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.

“Part of what keeps you sitting in that chair in that room enduring harassment or abuse from a man in power is that, as a woman, you have rarely seen another end for yourself. In the novels you’ve read, in the films you’ve seen, in the stories you’ve been told since birth, the women so frequently meet disastrous ends.”

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.

But the desk I sit at is a desk given to me by a woman who a man tried to murder, and it seems time to tell what it meant to me to grow up in a society in which many preferred people like me to be dead or silent and how I got a voice and how it eventually came time to use that voice—that voice that was most articulate when I was alone at the desk speaking through my fingers, silently—to try to tell the stories that had gone untold.

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.

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.”

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?

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.

“Sexual harassment is the great male performative, the act through which a man aims to convince his target not only that he is the one with the power—which is true—but also that his power and his sexuality are one and the same thing.”

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.

But it wasn’t weather; it wasn’t nature; it wasn’t inevitable and immutable.

Those men conducted a conversation, sometimes a shouting match, with my silence. They shouted I owed them words, obedience, deference, sexual services.

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.

So much of what makes young women good targets is self-doubt and self-effacement.

“It was the most devastating discovery of my life that I had no real right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness out of doors, that the world was full of strangers who seemed to hate me and wished to harm me for no reason other than my gender, that sex so readily became violence, and that hardly anyone else considered it a public issue rather than a private problem,”

Men were always telling me what to do and be; once in my emaciated youth I was walking through North Beach eating a pastry from one of the Italian bakeries when a portly middle-aged man chastised me for eating it because I should be watching my weight. Men told me to smile, to suck their dicks, and when I owned an old car with loose battery cables, men would wander by to tell me what needed fixing when I threw up the hood to wiggle the battery cables, and the ones who spoke were always wrong and never seemed to notice I already knew what I was doing.

The problem isn’t really with bodies, but with the relentless scrutiny to which they’re subjected. The problem is being a woman. Or being a woman subject to men.

It’s written in pencil on a large sheet of now-yellowed newsprint whose bottom half has the wide-ruled lines for beginning writers, and I’m pretty sure it’s my first essay, from first grade. In its entirety, it reads, “When I grow up I will never get married.” The illustration on the top half shows a man in a red shirt whose black hair wraps like a nimbus around his circular head and a yellow-haired woman in a flounced purple skirt. “Get married with me,” he says in a cartoon balloon, and she says, “No, no.”

That is, I had to fight to convince others, in both personal and professional life, to grant me the capacity to perceive events with a reasonable degree of accuracy, and the frequency of this experience sowed self-doubt in me, so the struggle was not only with others.

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.

as though the fact that not all men are awful outweighs the reality that some are in ways that impact her.

“When a homophobic man taunts a gay man, he almost invariably does so by comparing him in unfavorable terms to a woman.”

Gay men were despised for being men who had, in the imaginings of homophobes, chosen to be like women. Like women in being penetrated, when being penetrated was seen as being conquered, invaded, humiliated. Like straight women in being subject to men (though nonstraight women who were not subject to men upset them too; they upset easily).

Inside homophobia is misogyny: the act of being a man is a constant striving to not be a woman. If what a man does to a woman, or to anyone he penetrates, is imagined as violating and despoiling her, humiliation and degradation come to be indistinguishable from sexuality or a proxy for it in the puritanical imagination.

James Baldwin famously wrote, “If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.”

Growing up, we say, as though we were trees, as though altitude was all that there was to be gained, but so much of the process is growing whole as the fragments are gathered, the patterns found.

Encouragement not to make people feel good, but to make them feel powerful.

At the Nevada Test Site I learned that you deal with the worst things by facing them directly. If you run away from them, they chase you; if you ignore them, they catch you unprepared; and it’s in facing them that you find allies and powers and the possibility of winning.