There's not a whole lot of places for us to drive to. But then we drive into work. And when we get into work, she tells all these middle aged men what they should be doing, including that they should start taking me with them when they go out into the field to do their work, because Susanna sees the value of what I'm doing. She understands that if I'm going to be writing this report about wilderness, that I need to be able to get out and experience it for myself.
So I get a ride in my first float plane, these little three seater planes that take off from and land in the water. And we fly up to this incredibly remote glacial lake. It's just neon blue with the silt from the glaciers and these incredible, steep, gray mountains all around. But I can hardly even see it because I'm just so focused on trying to prove that I belong here.
I don't want anyone to think that I don't know what I'm doing, so I don't ask any questions. Then, all of a sudden, these middle aged men are asking me to hand them pieces of equipment or to mark waypoints on the GPS. I'm just caught off guard and overwhelmed. I just feel so stupid and silly. All I want to do is get back home to the basement and be by myself.
But Susanna doesn't let me. She continues to just drag me around. And, one day, we get invited over to Pat's house. Pat, he is the head biologist. He's the most intimidating of all of them. He's got this steel gray mustache. I've never seen him smile. He's always got a pistol at his hip. He's invited us over because he's caught a whole bunch of fish and he's giving some to Susanna to get her through her first winter in Alaska.
We show up to his house and there's just wheelbarrows full of these giant salmon all over his lawn. They're like the size of a baby. And he hands us these long knives with these wooden handles that he whittled himself and he shows us how to cut open the guts and then cut along the backbone to cut them into fillets so that we can vacuum seal them and keep them for winter.
I am just so bad at this. It's slippery and slimy and their little fish eyeballs are staring at you. And every single cut I make, I'm just apologizing for messing this up and doing it wrong. Finally, Pat just has to stop me. He's like, “Anna, I don't know why you would expect to be good at something that you have never done before.”
Then I look over at Susanna and her mangled fish doesn't look any better than mine, but she's just over there happily hacking away. And I realized maybe that's the thing that makes Susanna an actual badass is not that she has a truck or she can tell people what to do but that she's just not so concerned about trying to prove anything to anybody. She just is.
So I spend the rest of my summer trying a little harder to be. And on one of my very last days before I leave town, Pat comes into the office and he's like, “Anna, Susanna, come with me. We're going to the lake.”
So we pack up the truck, we pack up the boat and we drive to the lake. And what we're doing is we are looking for Kittlitz's murrelets. If you don't know, a murrelet is a type of bird. They're a little bit similar to a puffin but, unlike puffins which are colorful and live in big colonies by the coast, murrelets are small and brown and they live by themselves on the tundra. As a result, there's not a whole lot known about these birds except for that their populations are thought to be in decline.
So we're out at the lake because Pat's been hearing that there's been records of these birds out there and, in particular, juvenile murrelets. Knowing where juveniles is important because that's an indication that this is probably breeding habitat. And breeding habitat is really key when you're thinking about conservation of a species.
Anna Peterson shares her story at Waller’s Coffee Shop in Atlanta, GA in May 2023. Photo by Rob Felt.
So we're up at the lake trying to prove there's these little juvenile birds up there. We arrive. It's early in the morning and the lake is just sucked in fog. But Pat is undeterred and we just start doing transects back and forth, back and forth, back and forth across the lake. I'm just staring at like a wall of fog with a pair of binoculars and everything seems hopeless.
But, slowly, the fog begins to lift and I'm just looking at the way the clouds sit on the mountains and the dark green of the trees that ring the lake and the little bits of color of the tundra as it starts to turn for the fall. I set those binoculars down. I recognize that I am no good at using them and I don't even care. Instead, I just breathe.
And then I hear Susanna yell. She's like, “Wait, wait. I think I see something. Something across the lake.”
And then Pat wheels the boat around and we beeline towards some little thing that's bobbing out on the water. We pull up sideways next to it and he's like, “Anna, Anna, grab it, grab it.”
I reach over the boat and I grab this thing out of the water and I put it down on the seat in front of us. And there it is, a dead murrelet. Definitive proof that they exist here.
A couple days after that, I headed north to spend the next few months at a different wildlife refuge and then I moved down to Louisiana to start my PhD. But, in between, I stopped back by Colorado, which is where I had done my Master’s, and, while I was there, I reached out to that ex and I was like to see if he wanted to meet up.
He was like, “Yeah. Sure. I'll be at this coffee shop. You can come by if you want to.”
So I walk over there and, as I'm walking over, I just have all this anxiety and fear in my chest. The closer I get, it just sinks down into my stomach like dread. Every single step I take just feels so heavy.
And then I get there. We sit down and we start to talk.
He doesn't have a whole lot to say for himself. He never ended up moving to Brazil. And, instead, I just take up space and I tell him about Susanna and how, because of her, I got to do all these incredible things. I've spent ten days out on the coast looking at sea birds and I spent four days on an inflatable kayak with a middle aged man floating down a river from its headwaters until it meets the Bering Sea.
