Patrick Stewart: My Captain, Mentor, & TV-Dad

Maybe you want to read the entire post, or just a short summation. Either way, I’ve found that the more I try to shorten and refine the full post, the more I think of things to add, and so the longer it grows. So I’m going to try to communicate this the best way I can because it feels important to say all of it as best as I can.

The shortest way I’ve found to say it is:

Today the world lost a tv-dad, a wise captain, a powerful mentor, and an exceptionally good man. Though I never met him, Patrick Stewart was all these for me and more. His loss will be felt, but his existence will ripple across space and time.

But that feels empty of so much, so the slightly longer, tldr version is:

I may not have known him in person, but Patrick Stewart helped shape so much of my moral compass. In his various roles, he helped me learn to accept myself for who I am, to approach others with empathy, and that difference wasn’t something to fear but rather something to accept and embrace. I learned from him that to ere is human, but it’s how we respond to our mistakes that makes all the difference.

I’m sad that he’s gone. I’m sad for those close to him, his family and friends; anyone connected to him. I’m sad for those, like me, who never met him, but who found a father-figure, captain, mentor, or fellow enlightened thinker in him. I’m sad for myself that I will never get to meet him, or tell him how much his work influenced and meant to me.

But I’m also happy that this person had the chance to affect all of us in such monumental ways, from afar or up-close. He is much loved, and he will be missed.

This, too, is missing too much context and most of the emotion behind it, so the full, unredacted version is:

When I was still a kid, my dad would let me stay up until midnight every other Saturday to watch a rerun episode of Star Trek: The Original Series. It was an introduction to this possible, hopeful future for me, and the first time I saw a character more like myself on tv. (As an undiagnosed AuDHD kid, I found a kinship with Spock, and I often wished I could be him… or at least be his friend.)

Later, Star Trek: The Next Generation would begin airing, and so I made sure to watch it every other Saturday afternoon, alongside Deep Space Nine and Seaquest. I watched in dread of “To Be Continued” popping up at the end of an episode, because my maternal-gene-donor did not allow me to watch anything secular, claiming anything not explicitly written in the Bible (or shouted at us by our pastor) was ‘of the devil.’ This was before DVR was invented, and I was a very sheltered kid primarily raised in a Christian cult and sheltered from the world by an abusive maternal-gene-donor. I knew very little about most things that didn’t have to do directly with my church, the Bible, and whatever bits of the world the Christian-propaganda laden homeschool textbooks spoon-fed to me.

Because of this upbringing, I learned to fear the outside world. The adults around me most days claimed that anyone not at home or in our, specific church was out to get us. That they were all evil, demons, or hell-bound and would thus do us harm.

So Star Trek was literally my first introduction to the idea of a world with good, moral people in a hopeful future not bound for certain Armageddon. And as I watched TNG, I saw myself in Data. I felt like I was Data, or that he was me, or… something to that effect. I was always trying to understand a world around me that held subtext no one had given me, and other humans as though I had been created and not born. (Let me tell you, it’s so much fun to live in the world as an undiagnosed AuDHD, and unknowing transgender kid, who didn’t even know there were others like them, let alone who they really were.)

To a child who survived by consuming stories, who escaped abuse and their wrong-body and a scary world, I could see myself in this future through the eyes of Data. So for forty-five minutes every other week, I was Data. My best friend was Geordi La Forge. And my captain, mentor, and father-figure was Jean-Luc Picard.

And, as a very indoctrinated and religious child, who genuinely believed in the teachings of Jesus, I saw more morality in the lessons of Star Trek than I ever saw in the fire-and-brimstone preach-screaming from the my pastor’s pulpit.

These stories—Captain Picard’s lessons, specifically—taught me how the foundations of my morals could apply to the world in a larger context. They made more sense to a child who’d grown up reading and rereading the Bible than all those pastor-delivered ideas about the evils of secularism and outsiders and sin and damnation and Hell.

In the Bible, Jesus teaches us to treat people as we would want to be treated; to love thy neighbor; to turn the other cheek. Captain Picard taught me to see other people as human, no matter how different they look or sound or behave. Jesus teaches us to help the poor and less fortunate; to feed the hungry, care for the sick, and clothe the poor. Jesus teaches us that a camel would sooner pass through the eye of a needle, than a rich man would pass through the gates of heaven (so basically it’s impossible for a rich person to get into heaven). Captain Picard taught me that we could see the world as a place with enough to go around; that starvation and thirst and poverty were not necessities in a society, they were a choice that we could decide not to allow.

