Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

In those days, I was trying to disappear and to appear, trying to be safe and to be someone, and those agendas were often at odds with each other.

The names of the colors are sometimes cages containing what doesn’t belong there, and this is often true of language generally, of the words like woman, man, child, adult, safe, strong, free, true, black, white, rich, poor. We need the words, but use them best knowing they are containers forever spilling over and breaking open. Something is always beyond.

I was still early in the process of trying to figure out who and how to become, the usual task for someone that age.

adulthood arrives in small, irregular installments if it arrives; and every person is on her own schedule,

You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally.

Possibility means that you might be many things that you are not yet, and it is intoxicating when it’s not terrifying.

I eyed things and was spurred and pricked and bothered by the promise things make, that this pair of boots or that shirt will make you who you need or want to be, that what is incomplete in you is a hole that can be stuffed with stuff, that the things you have are eclipsed by the things you want, that wanting can be cured by having, beyond having what is essential.

More than anything I wanted transformation not of my nature but of my condition. I didn’t have much of a vision of where I wanted to go, but I knew I wanted to distance myself from where I had come from. Perhaps that was not so much a matter of craving as its opposite, aversion and escape, and perhaps it was why walking was so important to me: it felt like I was getting somewhere.

It was a kind of collective gaslighting. To live in a war that no one around me would acknowledge as a war—I am tempted to say that it made me crazy, but women are so often accused of being crazy, as a way of undermining their capacity to bear witness and the reality of what they testify to.

One thing that makes people crazy is being told that the experiences they have did not actually happen, that the circumstances that hem them in are imaginary, that the problems are all in their head, and that if they are distressed it is a sign of their failure,

this lack of credibility, this distrust of my capacity to represent myself and interpret the world, was part of the erosion of the space in which I could exist and of my confidence in myself and the possibility that there was a place for me in the world and that I had something to say that might be heeded.

It was many years later that I stopped letting men tell me what had and had not happened.

half the earth is paved over with women’s fear and pain, or rather with the denial of them, and until the stories that lie underneath see sunlight, this will not change.

Do you have a right to be there, to participate, to take up space in the world, the room, the conversation, the historical record, the decision-making bodies, to have needs, wants, rights? Do you feel obliged to justify or apologize or excuse yourself to others? Do you fear the ground being pulled out from under you, the door slammed in your face?

Can you state what you want or need without its being regarded, by yourself or those you address, as aggression or imposition?

What does it mean to own some space and feel that it’s yours all the way down to your deepest reflexes and emotions?

Faith in yourself and your rights. Faith in your own versions and truth and in your own responses and needs. Faith that where you stand is your place. Faith that you matter. Those people who have it in full seem rare to me, and clear in a way the rest of us aren’t; they know who and where they are, how and when to respond, what they do and don’t owe others. Neither retreating nor attacking, they reside in a place that doesn’t exist for the rest of us, and it’s not where the overconfident who take up too much space and take space away from others reside.

Perhaps I will always live in questions more than answers. What’s yours? Where are you welcome, allowed? How much room is there for you; where do you get cut off, on the street or in the profession or the conversation?

And I was trying to have a life, including a love life, which meant appearing, attracting, being attracted, and sometimes I enjoyed men, enjoyed my body, my appearance, my time in public.

Conversations are another territory where questions arise about who may take up space, who is interrupted or harassed into silence, that condition of occupying no verbal space. At its best, a conversation is a joy and a collaborative construction, building an idea, an insight, sharing experiences; at its worst it’s a battle for territory, and most women have experiences of being pushed out one way or another, or not let in in the first place, or being assumed not to be qualified to participate.

The problem isn’t really with bodies, but with the relentless scrutiny to which they’re subjected.

We were trained to please men, and that made it hard to please ourselves. We were trained to make ourselves desirable in ways that made us reject ourselves and our desires.

no wonder women were so praised for being thin, for taking up as little room as possible, for hovering on the brink of vanishing,

I was driven, to redeem my existence by achievement, to keep going until I reached a better place (and when I did, the habit was too ingrained for me to slow down), to make something, to stop being what I was and become something else, to meet all the demands placed on me, and of course to meet everyone else’s needs first or instead.