And I told him about Pat and about this bird we found and how he was working to write up this report and how, in some small way, it felt like I contributed to the protection of this little thing.
As I walked away, I would love to say that I felt confident and healed and I never thought or felt sad about him again, but that is not true. But I did feel a little bit bigger thinking about how, sometimes, your heart gets broken and you can feel so lost and sad and alone. But, sometimes, you meet a badass who drags you out onto a boat and, together, you find that floating dead bird that you were looking for. And I think that's enough.
Part 2
Hi, everyone. I am Moiya McTier and I have been in love twice. The first time ended with a heartbreak that hurt way more than it should have, like a paper cut.
We met freshman year of college and we fell in love over Key & Peele skits and BuzzFeed articles posted to each other's Facebook walls. He was the first person I ever imagined a future with and, almost a year into dating, he came to visit me for my birthday over winter break. Just a couple days after leaving, he broke up with me over Skype. Yeah, boo that guy.
I remember crying to my mom that it felt like my physical heart had taken a beating, but when I got back to campus I didn't have time to dwell on anything as ephemeral as feelings. I had classes to focus on. So, instead, I just chopped off most of my hair, got a couple of stress tattoos and piercings, which I don't regret but it did get expensive.
Moiya McTier shares her story at The Bell House in Brooklyn, NY in May 2023 at Story Collider’s annual Proton Prom. Photo by Zhen Qin.
So, instead, I took out most of my pain on the rugby pitch. And I don't know if you know this but rugby, very good at helping you express emotions, not so good at helping you learn from them. So I still blamed myself for the breakup. I had never thought that way before. Even as a lone black girl in rural Pennsylvania, I never doubted my worth as a human being. If anything, I was too confident, especially when it came to my intelligence.
But a year at Harvard had already stripped away enough of that confidence that, when I got dumped without explanation, I assumed it was because I wasn't enough. Not pretty or funny or lovable enough, whatever that means.
The second time I fell in love felt more solid than anything I had ever experienced from the very beginning. I moved to New York in 2016, excited to casually date big city hotties and solve the mysteries of the universe in grad school, but that universe had other plans.
One of my friends from college moved to the city about a month later and, without meaning to, we just spent so much time together that we both copped the feels. On the surface, we didn't make much sense. Strangers would tell him that he looked like a Republican and his friends described him as a robot, while I'm told all the time that I have a resting friendly face.
But everything between us just clicked so effortlessly. He was funny and thoughtful and kind. We shared values. We laughed together easily and I thought we were just different enough that we could do anything together, even build Ikea furniture without fighting, and we did.
We said I love you after a month. We moved in together after a year and I knew I had found my person.
In grad school, I was also trying to find my calling as an astrophysicist and a science communicator, but those insecurities I picked up in college they made me doubt that I was the right person to answer that call.
In between classes on galaxy evolution and the interstellar medium, I fell deep into anxiety and depression. I cried so often at work that I built a little crying nest under my desk out of comfy blankets. And when it got bad enough that I thought I wouldn't survive it on my own, I sought out therapy and medication. That's what you're supposed to do.
My partner was really supportive the whole time. He would spend hours talking me out of my depressive spirals and hyping up my accomplishments, but he also said he was starting to resent the dark thoughts that clouded my mind. That's not what you want to hear.
I promised him that I would try harder, that I would get better at controlling my emotions because he was my best friend and the idea of a future without him seemed too bleak to even consider.
Right before the world shut down in 2020, I signed my first book deal to write the Milky Way's autobiography. Thank you. Notice I said ‘first’. There's more coming, But in order to write that book, I had to have confidence in myself as a science communicator and that was the moment I knew I could make it, if only I could get out of my own way.
Years of studying astronomy gave me all the science information I needed but I still had to spend a lot of time reflecting on the mindset of the Milky Way. What might it actually feel like to be an intelligent creature more than 100,000 light years wide and 12 billion years old? What I discovered, or decided, was that galaxies struggle with much the same stuff we do. They have loneliness. They have failures. Their peers are cruel to them, but it exists on a scale that dwarfs ours.
Moiya McTier shares her story at The Bell House in Brooklyn, NY in May 2023 at Story Collider’s annual Proton Prom. Photo by Zhen Qin.
A typical spiral galaxy like the Milky Way will spend billions of years repeating the cycle of creating new stars, getting attached to them and then watching them die. Most of the interactions galaxies have with each other are violent and greedy, ripping each other apart until the victor can feed off of the loser's gas. And as far as we can tell, pretty much every galaxy has a hungry monster in its belly called a supermassive black hole that can literally strangle a galaxy of its gas until it can't make any new stars.
And yet our galaxy continues to forge its own path through the universe with the most impressive surety of self. The Milky Way knows who it is and it loves itself fiercely.
I spent a year and a half pretending to be that lonely galaxy floating in the universe and, over time, my worldview gradually expanded beyond the typical human scales. I zoomed out and I started to see myself as a teeny tiny cog in a great machine, so it's fine if I make mistakes. After all, I'm only human.
