Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once. “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” said Edgar Allan Poe, who must not have imagined it from the perspective of women who prefer to live.

The struggle to find a poetry in which your survival rather than your defeat is celebrated, perhaps to find your own voice to insist upon that, or to at least find a way to survive amidst an ethos that relishes your erasures and failures is work that many and perhaps most young women have to do.

The fight wasn’t just to survive bodily, though that could be intense enough, but to survive as a person possessed of rights, including the right to participation and dignity and a voice. More than survive, then: to live.

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 changed too; the person who moved out in the twenty-first century was not that person who’d arrived all those years before. There is a thread of continuity. The child is mother of the woman, but so much happened, so much changed, that I think of that spindly, anxious young woman as someone I knew intimately, someone I wish I could have done more for, someone I feel for as I often do for the women her age I meet now; that long-ago person was not exactly me, not like me at all in crucial ways, but me anyway, an awkward misfit, a daydreamer, a restless wanderer.

Childhood fades gradually in some ways, never ends in others; adulthood arrives in small, irregular installments if it arrives; and every person is on her own schedule, or rather there is none for the many transitions.

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. 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. Youth is a high-risk business.

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

It was they who taught me that a conversation even between strangers could be a gift and a sport of sorts, a chance for warmth, banter, blessings, humor, that spoken words could be a little fire at which you warmed yourself.

The one I remembered best was about when he was a youth just entering his teens and the Barrow Gang—Bonnie and Clyde and their associates—were in the house when he and his parents came back from the fields. The gang of bank robbers was there because in a segregated society the last place you would look for white outlaws was among black people. The gang reportedly did this with at least one other black sharecropper family in Oklahoma, and I later heard that another legendary gangster, Pretty Boy Floyd, also hid out among black homes in that time when the bank robbers were folk heroes of a sort. On that visit to the Youngs’ family home, they left a ten-dollar gold piece on the table or the dresser. His mother didn’t want to take stolen money, but his father said, “The children need shoes for winter.” There were two visits. That time or another time they came home from the fields and the gang was at their table, helping themselves to food.

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.

The texture of that bygone life seems hard to convey now: the solitude of a wanderer in the city who could wait for a bus or a taxi to come by or find a phone booth to call a taxi or a friend from a memorized number or by asking the operator or by looking it up in the ruffled tissue-thin pages of the phone book if there was one there, dangling in its black case from the metal cord; who’d look for what she wanted in many stores before the internet meant that you could pinpoint things without getting out of bed, back when there were fewer chain stores and more variety. 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.

Change is the measure of time, and I discovered that in order to see change you had to be slower than it, and that by living in one place for a quarter century, it became visible to me. Gradually. Not at first. People came and went in the building I stayed in, and many of the transient inhabitants imagined that they were passing through a stable neighborhood, but they were part of what was changing it, a river of people scouring out the place, making it less and less black, more and more middle class.

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.

Of course with lovers and boyfriends, uncertainty could keep craving alive (and with the more reliable and kinder men, that metamorphosed into that other kind of attachment we call love).

The fourth photograph for the street I lived on was from June 18, 1958, of a house a block and a half away, and it bore this caption: “Curious passersby peer down an alley, alongside 438 Lyon Street, where the body of Dana Lewis, 22, nude except for a black bra, was found today. Police, after a preliminary examination, said bruises on the victim’s throat indicated that she might have been garroted by a length of rope.” It’s clear her death is a spectacle for the newspaper as well, which describes her in titillating terms, while the passersby are described as curious rather than distressed by the sight of a corpse. She was also known as Connie Sublette, and it turns out her death got a lot of attention in the papers at the time. Mostly, the accounts blamed her for it, because she was a sexually active young bohemian who drank. SEAMAN DESCRIBES CASUAL SLAYING, said one headline, with the tag PLAYGIRL VICTIM. SLAYING CLOSES SORDID LIFE OF PLAYGIRL said another, in which sordid seems to mean that she had sex, adventures, and sorrows, and playgirl means she deserved it.

It felt ubiquitous then. It still does. You could be harmed a little—by insults and threats that reminded you you were not safe and free and endowed with certain inalienable rights—or more by a rape, or more by a rape-kidnapping-torture-imprisonment-mutilation, more yet by murder, and the possibility of death always hung over the other aggressions. 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. All the worst things that happened to other women because they were women could happen to you because you were a woman. Even if you weren’t killed, something in you was, your sense of freedom, equality, confidence.

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.

