Hieu Minh Nguyen's "Heavy"

Thoughts on shame and generosity.

Heavy

The narrow clearing down to the river
I walk alone, out of breath

my body catching on each branch.
Small children maneuver around me.

Often, I want to return to my old body
a body I also hated, but hate less

given knowledge.
Sometimes my friends—my friends

who are always beautiful & heartbroken
look at me like they know

I will die before them.
I think the life I want

is the life I have, but how can I be sure?
There are days when I give up on my body

but not the world. I am alive.
I know this. Alive now

to see the world, to see the river
rupture everything with its light.

from Not Here (Coffee House, 2018)

---

In his poem, “Badgers,” Seamus Heaney writes:

How perilous is it to choose
not to love the life we're shown?

It’s a question that pops into my head often, in exactly Heaney’s words. I wonder sometimes if I disagree with him, but then I realize that it’s a question, not necessarily a challenge. It’s a question, I think, that stems from the fact that it’s hard, sometimes, to love this life. It’s hard when life feels relentlessly mundane or relentlessly difficult or relentlessly unlike what someone says it should be or, well, just relentless. And I think Heaney was wondering about what it might mean to say you don’t love this life. Or what it might mean to insist that you do.

I thought of this line the moment I read today’s poem by Hieu Minh Nguyen and encountered the question at the heart of it:

I think the life I want

is the life I have, but how can I be sure?

I love that uncertainty — that desire to ask big questions and wonder towards the impossibility of an answer. I love a poem where people are “beautiful & heartbroken,” not because I love their heartbreak, but because I recognize that such a way of being is a way of life, sadly, in our society right now, where people must, day after day, be confident in the beauty of their humanity while parts of the world challenge or mock that very humanity.

This is a poem, in part — since it is also about so much else — about dysmorphia. It’s there in the title, and in these lines:

Often, I want to return to my old body
a body I also hated, but hate less

given knowledge.

Years ago, I wrote an essay about my own experience of body dysmorphia, which was exacerbated by being a competitive runner, and spending so much time in a world that aligned toward such a specific type of body that was thinner and leaner than mine. In it, I wrote:

Years before, in high school, my coach had told me I could stand to lose a few pounds. Then, in college, one of my teammates said, “You’re not fat, you’re just …” before trailing off. I began to understand a few things. I looked in the mirror and saw someone society might’ve deemed as lean or athletic, but someone who was too big, too thick around the bones to be taken seriously as a competitive college runner…I was never satisfied in a terrible way. Nights of impromptu diets, nights of less food, nights spent running secret miles around the block. Nights like this, willed against my body, willed for my body, until I looked in the mirror and saw six hard lumps protruding out of my abdomen, then immediately wished that they were more pronounced, that a creek bed ran between them. I bought a scale and began to measure myself daily, but even then I did not know what to do with this information, with all these numbers. Where was the lowest point I could reach? What was ideal? When would it stop? I didn’t know where to put it. I wanted to put it down, but I couldn’t. I still really can’t.

I could rationalize — and still can — that my body was lean, but, compared to people I lined up against to race, I felt fat. Now, a decade removed from that environment, I still feel its effects. I have a hard time seeing myself in photos, no matter how much I tell myself to love my body, and love myself. This is part of the complication of any narrative of self love. It is, quite simply, hard. Hard to tell yourself that you love yourself, and harder still to believe.

It’s why I’m drawn to Nguyen’s lines above — when he writes “I want to return to my old body,” one that he “hate[s] less.” Those are familiar moments that sometimes feel like failures of confidence but are really proof of the ongoing complexity of humanness. They show the way growth is not really linear, like so many say it is — progress toward a goal. They show the way growth is really just, well, growth. Growing older and moving deeper into an understanding of a life that doubles back and complicates and doubts and, even still, tries to love.

One complicated thing about shame is that I sometimes shame myself for these “failures of confidence” — these moments when I, looking into the mirror, want some lost body I used to have, rather than the one I’m struggling to love now. These moments when I hate my past self less, which means I hate myself more. I shame myself for not following some agreed-upon narrative of self-love. This shame is real. I was reminded of it while reading Donald Antrim’s recent memoir, in which he defines shame as a “condition of those who have been neglected, harmed, cast out.” And I think of that shame of self, the one that occurs in me when I feel like I shouldn’t be wanting something from my past that was also something harmful, the shame that occurs in me when I don’t live entirely in the present, as people like to say. This shame feels like a moment when my own feelings are neglected, cast away from a narrative of progress, capital, and linearity that doesn’t contain or account for the whole complexity of ourselves.

