Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

Beyond every beginning is another beginning, and another and another, but my first ride, eight years later, on the 5 Fulton bus could be a place to start, that bus line that bisects the city, running from downtown, by San Francisco Bay, all the way west out Fulton Street to the Pacific Ocean. The main thrust of this story happens in the middle of that route, in the middle of the city,

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.

The other residents were people whose lives seemed to have not turned out well. I was nineteen and my life had not turned out yet; I was still early in the process of trying to figure out who and how to become, the usual task for someone that age.

I have no regrets about the roads I took, but a little nostalgia for that period when most of the route is ahead, for that stage in which you might become many things that is so much the promise of youth, now that I have chosen and chosen again and again and am far down one road and far past many others. Possibility means that you might be many things that you are not yet, and it is intoxicating when it’s not terrifying.

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 churning ocean and the long sandy beach were another kind of home and another kind of refuge, in the vastness that put my woes and angst in proportion to the sky, the sea, the far horizon, the wild birds flying by. The apartment was my refuge, my incubator, my shell, my anchor, my starting blocks, and a gift from a stranger.

She survived; she was blamed for what happened as victims often were then; there were no legal consequences for the would-be murderer; she moved far from where it happened; she worked for a single mother who was evicted, and who gave her the desk in lieu of wages; and then she gave it to me.

Someone tried to silence her. Then she gave me a platform for my voice. Now I wonder if everything I have ever written is a counterweight to that attempt to reduce a young woman to nothing. All of it has literally arisen from that foundation that is the desktop.

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.

To live in a war that no one around me would acknowledge as a war—I

When your body is not your own and the truth is not your own, what is?

So much of what makes young women good targets is self-doubt and self-effacement. Now I would flag down cars, stand in the middle of the road, make noise, bang on doors, respect my own assessment of the threat, and take any action that seemed likely to get me out of it. I would bother someone, anyone. But I was young and trained not to make a fuss and to let others determine what was acceptable and even to determine what was real. It was many years later that I stopped letting men tell me what had and had not happened.

The threat of violence takes up residence in your mind. The fear and tension inhabit your body. Assailants make you think about them; they’ve invaded your thoughts. Even if none of these terrible things happen to you, the possibility they might and the constant reminders have an impact.

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.

And so there I was where so many young women were, trying to locate ourselves somewhere between being disdained or shut out for being unattractive and being menaced or resented for being attractive, to hover between two zones of punishment in space that was itself so thin that perhaps it never existed, trying to find some impossible balance of being desirable to those we desired and being safe from those we did not.

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.

we were supposed to be so slender as to shade into nonexistence.

reading, as that constant, chronic activity that had taken up so much of my waking hours since I’d learned to read, as being in a book, in a story, in the lives of others and invented worlds and not my own, unbounded by my own body and my own life and my own time and place.

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.

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. There are so many forms of annihilation.

there were books I took up residency in, books I read again and again and then picked up and opened anywhere just to be in that world, with those people, with that author’s vision and voice. Jane Austen’s novels, but also Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books, Frank Herbert’s Dune, eventually E. M. Forster, Willa Cather, and Michael Ondaatje,

I would not call books an escape if that meant that I was only hiding out in them for fear of something else. They were glorious places to be, and they set my mind on fire

But they were not warm, they had no bodies to meet my body, and they would never know me. 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.

the Washington Post’s decision to report on the Pentagon Papers, the material leaked by Daniel Ellsberg to make it clear that the Vietnam War was based on a lie,

A man named James Finn, in the course of writing about being assaulted elsewhere for being gay (and, with his powerful husband, winning the battle), noted, “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). Which means that some heterosexual men and for that matter whole societies, notably ours, imagine sex with women is punitive, damaging, adversarial, an act that enhances his status and demolishes hers. In some cultures the man who penetrates anyone or anything, including another man, retains his stature; it’s the man who allows himself to be penetrated who has fallen from the status of a man (which has made it doubly hard for boys and men who are rape victims).

So many of the thousands of sexual assault accounts I’ve read in recent years include acts that have nothing to do with the bodily satisfaction often presumed to be the goal. It’s a version of love that’s war, the enactment or realization of a set of metaphors in which men’s bodies are weapons and women’s bodies are targets, and queer bodies are hated for blurring the distinction or rejecting the metaphors.

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.

I was beginning to collect stories that illustrated my evolving sense of how the world gets changed and where power lies and what the case for hope is.

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.

It prompted an anonymous commenter at the website LiveJournal to coin the word mansplaining soon after it first appeared,

A writer’s voice is supposed to be hers alone. It’s what makes someone distinct and recognizable, and it’s not quite style and not just tone or subject; it’s something of the personality and the principles of the writer, where your humor and seriousness are located, what you believe in, why you write, who and what you write about, and who you write for.

femicide

??

They had a talent for valuing other things more than productivity and efficiency, the miserable virtues that hustle people past each other and everyday attentiveness and pleasure.