And the more time I spent pretending to be the aggressively confident Milky Way, the more my own self esteem improved. When I missed a meeting, I stopped saying, “I suck,” and I started saying, “Oh, I'm awesome. I have too many meetings to keep track of.”
Thanks to this book, I had finally found the type of peace and confidence that I needed to crawl out of my depression hole, just like I promised I would. And four and a half years after I confessed to my partner that I had crush like feelings, we proposed to each other in our living room. It was really cute.
We started to talk about a celestial themed wedding and I bought a beautiful star studded veil and I hid it in our closet as a surprise. I was climbing towards a better mental state.
But the next year was really tough for him. He was struggling with his transition to a new career as a rapper. I know. But I did really think he had potential. At the same time, his mom revealed that she fundamentally disapproved of our relationship and of me as a person.
He thought that the problem would go away if he just ignored it. Obviously, that's not true. I think we can all agree that's not the case. So after months of my begging, he finally agreed to try family therapy and it worked. In the final days of summer, he told me he was feeling better about both life and us.
Suddenly, it's a crisp October Sunday and he is sitting on the couch watching a football game when I say, “We need to talk about this wedding. It's supposed to happen in two weeks. We talked about eloping in the park but then life got too hectic so we didn't plan, but now is the time.”
He pauses the game. He takes a deep breath and he says he's been feeling ‘concerned’ about our relationship for a while. He pulls out his phone and starts reading a note of breakup thoughts to me. This isn't weird for him. He often writes down difficult conversations before he has them.
But I ask, “How long is a while?” And he says, “Months.”
I start replaying the last couple of months in my head. My book launch, our sixth anniversary, his album release and I am too stunned in the moment to actually ask anything out loud, so I just listen to him read his sentences from his phone. And all of them paint me as the problem in our relationship.
A year ago, I might have agreed with him but I have done the work. I'm no longer so quick to believe bad things about myself, so in my head I'm thinking, “You're wrong. All of this is wrong.”
But you know what? He's not interested in hearing my side of things. He's already packed a suitcase.
He walks out of our apartment and my entire world changes in a single moment. I lose my best friend, a second family I had grown to love and a joint future that I cherished. I feel betrayed. I feel blindsided but I can't quite conjure any anger, mostly just confusion.
So I call him the next day and I ask why. Why are you throwing away this beautiful life we've built together? And on the call I take notes, because I know I will want to remember exactly what he says. Things like, “You're not as interesting as you used to be,” “You eat too much,” and, “You're not steel sharpening my steel.”
After the call I feel conflicted. On one hand, finally angry because how dare he say those things. And on the other, grateful because, in hindsight, all of his flags have redshifted.
I make a playlist that alternates between ‘fuck you’ and ‘hallelujah’ and I call it ‘Good Riddance’. But on some third metaphorical hand, I feel deep despair. I fear I won't be able to get by without him and his support and, really, I am worried that I have just tricked all of my friends into loving me because the person who knows me best in the entire world has decided I'm not worth fighting for.
Moiya McTier shares her story at The Bell House in Brooklyn, NY in May 2023 at Story Collider’s annual Proton Prom. Photo by Zhen Qin.
This wound goes way deeper than a paper cut. It's like that scene in a movie where someone gets sliced in half by a blade so sharp they don't even realize what's happened. But once I do realize, oh, those tears, they come unbidden and they don't stop.
I spend most of that week in bed, except for my daily walks in Central Park that leave me too exhausted to do anything too rash, but I do post a few videos on TikTok of myself crying and processing the breakup.
And you know what happens? My nana follows me. My grandmother followed me on TikTok, which is not what you want on that platform, at all.
But that week I'm scheduled to talk about my book at the Ottawa Writers Festival and he plans to get the rest of his stuff while I'm gone.
In Canada, I see an old rugby teammate who reminds me that there was a time before this relationship. And when I read my writing at the festival in front of a crowd of people who only see me as an exciting new author and not some fragile, heartbroken husk, I remember that I still have plenty of life to live after it.
In the haughty tone that I have given the Milky Way, I say, “I am space. I am made of space and I am surrounded by space. I am the greatest galaxy who has ever lived.” And in that moment, I recognize the power in that delusional galactic confidence, the type of confidence that little Moiya had.
So I return from Ottawa a week after the breakup to an apartment that is pretty much empty. It's half empty and it doesn't feel like home anymore. I say it's empty but he left most of the furniture behind because he's not handling this breakup like a jerk. But his books are gone and his side of the dresser is empty and all of our lovey dovey art is missing from the walls. So
I take a breath and instead of ignoring my feelings or drowning in them, I ask myself, “WWMWD?” What would the Milky Way do?
The Milky Way would have faith in its permanence compared to this temporary discomfort. It would commit to living fully and without self judgment and, most of all, it would tell any disparaging voices to shut the fuck up because it is the greatest who has ever lived.
So that's what I choose to do.