It’s this shame, maybe that prompts that question from Nguyen’s poem:

I think the life I want

is the life I have, but how can I be sure?

Shame muddies our certainty. It throws all of ourselves against the backdrop of the world and makes it difficult to remember what we want, what we need, and what we love. And I think this shame is exacerbated by living in a society that continually markets new ways for us to live. Not just for us to live. But how we should live. It’s a society that commodifies our attention and then, once it has our attention, throws our attention away from our ordinariness, which is also our complexity, which is also our wholeness.

This makes me think, too, not just of Heaney’s question, but also the oft-quoted one from Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day”:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

It’s funny, though, since this question often suffers from being taken out of the context of the poem. I’ve seen it used as a motivation for action, which is sometimes the same thing as a push for progress, rather than attention, or curiosity. Sometimes it is used as an urgent reminder to move, to go into motion, to focus on your goals, make a five year plan, think about where you will be in ten years — all those various things that go into the marketing of the self and the commodification of attention I named above. But consider the lines that come before:

I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

I do know how to pay attention…to be idle and blessed…which is what I have been doing all day. Rather than an advertisement for progress, Oliver’s poem is a meditation about what it might mean to spend a life “idle and blessed,” to work against urgency — which is the same urgency that contributes to expectations that make people hate. Hate their bodies. Hate themselves. I feel echoes of Oliver at the end of Nguyen’s poem:

There are days when I give up on my body

but not the world. I am alive.
I know this. Alive now

to see the world, to see the river
rupture everything with its light.

I think Nguyen’s move here — to “give up on my body // but not the world” — is an act of radical generosity. It reminds me that the world is not just the small movement of my body through the world. That the world is not just the gravity I push against, or the way I feel about myself. That the world is a larger, more luminous thing — something living and full of light. This generosity reminds me that, when I am feeling vulnerable, or raw, when I feel battered by expectation or not worthy of love, when my most pressing desire is to find a lonely corner of the world and cultivate my loneliness there like a little plant that feeds itself in the dark, then I can turn toward the world and find a salve of light. Which is what all light is — a salve.

It’s funny, revisiting that essay I wrote about my own dysmorphia. I wrote that almost three years ago, in the summer before it was published. Writing it, I felt that almost miraculous surprise that arises in me when I’ve had the opportunity and willingness to interrogate myself and my values and my experiences in an honest way. In other words: I learned something about my own relationship to myself, my body, and what I value. There was a liberating feeling that came when I wrote that essay, a sense that I might move toward a life of more grace and generosity, one where I treated my relationship with my body differently.

The truth is that I do have a more complex and aware relationship with my body, but it is not one that is fundamentally devoid of conflict. I still pull the waistband of my running shorts high up to hide what I feel is the excess of weight I’ve gained, and I still do this even though I know that it’s okay — it’s okay that I’ve gained weight, not even considering the struggle of knee surgery and the near-year of not running. It’s just okay. It is. But me telling myself that and me listening to that voice to enact, almost immediately, a more graceful relationship with my body — those are two different things. And the latter is harder, more complicated work, one that is tied up in shame, and confidence, and the relentless urgency of a society that forgets Mary Oliver’s blessed idleness and only focuses, instead, on the doing.

This is why I appreciate Nguyen’s reminder to turn toward light, to simply remind myself that I am alive, in the company of so much light. As I write this, I’m spending a day along the coast. I just looked up from my computer to see the fins of what must have been four dolphins glide out of the water and then back into it. It just happened, as I sit here trying to parse through my own shame and my own body. Can you believe that? That the world conspires to be so easy to love, so full of such light? That it does this every day? It’s a generosity I have no words for. I aspire toward it, struggle, fall back, and aspire again. Blessed idleness. Dolphins. The light shining in a series of perfect trapezoids through the window and onto the floor. The plants that will need watering when I get back home. The body I have. And yours. What we all struggle with, and struggle more, and still continue trying to love.