Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

The word adult implies that all the people who’ve attained legal majority make up a coherent category, but we are travelers who change and traverse a changing country as we go.

Sometimes now I envy those people who are at the beginning of the long road of the lives they’ll make, who still have so many decisions ahead as the road forks and forks again. Imagining their trajectories, I picture a real road, branching and branching, and I can feel it, shadowy, forested, full of the anxiety and the excitement of choosing, of starting off without quite knowing where you will end up.

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

the process of wanting often took up far more time and imaginative space than the actual person, place, or thing, or the imaginary thing possessed more power than the real one.

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.

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.

One thing that makes people crazy is being told that the experiences they have did not actually happen, that the circumstances that hem them in are imaginary, that the problems are all in their head, and that if they are distressed it is a sign of their failure, when success would be to shut up or to cease to know what they know. Out of this unbearable predicament come the rebels who choose failure and risk and the prisoners who choose compliance.