The former Marine David J. Morris, author of a book on post-traumatic stress disorder, notes that the disorder is far more common and far more rarely addressed among rape survivors than combat veterans. He wrote me, “The science on the subject is pretty clear: according to the New England Journal of Medicine, rape is about four times more likely to result in diagnosable PTSD than combat. Think about that for a moment—being raped is four times more psychologically disturbing than going off to a war and being shot at and blown up. And because there are currently no enduring cultural narratives that allow women to look upon their survival as somehow heroic or honorable, the potential for enduring damage is even greater.”

I felt hemmed in, hunted. Over and over, women and girls were attacked not for what they’d done but because they were at hand when a man wished to—to punish is the word that comes to mind, though for what might linger as a question. Not for who but for what they were. We were. But really for who he was, a man who had the desire and believed he had the right to harm women. To demonstrate that his power was as boundless as her powerlessness.

Which was a reminder that 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. They protected what was theirs to protect or destroy, and sometimes the plot was about his grief that he’d failed to protect, or his revenge against other men, and sometimes he destroyed her himself, and the story was still about him.* She was dead even before she was a corpse; she was a surface, a satellite, an accessory. In comics, the violent death of a woman as a plot device in a story focused on a man was so common that women coined a term for it, fridging, after the 1999 website Women in Refrigerators documenting the plethora of gruesome endings for female characters.

As I write, there are new TV serials about the horrific torture-murder-dismemberment of women. One flirts around the periphery of the torture-death of twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles in 1947 that was given the unduly elegant name “Black Dahlia murder”; the other is about the 1970s serial torturer, rapist, and murderer Ted Bundy, played by a handsome young star. It’s far from the first movie about Bundy, and the L.A. murder of Short has begotten a small publishing industry unto itself. When Givenchy came out with a Dahlia Noir perfume, advertised with the slogan “the fatal flower,” I wondered if it meant that women should aspire to smell like a mutilated corpse.

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. Besides, in these cases, crazy is often a euphemism for unbearable suffering. So it didn’t make me crazy; it made me unbearably anxious, preoccupied, indignant, and exhausted.

It was popular in the media and polite conversation to pretend that murderers and rapists were marginal men, them and not us, but during that time a white man who was a bank vice president strangled a teenage sex worker in my suburban hometown not quite thirty miles north of San Francisco while his wife and daughters were at Girl Scout camp. It was the era of the Night Stalker and the middle-aged white man known as the Trailside Killer (who raped and killed women hikers on the trails I hiked on) and the Pillowcase Rapist and the Beauty Queen Killer and the Green River Killer and the Ski Mask Rapist and many other men who rampaged up and down the Pacific Coast without nicknames.

We often say silenced, which presumes someone attempted to speak. In my case, it wasn’t a silencing because no speech was stopped; it never started, or it had been stopped so far back I don’t remember how it happened. 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.

That it might be too unsafe to do was something I wasn’t willing to accept, though everyone else seemed more than willing to accept it on my behalf. Be a prisoner, they urged cheerfully; accept your immobility, wall yourself up like an anchorite!

I knew of no way to say No, I’m not interested, that would not be inflammatory, and so there was nothing to say. There was no work words could do for me, and so I had no words. Usually I’d look down, say nothing, avoid eye contact, do my best to be as absent, unobtrusive, insignificant as possible—invisible as well as inaudible—since I was afraid of that escalation. Even my eyes had to learn deferential limits. I erased myself as much as possible, because to be was to be a target.

I was often told that I was imagining things, or exaggerating, that I was not believable, and 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. When no one else seems to trust you, it’s hard to trust yourself, and if you do, you pit yourself against them all; either of those options can make you feel crazy and get called crazy. Not everyone has the backbone for it. When your body is not your own and the truth is not your own, what is?

All those years, I noticed the little stories tucked away on newspaper back pages, given a paragraph or two, mentioned in passing on broadcasts, about dismembered sex workers and murdered children and tortured young women and long-term captives, about wives and children slain by husbands and fathers, and the rest, each one treated as an isolated incident or at least something that was not part of any pattern worth naming. I connected the dots, saw an epidemic, talked and wrote about the patterns I saw, waited three decades for it to become a public conversation.

I think that a lot of girls and young women have this yearning that is part desire to have a man and part desire to be him, to merge with this force, to be where power is, to be powerful, to cleave unto it in the self or by bringing your body to it as an offering and as a quest for transmission. To be the armor and not what’s vulnerable behind it.

Sometimes having a body seemed to be the problem, having a body that exposed me to danger and potential harm and also to shame and shortcomings and the problems of how to connect and how to fit in, whatever that meant, whatever feeling I imagined people who were confident about their bodies and their movements and their memberships felt. Having a body of my gender was a vulnerability and shame so vast that I still find myself casting about for defenses, for versions of that armor I dreamed of in my twenties.

