Hope Has No Limits: From Congress to Space, Amanda Nguyen’s Journey of Resilience
The following is an excerpt taken from the 2025 TIME Women of the Year Leadership Forum.
To read the full article, head here.
Amanda Nguyen is an activist and astronaut who has turned her pain into purpose. “I was dreaming of being an astronaut, and then I was assaulted,” she shares. “When I found out that my evidence could be destroyed, I had to make a choice between my justice or my dreams of being an astronaut. At those crossroads, I put down my telescope, picked up a pen, and rewrote the law.”
A Promise to Never Give Up: From Harvard to Congress to Space
Image from: @amandangocnguyen
Amanda Nguyen: “All astronauts have a zero-g indicator when we reach space; it’s a little something that floats. And mine is something very special to me. When I left the hospital after my assault, I wrote a promise to myself: ‘Never, never, never give up.’ And so I taped that, and I looked at that note to help me graduate Harvard. I looked at it when I was fighting for my rights in Congress, in the United Nations, and I will be looking at it when I float over Earth.”
“Never, never, never give up.”
Interviewer: “I read that hope is a discipline. Share with us how that’s helped you in your journey and how that helps other people as well.”
Amanda Nguyen: “I really think that hope is something you can exercise every day. It is contagious or a renewable resource. I find myself practicing it in little ways, like, glimmers. If you’ve heard of this concept, it’s finding little things in your life that spark joy. Maybe it’s how you like your cup of coffee in the morning or the way that the leaf is falling to the ground and that brings you peace.
“Hope is something you can exercise every day.”
Our brains are wired to pick up oftentimes things that are negative. But if we practice appreciation and gratitude and just notice the things that make us happy, that has been phenomenally helpful in stretching my hope. Also, I think that hope is different from a dream. In order to have hope you have to have a plan that is what gives the foundation for that hope. And what makes me so hopeful now is seeing that change is possible.
Image from: @amandangocnguyen
Everyday I wake up and I work with my team of organizers and they are on the frontlines pushing for womens’ rights. And I do see that when they sit down even in deep red states, blue states, purple states we’re still passing laws. My team and I have passed 91 laws. All of them have been bipartisan and even when we were at the United Nations, trying to pass our general assembly resolution, people told us it’s impossible, not everywhere is a democracy and so the voice of civil society is really really seen differently. But we ended up passing (after 6 years) in the UN unanimously and that just shows that impossible is just an opinion.”
Adapted from: TIME.com, “Women Who Shattered Ceilings Share Lessons They’ve Learned” by Chantelle Lee
