I didn’t feel good about asking Greta Thunberg for an interview. She’s a kid still; stardom rots the soul; and the spotlight is clearly torture to her—a torture she has chosen freely, but a torture all the same. And her celebrity has never seemed entirely healthy: this Nordic child, from one of the most comfortable and privileged societies the Earth has ever known, leading a movement to confront a planetary crisis that disproportionately harms people who do not look anything like her—people who live in Mozambique, the Bahamas, Somalia, San Juan, whose lives could not be more different from hers. Wasn’t the media playing the same tired, old game, elevating a photogenic white savior figure so that it wouldn’t have to deal with voices and faces that might make it uncomfortable? And wasn’t I part of that media?

But I was also on my way to Madrid to cover December’s United Nations climate summit, and it was sufficiently important to Thunberg to be heard there that she sailed across the Atlantic twice. It felt irresponsible not to try to interview her, if only to ask her the same questions I was asking myself. Plus, she and the other youth activists would be the more lively subjects in those windowless convention center halls. Without their idealism and anger, the event would look like just another bureaucratic death march.

I found an email address for interview requests. Greta wasn’t even on land yet at that point, but she had internet on the catamaran. She was tweeting still, and occasionally posting selfies. I couldn’t help but notice that out there in the swells and spray, she looked much happier and more at ease than she had on any of the stages I had seen her on over the previous month, each day looking more and more exhausted. Every time I saw her happy, I realized, I felt happy too. But this was part of the problem, wasn’t it? That I—and I knew I wasn’t alone in this—had become so invested in her individual happiness; that I had managed to funnel a portion of my rising panic over the climate crisis into her, brave little Greta, with the fierce eyes and the stainless steel backbone, those earnest pigtails a reminder that she was, despite it all, a child.