Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

My university interlocutor had accused me of offering palliatives for marketing reasons, but what I’d wanted to offer is encouragement, a word that, though it carries the stigma of niceness, literally means to instill courage. Encouragement not to make people feel good, but to make them feel powerful. I’d eventually realize that what I was doing could equally be characterized as stealing away the best excuse for doing nothing: that you have no power and nothing you do matters. It was nurture of people’s sense of possibility, and it was dissent from a lot of the most familiar narratives in which despair and cynicism—that weird formula in which overconfidence about outcome undermines one’s will to play a role—justify nonparticipation. Something profound had shifted for me to feel capable of changing minds and responsible for tending to hearts. A sense of powerlessness and disconnectedness had faded away and a sense of possibility had replaced it, about my own capacity and role as well as about the way that change itself works.