No one is ever beautiful enough, and everyone is free to judge you. In her memoir Under My Skin, Doris Lessing describes how, when she was a young woman at a dance, a middle-aged stranger told her that she had an almost perfect body but one breast was a third of an inch too high or too low—I can’t remember which, just that a stranger thought her body was under his jurisdiction and announced what must have been a wholly imaginary fault to demonstrate his right and capacity to render judgment and her subjection to it.

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.

It’s no wonder I was thin, no wonder women were so praised for being thin, for taking up as little room as possible, for hovering on the brink of vanishing, no wonder some of us vanished through undereating like a country ceding territory, an army retreating, until it ceased to exist.

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.”

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. It’s built into the culture in so many ways. Your mother’s maiden name is often requested as the answer to a security question by banks and credit card companies, because it’s assumed her original name is secret, erased, lost as she took on the name of a husband. It’s no longer universal for women to give up their names but still rare to pass them on if they’re married, one of the ways women vanish or never appear.

This had real consequences. They are endless but a few come to mind: heart attacks were described by how they affected men, so that women’s symptoms were less likely to be recognized and treated, a situation from which many women died; crash test dummies replicated male bodies, meaning that vehicular safety design favored male survival, and women died at higher rates. The Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971 presumed that the behavior of young men at an elite university could be universalized to stand for that of all humanity, and William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, about a group of younger British schoolboys, was also often cited as an example of how humans behave. If men were everyone, then women were no one.

It is so normal for places to be named after men (mostly white men) and not women that I didn’t notice it until, in 2015, I made a map renaming places after women and realized I’d grown up in a country where almost everything named after a person—mountains, rivers, towns, bridges, buildings, states, parks—was named after a man, and nearly all the statues were of men. Women were allegorical figures—liberty and justice—but not actual people.

When I wrote my book on walking almost twenty years later, I quoted Sylvia Plath, who declared when she was nineteen, “Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.” Reading the passage long after I’d put it in the book, I wondered about who she might have been if she’d had the freedom of the city, as they used to call it, and of the hills, and of the night, of how her suicide in her kitchen at thirty must have been in part from the confinement of women in domestic spaces and definitions.

Children are diurnal animals. Nocturnal life to a newcomer to adulthood was almost synonymous with the new world of sensuality and sexuality, of freedom of movement and exploration, with a lingering sense that the rules fade a little when the sun goes down. Nightlife. Nightclubs. Nightmares. Patti Smith’s first hit, “Because the Night,” had come out only a few years earlier, telling us that the night belongs to lovers and to love. Love is made mostly in dimness or darkness, and darkness—the failure of sight, the most rational of the senses, the awakening of the other senses, the otherworldliness that the world takes on when it turns away from the sun and faces out into the galaxy—can itself be an erotic embrace.

In the myths, women keep turning into other things, because being a woman is too difficult, too dangerous.

I’d learned it in the same introductory class where we read Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” which I can see now is creepily specific about the details of a god in the form of a bird raping a woman. “How can those terrified vague fingers push / The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?” That so many Greek myths are about rape and women trying to escape it never came up.

Mostly I wandered in books on my own, or read what was given me, an indiscriminate omnivore then, as the young often are with people as well: not sure what their criteria are, what feeds them and what discourages them. So I read what came my way and then learned enough to trace paths through the forests of books, learn landmarks and lineages.

I also struggled secretly against the men around me who were convinced that they were the artists and I was the audience. Young women like me were supposed to exist as orbital figures, planets around a sun, moons around a planet. Never stars.

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. Other times it is not the propaganda or the political art that helps you face a crisis but whatever gives you respite from it.

Despite that Lewis book, I soaked up novels’ impossibly dramatic notions of love and romance and their myths of completion and ending. And I got something most women got, an experience of staring at women across a distance or being in worlds in which they barely existed, from Moby-Dick to Lord of the Rings.

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, that empathy that is a capacity to shape-shift and roam out of your sole self. One of the convenient afflictions of power is a lack of this imaginative extension. For many men it begins in early childhood, with almost exclusively being given stories with male protagonists.

The term double consciousness is sometimes used for black experience in a white culture. W. E. B. DuBois famously wrote in the last years of the nineteenth century (and wrote, as so many men did up through at least James Baldwin, as though all people were men or even one man) “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.” Perhaps there should be another term for never looking through the eyes of others, for something less conscious than even single consciousness would convey.

DuBois’s framework found an echo in John Berger’s 1972 Ways of Seeing, when Berger imagined, with generosity and brilliance, what it was to be something he had never been: “To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage with such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continuously accompanied by her own image of herself. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.”