“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
– Kurt Vonnegut –
—
I didn’t watch Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time like a fan.
I watched it like someone recognising himself in another man’s ruin.
Kurt Vonnegut has always been my favourite author.
But watching this film, I didn’t see an icon.
I saw a man
who turned grief into absurdity
and loss into comedy,
not because life is funny,
but because it’s unbearable.
He laughed not because things were joyful,
but because he needed a language that wouldn’t fall apart
under the weight of what he’d seen.
At the very end of the film,
he turns to the camera and says,
“Hooray, let’s do it again.”
And I broke.
Because I’ve lived that contradiction.
That quiet, gnawing split
between pretending everything is okay
and trying to find joy anyway.
Between making people laugh
and carrying your own silence home at night.
Between smiling at the very people who’ve disappointed you,
and checking in on people who just broke your heart.
There’s something cruelly tender about it…
this habit of protecting everyone else from your own pain.
Making sure no one feels bad.
No one feels guilty.
Making sure everyone sees the version of you
that’s helpful, charming, composed.
Useful.
That’s the part people always remember: The Mask.
The safety. The clarity.
The comfort I gave them.
But never the man beneath it.
I don’t think they’ll miss me.
I think they’ll miss the way I made them feel.
And I suppose that’s the part of me
I’ve gotten used to watching them walk away
once they are done with me.
That’s why the film hurt.
Because Vonnegut didn’t just wear that mask.
He mastered it.
He made the world laugh, made them feel less alone.
He gave people permission
to feel absurd and wounded and human.
And they loved him for it.
But I don’t think many of them saw him.
After Breakfast of Champions,
he started writing more personal, raw,
fractured things.
And people drifted away.
They missed the man
who once gave them clarity through chaos.
But the director, Robert Weide, he missed Kurt.
The man behind the brilliance.
The man who wasn’t always trying to be profound,
just trying to live.
To be loved.
To be left alone.
There’s a moment in the film where Weide admits
he was once afraid the friendship
would get in the way of the film.
But by the end,
he was afraid the film
was getting in the way of the friendship.
That line wrecked me.
Because maybe
what I’ve wanted most in this life isn’t admiration.
It’s that.
Someone who doesn’t want
the version of me that performs.
Just… me.
—
Vonnegut wrote to survive himself.
Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions
they weren’t just books.
They were rituals.
Ways to get the ghosts out without letting them take over.
He made the unbearable readable.
He turned war and death
and mental collapse into something almost funny,
not because it was…
but because making it funny was the only way to live with it.
I understand that.
I write random stories I never publish.
Songs I’ll never record.
Melodies no one will ever hear.
Heck, I’ve been working on a novella every day for over a year,
and I’m only in chapter four.
By the time I finish, in God knows how many years,
I’ll just shut my laptop and set it on fire.
Reading, or just sitting back and enjoying music,
will probably be obsolete by then.
Like licking stamps.
Or shaking hands.
But I’ll write and compose anyway.
Not under my real name, of course.
I use a pseudonym.
Because it’s the only place
where I don’t have to be the useful one.
The wise one.
The composed one.
I can just… bleed a little.
Quietly.
Safely.
Sometimes,
I don’t even know if I’m confronting the pain
or trying to deny it by dressing it up in metaphor.
I just know that writing keeps me from dissolving.
It’s a kind of emotional recycling…
grief in, story or song out.
For a long time, I think I wrote for people too.
Not because I wanted applause.
But because I wanted them to understand me.
Not the me they laughed with.
Not the one who always knew what to say.
But the quiet, hidden version,
the one I never quite knew how to let them hold.
I didn’t need them to praise the writing.
Or say that my songs are nice.
I just wanted them to say: “I understand.”
But they’re gone now.
Or they will be. Sooner or later.
And still — I write.
Because maybe there’s someone else out there
who will read what I write and whisper: “Yes. I get you.”
And, “I am not going anywhere.”
Or maybe not.
Maybe writing is the only place I’ll ever feel fully real.
And maybe that’s okay too.
—
That final moment of the film,
Vonnegut turning to the camera and saying,
“Hooray. Let’s do it again”
It stayed with me
like a bruise you don’t notice until someone touches it.
Was he being ironic? Hopeful? Resigned?
I don’t think it matters.
Because in that one line, I heard everything at once:
the pain, the joy, the absurdity,
the stubborn love for a life that never quite loved him back.
And somehow, I get it.
I look at my own life.
This stupid, aching, beautiful thing
full of heartbreak and letdowns
and quiet moments nobody notices, and I think…
Yes.
Even with all of it.
Let’s do it again.
Not because it didn’t hurt.
But because it was mine.
And because, in some strange way,
it was worth it.
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
Even if it wasn’t true.
Especially because it wasn’t.
That’s what made it beautiful.
That’s what Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time gave me.
Not a biography.
Not a literary retrospective.
But permission.
Permission to carry pain and still laugh.
To be broken and still useful.
To be invisible to almost everyone
and still make something beautiful.
Just in case someone, somewhere, is watching
and understands.
Even if nobody ever does.
Hooray.
Let’s do it again.
Featured image adapted from a photo by Jason An
See more on Unsplash: @JasonAn
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