Now, I’m aware that some of these lessons come from Gene Roddenberry’s fantastic world-building and imagination, but it was Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard who introduced these ideas to me, who patiently guided me through life lessons every other Saturday, and who stood as my only representation of the sort of hopeful and wise parental figure I desperately needed. And this is what Patrick Stewart in his various characters taught me:

To the child raised in a born-again Christian cult, who was told that the outside world as an awful, evil place, Captain Picard taught me that it could instead be hopeful place. One that aspired to the kind of peace where everyone could be treated equally. Instead of some secular hellscape, it could be a world where our greatest concern was in finding, meeting, and learning to understand other cultures and civilizations; and that for this world to be possible, it is important to treat everyone, everywhere with respect and empathy and understanding; rather than trying to change them or force them to see the world from a single, very narrow perspective.

To the AFAB kid , who grew up feeling wrong and different and abnormal, who was taught that they had one specific future, and if they didn’t accept it or didn’t fit themself into its required mold, they belonged nowhere; Professor X taught me that I could exist as I am, and there was nothing wrong with me or with being different; that I should take up space and accept the power I had inside me; and accept myself. He taught me to look for people like me, to form communities where we could support each other in all the ways our families failed to support us; and that though we would sometimes have to hide from people who wanted to do us harm, we should continue to exist, to fight back, and to protect each other, all of us; all the different and abandoned kids.

To the survivor of child-specific and other types of abuses, Patrick Stewart, himself, taught me that I could use the pain and the scars and the trauma to inspire work that makes the world a better place for others. That the pain didn’t have to isolate me, but could instead inform my art and my actions and my work; and that it didn’t have to define me.

To the neurospicy adult and someone living with C-PTSD, Shakespearean Stewart, in all his roles, taught me that to ere is human. It’s not notable to make mistakes; it’s normal, typical, commonplace. Making mistakes is not failure on my part because literally no human being is perfect. That what’s important is how we react to our mistakes that matters, and what we learn from them as we move forward and try not to make the same ones again and again.

And, finally, to the idealist, who’d admittedly fallen deep into cynisism and hopelessness over the past decade, Admiral Picard taught me to never give up, even when we discover that the world is not as it seems; and especially when treachorous, amoral people have taken hold of power; when those people seem unbeatable. Admiral Picard taught me that’s when we fight, when we stand up for and alongside others who would otherwise be trampled by a system designed to hold them down. And that, even amidst all this, you’re never too old to unearth unprocessed traumas that may need addressing. That you should always reach out to your friends, whether the situation is dangerous and dire or simply melancholy. That found-family is just as important and deep, if not moreso than blood-relations. That it’s worth striving for a better future for all humanity, even when the obstacles seem impassable.

So, no, I did not know Patrick Stewart, himself. I never got the chance to meet him in-person, or to share correspondence with him. But to me, to the child I once was and to the adult I have become and am still becoming, he was my tv-dad, my captain, my mentor, and my ideal male role-model. He was a defender of the weak and protector of the helpless, in-character and IRL. And much like a parent, I cannot imagine a world without him in it.

But this world is better because he existed. I’m part of the next generation, a small piece of a hopeful future that he helped create. And I will carry his stories and teachings forward. I will keep fighting to make this world a better place, in his memory; always.

Rest in peace amongst the stars, Sir Patrick Stewart; oh captain my captain.

Some Backstory

(TW: light mentions of child abuse / neglect, sexual assault, suicidal ideation, and gender dysphoria)

For those who don’t know my story, let me share a brief overview:

After my parents’ divorce when I was around five or six years old, I was primarily raised in a born-again Christian cult by a bipolar woman with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, who homeschooled me and my little brothers until I turned ten, at which point she sent us to a succession of private Christian schools, and forced my dad to pay for them. This woman, whom I refer to as my maternal-gene-donor (MGD), used a combination of isolation and religion to control and indoctrinate me and my little brothers. We were only allowed to watch two tv channels because they were the only Christian channels we could get, and only allowed to read our Bibles or our Christian textbooks. We went to church three days a week, and that was the only socialization we were permitted outside of whatever immediate family she couldn’t keep us away from.

