Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

When I was about eleven there was a shoe store where my mother got me the engineer boots I favored back when I was trying not to be that despised thing, a girl, and was trying to be what seemed like a separate thing, rugged, ready for action,

We need the words, but use them best knowing they are containers forever spilling over and breaking open. Something is always beyond.

Some people have others who will tend and fund and sometimes confine them all their lives, some people are gradually weaned, some of us are cut off abruptly and fend for ourselves, some always did.

You are in your youth walking down a long road that will branch and branch again, and your life is full of choices with huge and unpredictable consequences, and you rarely get to come back to choose the other route.

adulthood, a category into which we put everyone who is not a child, is a constantly changing condition; it’s as though we didn’t note that the long shadows at sunrise and the dew of morning are different than the flat, clear light of noon when we call it all daytime.

As I get older now, even people in their twenties seem like children to me, not in ignorance, but in a kind of newness, a quality of discovering many things for the first time, and of having most of their life ahead of them, and most of all of being engaged in the heroic task of becoming.

There are so many ways people are forced to disappear, uprooted, erased, told that this is not their story and not their place. They pile up in layers like geological strata; Ohlone people had resided for millennia on the San Francisco peninsula before the Spanish came crashing in, and Spain claimed the whole coast and then it became a sparsely inhabited outer edge of an independent Mexico. After California and the Southwest were taken by the United States, the Mexicans resident there were fleeced of their vast ranchos and treated as an underclass, as intruders, or both, though their names stayed on many places, the names of saints and ranchers.

I had first visited the building and met Mr. Young five days after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. The nation, having reached its maximum of economic equality, had voted in someone who was going to reverse direction, stop black progress, reconcentrate wealth in the hands of the few, dismantle the programs that had helped so many rise, create mass homelessness. Crack was soon to come to the city and other cities, and to our neighborhood and our block.

We were subject to the wonders and frustrations of unpredictability and better able to withstand them because time moved at what would only later seem a gentle flow, like a river across a prairie before the waterfall of acceleration we would all tumble over.

We were prepared for encounters with strangers in ways that the digital age would buffer a lot of us from later. It was an era of both more unpredictable contact and more profound solitude.

The city felt like something old and crumpled with dust and treasures caught in its crevices, and then it was smoothed out and swept clean and some of its people were pushed out as though they had themselves been dirt. A junk shop became a high-end pizzeria, a storefront church became a hair salon, a radical bookstore became an eyeglass boutique, and a lot of things became sushi bars. The place became blander, with more chain stores and more cars, and without flyers layered atop each other on telephone poles, without family pharmacies and odd businesses like old temples where the priest still performed the rites whether or not the congregation had moved on.

Memoirs at their most conventional are stories of overcoming, arcs of eventual triumph, personal problems to be taken care of by personal evolution and resolve. That a lot of men wanted and still want to harm women, especially young women, that a lot of people relished that harm, and a lot more dismissed it, impacted me in profoundly personal ways but the cure for it wasn’t personal. There was no adjustment I could make in my psyche or my life that would make this problem acceptable or nonexistent, and there was nowhere to go to leave it behind.

You could be erased a little so that there was less of you, less confidence, less freedom, or your rights could be eroded, your body invaded so that it was less and less yours, you could be rubbed out altogether, and none of those possibilities seemed particularly remote.

My friend Heather Smith remarked to me recently that young women are urged to “never stop picturing their murder.” From childhood onward, we were instructed to not do things—not go here, not work there, not go out at this hour or talk to those people or wear this dress or drink this drink or partake of adventure, independence, solitude; refraining was the only form of safety offered from the slaughter.

Mostly when people write about the trauma of gender violence, it’s described as one awful, exceptional event or relationship, as though you suddenly fell into the water, but what if you’re swimming through it your whole life, and there is no dry land in sight?

I was, we were, not the intended audience for so much art, including the stuff lauded as masterpieces and upheld as canonical. Sometimes the male protagonists protected women, particularly beautiful young white women, from other men, and protector was one face of their power, but destroyer was still the other face, and either one put your fate in their hands.

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.

I was faced with either surrendering my freedom in advance or risking losing it in the worst ways imaginable.

It never occurred to me to speak to the men who pressured me then, because it didn’t occur to me that I had the authority to assert myself thus or that they had any obligation or inclination to respect my assertions, or that my words would do anything but make things worse.

At the art of nonexistence, since existence was so perilous.

The rage: it was as though they expected me to obey strangers, as though any woman belonged to any man, as though everyone, anyone, owned me except me. The words: they had an overabundance, and I had none, even though I lived for and by words the rest of the time.

You can drip one drop of blood into a glass of clear water and it will still appear to be clear water, or two drops or six, but at some point it will not be clear, not be water. How much of this enters your consciousness before your consciousness is changed? What does it do to all the women who have a drop or a teaspoon or a river of blood in their thoughts? What if it’s one drop every day? What if you’re just waiting for clear water to turn red? What does it do to see people like you tortured? What vitality and tranquility or capacity to think about other things, let alone do them, is lost, and what would it feel like to have them back?

I tell all this not because I think my story is exceptional, but because it is ordinary; 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.

Danger wracked my thoughts. Scenarios of attack would arise unbidden, and sometimes I addressed them by imagining winning the combat, usually by means of martial-arts moves I’m not really capable of, and so I killed in order not to be killed over and over during the grimmest years of that era, in imagined scenarios that were intrusive, unwanted, anxiety-driven, a kind of haunting and a way of trying to take control of being haunted.

I’ve done this so many times, I guess we all do!

I didn’t imagine myself as a man but in those moments when I felt swept up by power that surged like confidence and sureness, I didn’t imagine myself as a woman. I wanted to be rugged, invincible, unstoppable, and I didn’t have examples of women who were those things.

