On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous Book Reflection
I finished reading On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous yesterday, a book I savored slowly for six months.
A few weeks ago in therapy, I shared a haunting memory, white-hot. I couldn’t get it out fully in words before the crying appeared—not so much the saltwater droplets running down my cheeks, but the way my body heated up and compressed itself, choking off air in my throat, inhibiting all digestive functions, and spreading a pattern of blotchy red stains across my face. I wanted to get it out but the memory engulfed me. Help! I was drowning and gasping. I wanted to get it out without crying to prove my sanity. I felt betrayed by my body. “I’m saner than this,” it somehow felt important for her to know, even though she was wholly equipped to handle the mess of my perceived mental derangement, my shameful defects.
Being a practitioner of the Internal Family Systems method of therapizing, in which one is instructed to label each intrusive memory, thought, and feeling as “a part,” she waited a sympathetic beat before stepping in: “So there’s a part here that’s feeling overwhelmed. Let’s see if we can ask this part to take a step back and give you some room.”
When drowning in an actual body of water, the thrashing around only steals our energy away, pulling us under through sheer exhaustion. When we stop panicking, we realize that we’re quite buoyant just as we are, no flailing required. When we become the seer behind the memories or the flooding feelings, we can float on the current of our life experiences. Or we can get out of the water and watch from the banks, usually realizing that our feet could touch the floor all along.
I asked that part for some room. Space was created within. I could feel the invading blotches on my face receding. Air filled my lungs.
Ocean Vuong transforms generations of terrifying overwhelms into moments with space—lyrical and soft, thoughtful and transcendent. A Guardian piece about him from 2022 shares that he feels at his best “when the world has kind of knocked me down and I’ve decided, maybe after weeping in the dark, finally to get up off the ground and ask - now what?” Writing is the practice of giving the overwhelmed parts space. We step back and look at them.
I had a breakthrough this year with my therapist when she helped me label a part that was always trying to make meaning and solve the feeling. “There’s nothing to solve,” she tried to tell me. I got angry and fought back. “That’s a part too.” That’s a part that’s worried I’ll forget again and slip back into the zombie-like trance of my 20s when I couldn’t see how the fragmented parts of my childhood added up to the chaos, despair, and addictions of my adult life. “That part doesn’t want me to forget. It doesn’t want me to go back,” I cried. Ocean Vuong must have received that teaching a little earlier in his life than I did—that there’s nothing to solve. Just being the seer is enough. “When we are in trouble collectively we don’t want context and plot. A poem makes the most sense because there is no fluff. It goes right in and gets to what we are all feeling.” Vuong knows that just sitting with and seeing the feeling is the whole point—is art. Is magic. Is why we’re here. Just feel it. Name it. Share it.
The author of the Guardian piece wrote, “To say that Vuong is a poet born of war is not merely a figure of speech.” His mother was a literal outcome of the Vietnam War—having been born to a Vietnamese woman and an American man. She fled to the Philippines with her baby, Ocean, and they eventually landed in Hartford, Connecticut, where the novel takes place.
Vuong knows that we hopeless humans haven’t beaten war. We haven’t figured it out. Violence, addiction, yearning, seeking, surviving…these are all parts of life. The mystery of it all could, and probably should, really drive us all to the brink of insanity-but the seeing, and seeing it written out on the page, pulls us back.
I first started to consider the ways that the violence of war is inextricably linked to the violence at home behind closed doors upon reading trauma researcher Judith Herman’s book Trauma and Recovery. "The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom."
War had seemed so far away for me, a child of the prosperous 1980s United States of America. It was intangible. But addiction was near and dear. I couldn’t connect the ways my ancestors fled their war-torn homelands seeking a better life, bringing their traumas with them, getting blood on their hands in the process, pillaging land and lives as they pursued their own peace, with the way I wanted to, as Vuong puts it, consume “everything you could crush into a white powder.” I couldn’t see how those things fit together and so I carried the weight of personal shame around with me along with the accompanying inner voice taunting me to just drown already.
Vuong doesn’t tell the story of how the pieces fit together. He shares the intensity of feelings and relationships and moments. In them we sense the story—we can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch it. It coalesces into a whole narrative, the reader filling in the blanks.
The blanks I can best fill in are the depths of despair and depravity at the bottom of the ocean of addiction. Way, way down there at the bottom, in the pitch black, is the simple yearning for “ma,” who the novel’s protagonist writes to. We yearn for the wholeness of complete love—whole attention, whole wanting, whole belonging. The white powders get us there when we can’t seem to find the way or when the way was never paved for us. Addiction is “one of the most human things. It is the body and the mind deciding to find a way out. We have this desire to be OK, to feel better and that amplifies the horror all around us.”
“The strays beyond the railroad are barking, which means something, a rabbit or possum, has just slipped out of its life and into the world. The piano notes seep through the boy’s chest as he makes his way to the backyard. Because something in him knew she’d be there. That she was waiting. Because that’s what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.”
The thing that brought me to my knees, brought me to therapy for the real first time—ready to heal, was a sudden illumination that my sense of not belonging didn’t belong to me—I was a part of a vast network of non belongers. I fit a pattern, a mold. My brain did exactly what everyone else’s did. “Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation,” was the line of a David Whyte poem that called to me at that time. “You must note the way the soap dish enables you, or the window latch grants you freedom.” The seeing. In the seeing is belonging to this world.
“If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.”
And I think we get to see the gorgeousness of it all only briefly.