Outside of church, where we spent three evenings every week, my dad and mi abuela were the only other people we consistantly saw. And the only reason we had mi abuela was because MGD didn’t want anything to do with any of us children most of the time. In fact, years later, after she moved into her own apartment, and forbade us from spending any time alone with our abuela, MGD would get into the habit of leaving her three young children at home, alone, for hours every single day, locking us in the house, and forcing us to fend for ourselves without friends or familia, even though mi abuela offered to look after us every day after school. We survived, but lived very sheltered, lonely lives with no social skills and very little daily care or support.

When MGD did take us on her outtings, more often than not, she would get annoyed with one or all of us, and would literally leave one or two of us—her children, none of whom were older than 8 at the time—in the parking lot or in front of a store or outside of a gas station for hours. We would be standing there, not knowing whether she would come back for us or how to even get home. And because we were taught that the outside world was evil (more on that later), we were afraid to ask for help, and would just wait right where she’d left us, terrified. (Still, several decades on from this, I still sometimes have the same recurring dream about being lost in a place too big for me with monsters hiding around every corner.)

She got away with abuses like this for over a decade because courts were very reluctant to take children away from their mothers before the 90’s, despite obvious signs of abuse or neglect. They were, of course, perfectly fine with taking children away from their fathers, even when said fathers were fighting for custody with everything they had. And MGD made, not only our lives miserable, she also made my dad and abuela’s lives hell because they wouldn’t be controlled by her, and because she couldn’t keep us away from them. With us, her children, she used a combination of beatings, guilt, and silence to punish us for wanting to see or spend time with anyone but her. This included church acquaintances (we had few friends), other family members, as well as our dad and abuela.)

At church, our pastor shouted on stage about all the sinners outside and the evil in the world until his face turned red, and veins popped out on his forehead and along his neck. He screamed about Satan and secular wickedness, and how everything outside of that auditorium was infected by demons and wickedness.

After church, MGD told us all about how the pastor’s wife or some other church lady was a vindictive bitch. They were all always out to get her, or to get us. All the other church-goers, according to her, were deceived by these women and took their side against MGD. Like MGD, these women were all heavily involved with the church, and the pastor’s wife led the church choir. So we heard a lot of words attributed to women there: whore, bitch, slut, heratic, witch, liar, etc. Even in church, MGD saw other women as incapable of doing anything right, while their husbands were deceived by their wives, and could do no wrong.

That was how we were conditioned to see the world; how we were taught to think of the rigidly binary genders: everything boys and men did was natural, even when it was evil or wrong. The Bible, after all, might punish a man for raping a woman, but in every single instance, the raped woman is killed for the sins of the man who attacked her. So that’s how we were taught to think. I, unfortunately born AFAB, could do nothing right or good; I was soaked in inescapable sin. No matter how good I tried to be, I could never be perfect enough.

And no matter how horrible my brothers or the males at church behaved, they could do no wrong. (Except my dad. He was ‘of the Devil’ and irredemable, according to her; a contradiction that would eventually be the first in a series of wedges that my AuDHD brain couldn’t square with the supposed rules of the world I was constantly being fed.)

The thing is: this was my example. I was expected to see what she was doing as ‘holy’ and ‘righteous’ and ‘justified’ because she was the born-again Christian, whereas my dad was agnostic and mi abuela a devout Catholic. These, we were told, were not the same as us, no matter that they believed in the same ‘god.’ Somehow, they were likely to go to hell right along with the Hindus and Pagans and Muslims, right beside the gays and lesbians, who were as condemned as the murderers and sinners.

Even as a child being told these things over and over, I struggled to believe that people were fated to go to Hell for simply being who they were and believing in a different version of god, even while I was actively being drowned in the brainwashing.

This church, its pastor, and MGD all wanted me to believe that everything and everyone who wasn’t born-again Christian from our specific church was infected by Satan, period. Every person on the street who didn’t go to our church was a demon in disguise. Every place outside of church and MGD’s home was a den of sin and evil. Every story that couldn’t be found in the pages of the Bible was laced with wickedness and temptation. No one and nothing could be trusted unless it came from the Bible or our specific church or a church-approved channel / station, because the whole world hated us and was out to get us.

