Running on Different Frequencies
How Project Hail Mary Bridged the Gap
This morning I pressed my fist against the shower glass and said: “fist my bump.”
My husband fist bumped me back without missing a beat.
If you’ve read or seen Project Hail Mary, you’re already smiling. If you haven’t, that phrase makes zero sense, and that’s actually kind of the whole point of this article.
The Book, The Movie, The Moment
Project Hail Mary is a sci-fi novel by Andy Weir, and the movie adaptation just came out, starring Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace. I am not going to give you spoilers because that is a crime I will not commit. What I will tell you is that the story is about an impossible connection between two beings who share nothing in common. No language. No biology. No logical reason it should work. And yet they find each other anyway, through patience and curiosity and a willingness to keep trying even when the signal produces nothing but noise.
One of those beings is Rocky. Rocky communicates through pure frequency, through sound. And in learning each other’s language, things get charmingly, perfectly lost in translation. “Fist my bump” instead of “fist bump.” “Amaze” instead of “amazing,” delivered flat and sincere with zero understanding of context. Small things. But they’re the whole soul of the story in miniature. Two completely different beings reaching across a gap that shouldn’t be bridgeable, finding a handhold anyway.
My husband read the book before I did. He handed it to me and said he thought I’d like it.
And boy, he wasn’t wrong. I absolutely loved it and had a full grief spiral over the ending and then wrote an entire article about it, and then sent that article to Andy Weir himself because his email was right there on his website, and I have no self-preservation instinct, apparently. Weir wrote back. Said it was very long and he had to move on to other work. This turned into me writing a second article defending long-form writing. But that’s a whole other story on my other Substack.
The point is: this book has been living in me for a while. And going to see the movie together felt like closing a loop.
The Hallway
After the movie, I ducked into the restroom. My husband waited in the corridor. One of those long, empty post-show hallways where you can see each other from far away, neither of you quite ready to go back out into the world yet.
Something came over me.
I started doing what Grace does in the film. The poses. A full-bodybuilder flex. A shimmy. The Heisman. Complete commitment, zero self-consciousness, forty feet of empty hallway between us. I was fully prepared to be gently tolerated, which is sometimes what happens when I go a little off-script.
He didn't ignore me.
He met me there. He mirrored me back. His own poses, his own moves, walking toward each other the whole length of that corridor like two complete goofballs who had absolutely nowhere more important to be.
My heart was so full I didn’t know what to do with it. It still overflows when I think about it.
Why That Mattered More Than It Should Have
Here's something I don't say enough about myself, or maybe about a lot of us who feel things deeply and carry a lot and have spent most of our lives being a little too much or a little too sensitive or just a little too whatever for the rooms we were in.
I didn’t get to be a kid much. I grew up fast. I was the oldest, I figured things out on my own, and goofy, unself-conscious joy was not something I felt safe letting out for very long before it got reined in. So I learned to keep it mostly internal. The theater in my head runs constantly. What makes it out into the world is extremely edited.
My husband grew up hard and fast, too. Oldest kid, same story in a different scenery. We found each other later, and we’ve been building something ever since, two people who were largely on their own before they weren’t, still sometimes on their own even now, figuring it out together and separately in the same life.
We don’t always land on the same frequency. We are genuinely different. He is always moving, always doing, and the loudest person in the room in the best possible way. I am internal, a feeler, the one quietly absorbing everything everyone else walks past without noticing. He thinks in solutions. I think in patterns and feelings and things I can’t always find words for, which is why he’s learned over the years to speak “Amanda.” That’s what he calls it. When I can’t finish a sentence, and I point vaguely at an object that has a name, trail off mid-thought, or call it something crazy like “whatchamdoogit,” he just knows. He translates. He’s fluent.
We have more channels between us than it might look like from the outside. We get each other, genuinely, in the ways that matter. But we also get serious fast, or sarcastic, or pulled back into our own separate orbits. The childlike stuff, the loose and unguarded and genuinely silly stuff, that’s rarer.
The hallway was that. That fist bump this morning was that.
Two people who had to grow up too fast, catching a few minutes of not being grown up at all.
On Being a Different Kind of Signal
I think a lot about frequency. About why some people feel immediately at home, and others feel like you're both speaking different languages and always will be. Why some connections feel effortless, and others feel like you're constantly translating. It's not because anyone is doing anything wrong. It's because we all send signals, and everyone receives them through their own filters. What comes through on the other side depends entirely on who's doing the receiving. Some people pick you up clear. Others distort the signal without even trying to.
And then there are the people who’ve known you long enough to calibrate. Who’ve heard enough of your static and your clarity to know the difference. Who don’t need you to explain yourself because they’ve already learned your frequency, even the parts that don’t have words yet.
That’s its own kind of rare. And even with those people, there are moments where the reception is cleaner than usual. Where something unguarded passes between you and lands exactly right, and you both feel it, and nobody has to say so.
Some of us spend most of our lives waiting for that. To be received without having to translate ourselves first. You know the feeling, or you don’t. And when it happens, even in the smallest, goofiest, most ordinary way, it is not small at all.
That’s not a flaw. That’s a frequency.
The gap between people doesn’t always mean you’re wrong for each other. Sometimes it just means you’re different signals learning how to find the overlap. Grace and Rocky had no business being able to reach each other. They did it anyway.
My husband doesn’t always understand why I feel what I feel, or see what I see, or need what I need. But he fist bumped me through the shower glass this morning without asking a single question.
That’s the overlap. And I’ll take it.
If you've always felt like you're running on a frequency the world wasn't quite built for, you're in the right place. That's who I write for.