Femininity at its most brutally conventional is a perpetual disappearing act, an erasure and a silencing to make more room for men, one in which your existence is considered an aggression and your nonexistence a form of gracious compliance.

I had and still sometimes have a sense of dread that held down my sense of hope and possibility, a sinking feeling that was a real sensation of heaviness in the chest, as though my heart were encased in lead, as though I were on some planet whose gravity made every step a struggle and the lifting of limbs an onerous exercise and going out among other people an exhausting prospect. It was a feeling in the present that arose from a vision of a future that was no future, one with no way forward, from a conviction that what is terrible will always be terrible, that now is a flat, featureless plain

the dread that nothing will change that somehow coexists with the dread that something terrible is going to happen,

a love of place, a sense that places were embodiments of emotions, were anchors, were companions of a sort, even protectors or parents.

It was an experience of not belonging to the ordinary world and not being bound to it.

But also, she was a jumble of quotations and allusions and foreign phrases and circumlocutions, of archness and pretense and avoidance and confusion, an attempt to use language that kept her so busy that hardly anything got said,

I was building up a body of literature, points of reference for a map of the world, a set of tools to understand that world and myself in it by reading.

I still walk into a bookstore or a library convinced that I might be on the threshold that will open up onto what I most need or desire, and sometimes that doorway appears. When it does, there are epiphanies and raptures in seeing the world in new ways, in finding patterns previously unsuspected, in being handed unimagined equipment to address what arises, in the beauty and power of words.

There were comfortable books, and another kind of comfort in recognizing my own condition or its equivalents and analogies in others, in not being alone in my loneliness and angst.

Sometimes when you are devastated you want not a reprieve but a mirror of your condition or a reminder that you are not alone in it.

I wanted urgency, intensity, excess and extremes, prose and narrative bursting against the confines.

Being so often required to be someone else can stretch thin the sense of self. You should be yourself some of the time. You should be with people who are like you, who are facing what you’re facing, who dream your dreams and fight your battles, who recognize you. And then, other times, you should be like people unlike yourself. Because there is a problem as well with those who spend too little time being anyone else; it stunts the imagination in which empathy takes root,

You learn to think of what you are in terms of what they want, and addressing their want becomes so ingrained in you that you lose sight of what you want, and sometimes you vanish to yourself in the art of appearing to and for others.

You are always somewhere else. You turn into trees and lakes and birds, you turn into muses, whores, mothers, the vessel for others’ desires and the screen for their projections, and in all that it can be hard to turn into yourself, for yourself. Even reading novels by men can instill this, and it did in my case.

men photographed space, but women photographed place.

she stood there as someone with a key to a door I wanted to unlock and pass through.

they were people who had lived their lives as great adventurers, taking risks, not chasing stability, and not regretting it.

Credibility is a basic survival tool.

Mostly we hear from people who survive difficulties or break through barriers and the fact that they did so is often used to suggest the difficulties or barriers were not so very serious or that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Not everyone makes it through, and what tries to kill you takes a lot of your energy that might be better used elsewhere and makes you tired and anxious.

I came to recognize that though looking amazing is usually thought of as either a mildly despicable self-glorification or a straightforward strategy to access sex, it can be a gift to the people around you, a sort of public art and a celebration,

I was learning that who you are and what you do and make and wear and say can be a contribution to people around you, that many of the most valuable gifts are not direct or material or measurable. That even how you live your life can be a gift to others.

How it let me be someone I might not have gotten to be elsewhere.

We collage ourselves into being, finding the pieces of a worldview and people to love and reasons to live and then integrate them into a whole, a life consistent with its beliefs and desires, at least if we’re lucky.

I had always been craving illimitable space.

That was my golden age, not because I had escaped the evils of this world but because I had found ways to think about them and sometimes do something about them,

you can’t assume that you know why what you’re doing matters. You can’t at least declare failure immediately, because consequences are not always direct, or immediate, or obvious, and the indirect consequences matter.