In this and many other ways, I was trapped. There were no options for me: I was not LGBTQ+, period. I would be a good little afab, and eventually a good little spouse, married as soon as MGD could find me a good Christian husband, so I could start my life of mindless submission as his private caretaker, cook, housemaid, and (most importantly) baby-factory.

Who I was and what I wanted didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that the very idea of getting pregnant made me sick to my stomach (either because of the various sexual assaults I’d endured before the age of sixteen—and they didn’t stop there—or because of the inexorable understanding that my body didn’t fit me or my actual experiences of who I was; or both).

(The following paragraph carries a sever trigger warning for discussion of suicidal thoughts and ideation. For those affected, read with caution or skip to the next paragraph.) At this point, as I aged into what I’d been taught was my unavoidable future, I started to dream of dying. Death and all the ways I could die became and remained a daily preoccupation until I began transitioning, in fact. I thought about dying more than anything else. I imagined it. I planned it. I stood on the edges of cliffs and imagined what it would feel like to jump, or the edges of lakes / to drown. I counted pills I knew could stop my heart in high enough doses, and wondered if it would hurt or just feel like going to sleep and not having to wake up. I thought about these things every single day, every. single. day… until my outside body started to reflect more of how I felt on the inside. I was 35 when I started my transition. Until then, for several decades, I just sort of survived, I got by. Until then, I shut down everything inside of myself, and bottled up all the bad feelings. Until then, I would occasionally lose control and put myself in dangerous situations doing wreckless things because I felt trapped and miserable in my life, in my very skin.

Until I started HRT, I had no idea that anyone could exist without constantly trying to hold back the near constant desire to break every mirror in the house; and the intense impulse to just… stop everything; to find a permanent end to it all.)

I have been luckier than many. I escaped the cult. I survived the abuse and the assaults. I woke myself up, and sought out a proper education that covered all the things I was never supposed to know anything about. And I did that because I had people in my life that MGD couldn’t control or keep me away from: my dad, mi abuela, and Tía Sharon, MGD’s half-sister. These three people opened my eyes bit-by-bit, introducing me to the outside world and secular media.

Particularly influential for me, my dad got me into Star Trek, Tía Sharon gifted me Journey CDs, and mi abuela introduced me to the library and the magic of reading. All of these were ways to escape the torture of everyday life. I could see a world with a hopeful future, full of equity and acceptance for all. I could immerse myself in beautiful music, that would let me escape the prison of my body, mind, and soul for a few minutes at a time. I could imagine myself in another life, another world; another body. I was a hobbit on a mission to destroy the weapon of pure evil. I’d found another world in the back of a deserted wardrobe, went exploring, and began a great adventure. I reassembled the bones of a magical being, and helped it return home before it became trapped in the wrong universe forever. Through tessering, I explored the universe and rescued my long, lost father.

Stories helped me survive. They kept me out of my body, and in my imagination. In stories, I could be anyone or anywhere the author could imagine, and though these authors rarely imagined characters like me (a queer, transgender, AuDHD, biracial empath), I felt like I could exist in so many of them; that I could be in a place I belonged, where I didn’t have to be afraid, or trapped in every possible way. I read my way out, word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence, hungrily clawing for more imagined places and narratives like a starving child shovelling hot cereal from a bowl.

There are more reasons to love stories, of course: the lessons they can teach, the empathy they instill, the windows and mirrors they hold up for us to look through and into, and so many more. And, perhaps, these are all aspects of how I came to be who I am, to see the world the way I do, and to think in my own unique way.

So for those who didn’t previously know the how and the why: this is why I’ve grown up to tell stories; why I’ve delved so deeply into the various storytelling arts. Stories helped me survive, they kept me alive; and I hope one day that mine will reach that person out there who feels alone, out of place, and like the world isn’t a place where they can even exist. Because no one deserves to feel that way, and I know first-hand how fantastical stories set in imagined worlds can save a life.

Now you know the key aspects of my backstory, why I became a writer, and why I can’t stop writing (or reading) stories.