Amanda Nguyen is finally breaking her silence. The civil rights activist revealed that she has been grappling with her mental health in the months since the Blue Origin space flight she was part of in April, alongside Katy Perry and Gayle King. The flight sparked a global backlash.
"When Gayle called to check on me after the spaceflight, I told her my depression might last for years," Amanda wrote in a statement posted on Instagram on Dec. 28. "Another dream turned into a nightmare."
She continued, "Everything I had worked for—as a scientist, my women's health research, the years I had trained for this moment, the experiments I conducted in space, the history that was being made as the first Vietnamese woman astronaut, on the 50th anniversary of the US-Vietnam war, as the child of boat refugees, the promise I kept to my survivor self—that dreams are worth fighting for, especially when we've deferred them to fight for rights—were buried under an avalanche of misogyny."
The 34-year-old admitted she "felt like collateral damage" amid the "onslaught" of "hostile impressions" she received amid breathless media coverage about the space mission. "I didn't leave Texas for a week, unable to get out of bed," she shared. "A month later, when a senior staff at Blue Origin called me, I had to hang up on him because I couldn't speak through my tears."
The founder of Rise went on to outline the myriad ways in which the Blue Origin flight—which also included Lauren Sánchez Bezos, Aisha Bowe, and Kerianne Flynn—had a positive impact on her work, including bringing attention to her breast cancer research. "My goal of science as a tool for diplomacy was achieved," she explained. "There has been overwhelming good that has come out of this."
She also noted that she's beginning to feel better eight months after the ordeal began. "I'm glad that the fog of grief has started to lift," Amanda wrote. "When the days have been bad, I have held on to every kind of interaction you've shown me. When Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, bombs rained down on Vietnam. This year, when my boat refugee family looked at the sky, instead of bombs they saw the first Vietnamese woman in space. We came on boats, and now we're on spaceships."
After crediting her "survivor self" with helping her through the dark times, Amanda included a picture from her journal dated Dec. 27 in which she simply wrote, "I'm happy to report the depression has lifted." She then shared an old photo of herself next to which it said, "For her..."
