This has been a big year for me. There’s the obvious big thing—baby!—but there’s also the end of one of my big projects, Journey to the Microcosmos. For the past few years, my weeks have revolved around the tiny microbes filmed by James, our masters of microscopes. Over time, I learned that each episode started with one very important question: what does this make me think about? And so here I am, trying to figure out how to write about the end of a show that’s been so important to me, and trying to answer that question.
What does this make me think about?
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I may be projecting a bit broadly, but I feel like a lot of us who go from the lab to science writing are following a path that begins with a bit of hubris. We come in to the world of science writing as both insiders and outsiders: we know the ins and outs of science, but less about how to share that science in the context of a media business. It’s one thing to spend your spare time talking about science to any non-scientist you can find, it’s another to figure out how to talk science in a way that sells.
For me, that combination of naïveté and hubris produced a fantasy that I would get to talk about science in the way that science has felt to me: slow, incremental, and grounded in tiny moments. I’ve heard scientists espouse this very idea, that the world of science communication would be fixed if we could just focus on the slow and incremental instead of flashy headlines.
The reality is not that science writers don’t want to write about science as a slow process. In fact, I would argue that all of the science writers I’ve met also want to be able to convey science for the incremental, years/decades/centuries/millenia-long process that it is. But every day is an exciting new discovery, and sometimes there just isn’t the space to put it in all of the context that has existed before that. And honestly, I didn’t learn science in that context either. I’s been through popular science writers—not my undergrad or grad school coursework—that I’ve gotten a sense of the history that lay behind the field I spent my grad school years in.
And yet, there are spaces. When I first heard about Journey to the Microcosmos, the thing that drew me to it was the chance to do the thing I’d wanted to do all along. I first got an inkling of the show when I applied to work for Hank Green as his editorial assistant. One of my tasks during the application process was to write with a tone of awe about stentor coeruleus, a ciliate that resembles a blue trumpet. It was the first time I’d heard about stentors, and honestly, I don’t think I could have even told you what a ciliate is. But working on that prompt immersed me in the life of this weird creature, and I just had so much fun trying to construct an (extremely short) David Attenborough-esque version of its life. I knew that if I had the chance to work on Journey to the Microcosmos, I had to take it.
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The best part about getting to work on a new show was getting the opportunity to get weird. Journey to the Microcosmos is a slippery show. It’s about science, but it’s also always a return to that question, “What does this make me feel?” The first episode where I realized that was an episode about amoeba. Yes, there was all the science to talk about, the pseudopodia, the movement, and so on. But the thing I couldn’t let go of was that amoeba have a kind of cultural resonance that other microbes don’t. It’s closest competitor is the tardigrade, but tardigrades are more like an internet-beloved pop star who is a month or two from a backlash. The amoeba is like Elvis: you know of it long before you know what it actually is. The whole point of the episode became examining how this microbe had become such a metaphorical touchpoint beyond the world of the microscope.
There’s something about working on this show that was a little overwhelming in the best way. Every week, I would get these incredible videos from James, whose talent for stunning imagery is matched by his persistence and dedication. And his work made my job felt secondary. You could theoretically just set his videos to music and attract a wide audience (not so theoretical when you consider that was a patreon perk). My challenge was to figure out a story that justified adding a voice to all of this footage.
What made that challenge fun was this incredible world of microbiology that I got to uncover, sifting through old papers and illustrations that built over centuries to give us insight into this invisible world. Sometimes it was hard, especially when trying to construct a story out of a microbe that's had maybe 3 papers written about it (2 of which are in German). But it's impossible to look at James' footage and not feel inspired, especially when you know you're working with people who can translate that inspiration into something so cool.
Journey to the Microcosmos started as a small team, and Matthew Gaydos was the person who kept it all running as the producer and editor. And his ability to render my ideas into something real meant that I got to get weird, like the time we decided to make a horror movie out of a nematode-eating fungus. The other person who let it get weird was of course Hank Green, who was willing to take these strange scripts and their complicated pronuncations, and then do the thing he’s so good at: connecting with audiences.