As a child, I visualized myself being something competent and well received in the world—I saw myself as a handsome man, even though I realized that was not possible.

Then the nerds were shoved aside for the jocks as a bunch of burly Southern California men’s bands came to dominate what had morphed into hardcore or thrash, and the front of the concert halls and clubs became a gladiatorial arena dominated by strong young men and the occasional woman who would knock you down and trample you if you couldn’t hold your own. It came to seem like another place I didn’t really belong.

My body was a lonely house. I was not always home; I was often elsewhere. I imagined when I was young some science-fiction version of humans becoming brains in jars as a good thing, that our bodies were some sad thing we were mired in rather than instruments of joy, connection, and vitality, the non-negotiable terms of our existence.

Being so thin made me frail, tired, limited in my energies, easily chilled; maybe it made me more of a target: I was the opposite of robust, and all that punk rock was partly an attempt to imbibe a spirit that would counter the frailty, or perhaps it was that my flesh was frail but my spirit was savage. I sometimes think I fled to the city in my youth because to run in the other direction, to the country or the wilderness, would have required a physical vigor that I didn’t have then.

Women’s bodies are usually soft if they’re healthy, at least in some places, and if softness is equated to a moral failing, and virtue to a low-body-fat hardness of surface, then that’s another way in which to be a woman is to be wrong, one that people starve their way out of. Roxane Gay wrote in her book Hunger that “we should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men. . . . And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.”

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 that goes on forever, with no forests relieving it, no mountains rising from it, no doorways inviting you out of it—the dread that nothing will change that somehow coexists with the dread that something terrible is going to happen, that what is joyous cannot be trusted, and what is feared is lying in wait for you.

someone I cherished then as a person I could trust and talk to, perhaps because of who he was or because of who I imagined he was, or how I filled up what I didn’t know about him with what I needed.

Once I found out he was conservative, things that had seemed mysterious or exotic about him when he was young suddenly made sense.

The young writer I met there didn’t know how to speak from the heart, though I could be affectionate. 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, or major events were mentioned in passing in sentences busy doing other things that didn’t matter. She had collected a lot of words, phrases, syntaxes, tones and was trying them out, like someone at the very first stages of playing an instrument, with squawks and clangs. She was speaking in various voices because she didn’t yet know what voice was hers, or rather she had not yet made one.

In the myths, women keep turning into other things, because being a woman is too difficult, too dangerous. Daphne is turned into a laurel as she flees Apollo; I’d known that even before I’d memorized Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden,” including these lines: The gods, that mortal beauty chase, Still in a tree did end their race.

In Philomela’s case, the mutation into a nightingale doesn’t come in time to save her from rape, mutilation, silencing, and imprisonment, but it does save her from murder, if being turned into something other than yourself is survival.

The sheer pleasure of meeting new voices and ideas and possibilities, having the world become more coherent in some subtle or enormous way, extending or filling in your map of the universe, is not nearly celebrated enough, nor is the beauty in finding pattern and meaning. But these awakenings recur, and every time they do there’s joy.

I lived so deeply in books that I felt unanchored and adrift, not particularly part of my own time and place, always with one foot or more in other places, medieval or imaginary or Edwardian.

I did as well when young.

That I might wander into Georgian England or medieval France or the nineteenth-century West or some of the other places in which I had immersed myself, and some sense of this, ridiculous though it sounds, made me hesitate to cut my long hair, and I found encouragement in archaic ideas of beauty to which I thought I measured up more than I did to modern ones.

The term double consciousness is sometimes used for black experience in a white culture.

“the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”

This was something she quoted, but I didn’t highlight the author. Perhaps W.E.B. Du Bois?

but when I turned to books I often turned into a man looking at women. Looking at women as problems or trophies or mildly baleful phenomena with opaque motivations and limited consciousness probably did something to me, and so did being encouraged to identify with the man over and over again, and to live in imagination in places where women were just ornaments in the margins or trophies or broodmares.

Yes

And the task of finding one’s own way must be immeasurably harder when all the heroes, all the protagonists, are not only another gender but another race, or another sexual orientation, and when you find that you yourself are described as the savages or the servants or the people who don’t matter.

You translate words into your own images, faces, places, light and shade and sound and emotion. A world arises in your head that you have built at the author’s behest, and when you’re present in that world you’re absent from your own.

There was nonexistence in living through books as well as many other existences and minds and dreams to inhabit and ways of expanding one’s own imaginative and imaginary existence.

Absolutely

The voice that came out of me when I spoke in social settings and often even to a single friend wore a thousand pounds of armor and was incapable of saying anything direct about emotions, which I was barely feeling or feeling through so many filters I hardly knew what was spinning me around.

But the voice: it was the voice I’d grown up around and learned to emulate and then to promulgate, a voice that strove to be clever, cool, sharp, and amused, to shoot arrows with precision and duck the arrows that came back or pretend they hadn’t stung. It relied on jokes and quips that were often cruel in a game where anyone who was hurt or offended by those jabs was supposed to be lacking in humor or strength or other admirable qualities. I didn’t understand what I was doing, because I didn’t understand that there were other ways to do it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t mean-spirited at times. (Later, I discovered that scathing and mocking reviews were the easiest and most fun kind to write, but I tried to write them only about much-lauded successes.)

There was another kind of humor, or rather a ponderous wit, that was convoluted, full of citations and puns and plays on existing phrases, of circling around, far around, what was happening and what you were feeling. It was as though the more indirect and referential your statemen...

What I had then was a voice that leaned hard on irony, on saying the opposite of what I meant,

Yes

I know that sometimes what gets called digression is pulling in a passenger who fell off the boat.

I wanted English to be an instrument on which many kinds of music could be played.