I have had some shaky times in my life. Some of them were my fault; some of them were accidents; some of them happened to me, like I was a passenger on a ride I didn’t want to be on. Through them all, I had a mantra to keep me going: “Mars has two moons.”

Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos. They are smaller than ours, irregular in shape. We didn’t even know they existed until 1877. Occasionally they act in strange concert. I thought of them as a way to diminish my problems: This is bad, but remember how big everything is.

I started saying “Mars has two moons” to myself back in 2008 or so. I said it a lot in 2016, the worst year of my life. Sometimes it helped; sometimes it didn’t. What really helped me, in the end: people. Kindness. I have a collection of saints from back then. They saved me.

One of those saints is a man named Andrew. I had optioned an Esquire story of mine, “Away,” to be made into a TV show. I’d sold it to Jason Katims and @mattreevesLA. Not bad! But nothing had happened for a little while. Then they hired Andrew to work on it. He called me.

I was busted at the time, living in a tiny house. I didn’t know Andrew at all. I Googled him. He was a playwright by trade. He’d written on Penny Dreadful and other shows. It was like a blind date. We ended up talking that afternoon for four hours about what Away might become.

We talked about a crewed mission to Mars. Who might be on that rocket? A Russian cosmonaut named Misha—an engineer, maybe? An American commander. A woman, with a family. Because NASA likes its astronauts to have families. To make sure they come back home.

We also talked about magic. Andrew had done a play with magic at its centre, and I’d written about @MrTeller, the magician, and become infatuated. I believe in some things that I don’t like to admit, but I confessed them to Andrew: I believe in belief, and Mars has two moons.

Away, the show, became another talisman for me. Andrew and I spent hundreds of hours on the phone. He wrote the pilot. I was just a voice in his ear. The script was done, and we hadn’t even met in person. Ours was a remote connection. We could have been anywhere.

A lot of things after had to break our way, and every one of them did. Our show got picked up by Netflix. (I bought a real house.) I became one of its writers. I wrote a speech imagining Hilary Swank might say it. Then I went to a set in Vancouver and watched her say it.

Away came out today. I’m excited and terrified and hopeful that it’s the first of many good things. Andrew has become one of my best friends in the world. So many people on the show have become like sisters and brothers to me. It’s been so fun. It’s been so important.

If you watch it, you might notice a little glimpse of something that makes me feel so much, I worry my chest will collapse. You might look to the sky and see the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, acting in strange concert. You wouldn’t believe what that means.