Over the years, the team grew to include other people who grought the show to life in new ways. Darcy Shapiro and Paige Madison helped me approach my writing with more structure. Chayton Whaley took on editing, embracing the fun of the show, and Callie Dishman mixed the audio for the show to bring together all these elements. Brandon Brungard later took on Matt’s role as producer and was willing to jump into the weirdness of the show. And Seth Radley helped keep everything as executive producer.
So here is something I’ve learned: you can end up with your dream project, but what actually makes it a dream are the people you’re working with. That part of getting what you want is finding the people who want it with you, and who are smart and talented in the ways you aren’t, and who think about things you think about but in different ways.
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Now if you’ll excuse me, a diversion of sorts, but I promise it’s relevant.
Last year, around the same time that I realized I was pregnant, I found out that the show would be ending. The last script I would write would be sent in around a month before my due date. There was something kind of cosmic in how the timelines lined up. I don’t mean that this is how things were supposed to happen, just that there was something meaningful about the closing of one door and the opening of another.
Or maybe I'm just reading too much into it because it’s impossible for me to think about Journey to the Microcosmos without also thinking about the other big want in my life: a baby. My experience on the show is inextricably tied to the journey I’ve been on the past few years. There was the time I was in a hospital after my first miscarriage, and I asked my husband to read me the (nice) comments from an episode about sea anemone that I wrote and hosted.
There was the time, shortly after my second miscarriage, that I wrote and hosted an episode about a rotifer mother’s unsuccessful attempt at protecting her young. I asked to host that episode because I had to.
For both Journey to the Microcosmos and my personal journey to motherhood, there’s a question you have to answer when you get to your destination. What do you do when you get the thing you wanted? That was a question that used to cause me angst, the way it does to so many 20-somethings who follow a path for reasons they’re not sure of, only to realize it didn’t lead them to what they really wanted. But maybe because I have a clearer idea of why I want the things that I want, the answer seems more clear to me now. You just do whatever is next.
When I finally felt somewhat secure that I would have a pregnancy that continued past the first trimester, I had to remind myself that pregnancy was just one very early step in a journey that is going to last for the rest of my life. And boy have these last few months really reiterated that. Coming off having had a good pregnancy and delivery, the fourth trimester—that period where your body is recovering while simultaneously trying to keep a new life alive—hit me like a brick wall. Every day has been a reminder that this is what I wanted (with echoes of “be careful what you wish for”), and every day has been a renewed conviction of why I wanted it (an answering echo shouts “my baby is so cool, and there is nothing cooler to me than the fact that he is in the world”).
With a baby, all you can do is what’s next. You find the next skill they’re developing or contend with the new hurt they’ve faced. And I guess writing is like that too. I’m typing this during my first week back from maternity leave, trying to figure out how to write again, and with a sense that this show was just one step in a creative and professional journey that I hope will last a long time.
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Getting what you want can be humbling. Writing for a youtube show doesn’t take the same level of conviction that subjecting yourself to pregnancy/birth/newborn life does, but it does require some idea of why you want to do the thing you do. If you’re going to tell people that you write youtube videos for a living, it helps to know why. For me, the reason is answered so simply by our audience. It is absolutely incredible to have worked on a show that has inspired an audience to take up new hobbies or change the direction of their career. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever get something like that again, and sometimes I tell myself that it doesn’t matter—if you get it even just once, you're set.
After all, our audience isn’t the only one changed by the show. I went into this project thinking that it would satisfy some need of how I saw the world of science. But it also changed the way I see science. I went from being an engineer who is always picking away at individual components of biology with the aim of creating new futures, to someone who has to envision worlds built from tiny little lives that go far back in our planet’s history. It taught me so much about what I don’t know about the world, from that first prompt about stentor coeruleus, to the last episode about what we hope for the future of microscopy.
It has been an incredible privilege to work with this incredible team who loved the show the way I loved it, to bring it to an audience who also loved it. And it is humbling to think of all the ways that working on it has shown me my own scientific biases and creative limitations.
When I think about this show, I will always think about just how challenging it can be to get what you want, and how that challenge is so worth it.
