Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

I meet young people now who seem clear about their needs and selves, their emotions and others’ feelings, in ways that seem astonishingly advanced to me. I too was a wayfaring stranger in that country of inner life, and my attempts to orient myself and find a language to describe what was going on within would be slow, stumbling, and painful. If I had luck in all this, it was the luck of being able to continue to evolve, of being someone gradually, imperceptibly changing, sometimes by intention, sometimes by increments and impulses invisible to me. Of being an acorn that kept rolling. In that little apartment I found a home in which to metamorphose, a place to stay while I changed and made a place in the world beyond. I accrued skills and knowledge and eventually friends and a sense of belonging. Or rather I grew to find that the margins could be the richest place, the perch between realms you could enter and exit.

It’s not just that you’re an adolescent at the end of your teens, but that adulthood, a category into which we put everyone who is not a child, is a constantly changing condition; it’s as though we didn’t note that the long shadows at sunrise and the dew of morning are different than the flat, clear light of noon when we call it all daytime. You change, if you’re lucky, strengthen yourself and your purpose over time; at best you are gaining orientation and clarity, in which something that might be ripeness and calm is filling in where the naïveté and urgency of youth are seeping away.

As I get older now, even people in their twenties seem like children to me, not in ignorance, but in a kind of newness, a quality of discovering many things for the first time, and of having most of their life ahead of them, and...

Sometimes I would look down from my bay windows at churchgoers strolling in various directions, sometimes I would stroll through the throngs of people greeting one another before and after service. It was a vitally alive place in those days when the congregations moved through each other toward their places of worship and dispersed back into their homes on foot.

The churches owned their buildings and stayed put, but their members were mostly renters and gradually more and more of them lived somewhere else, and the streets were no longer so lively. Instead of celebratory bustle on the sidewalks, there were lines of double-parked cars near each of them. Then, slowly, the houses of worship also began to vanish, but that was long after those days I was first getting to know the place and its people.

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. The newcomers lived in the space their money secured, not the space that belonged to everyone, and a vitality faded away as the neighborhood became less a neighborhood.

Poverty is sometimes a great preserver of the past, and I lived in a place little altered since its creation. The narrow planks of the yellow-gold oak floors were original, as were the steamy radiator, and the chute on the back stairs through which garbage plummeted two stories into the big can, and the early, tiny, defunct refrigerator built into the wall on one side of the kitchen, by the sinks, across from the built-in sideboard and glass cabinets that rose to the ceiling. A magnificent old Wedgewood stove presided over the kitchen, creamy white enamel with black trim and a black stovepipe making a right angle on its way to the wall. The pilot lights were never relit while I was there, so I collected matchbooks from bars and restaurants, back when smoking was permitted in those places. Being able to cook meals, to have a whole refrigerator, felt luxurious after the residential hotel in which I’d been unable to store and prepare food.

Most of what I owned was older than me, and I relished that; every object was an anchor to the past.

My parents had ingested a deep sense of lack during the Great Depression or out of whatever deprivations their childhoods contained, and they were not interested in sharing their middle-class comfort. I did not trust that they would have bailed me out if something truly horrific had prostrated me, and I was never willing to fall apart enough to find out, so I was not slumming quite the way that a lot of young white people around me were, who could opt out of poverty as easily as they had opted into it. I left it too, but slowly, by my own labors. And as I’d understand better later, by the advantages that had come with my color and my background that made me feel fit, to myself and in the eyes of others, for an education and white-collar work.

Despite all the frills, the old desk is fundamentally sturdy, an eight-legged beast of burden whose back has carried many things over the decades, or two beasts of burden side by side, yoked together by the desktop. The desk has moved with me three times. It’s the surface on which I’ve written millions of words: more than twenty books, reviews, essays, love letters, several thousand emails to my friend Tina during the years of our near-daily epistolary exchange, a few hundred thousand other emails, some eulogies and obituaries, including those of both of my parents, a desk at which I did the homework of a student and then a teacher, a portal onto the world and my platform for reaching out and for diving inward.

A year or so before she gave me the desk, my friend was stabbed fifteen times by an ex-boyfriend to punish her for leaving him. She almost bled to death; she had emergency transfusions; she was left with long scars all over her body, which I saw then without response because whatever capacity to feel had been muffled, maybe when I got habituated to violence at home, maybe because it was something we were supposed to take in stride and be nonchalant about, back when few of us had language to talk about such violence or an audience ready to listen.

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.

There were, however, ways of breaking the silence that was part of the affliction, and that was rebellion, and a coming to life, and a coming into power to tell stories, my own and others’. A forest of stories rather than trees and the writing a charting of some paths through it.

In the arts, the torture and death of a beautiful woman or a young woman or both was forever being portrayed as erotic, exciting, satisfying, so despite the insistence by politicians and news media that the violent crimes were the acts of outliers, the desire was enshrined in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Lars von Trier, in so many horror movies, so many other films and novels and then video games and graphic novels where a murder in lurid detail or a dead female body was a standard plot device and an aesthetic object. Her annihilation was his realization. For the intended audience, it was apparently erotic, because in life women kept getting murdered in the course of sex crimes, and the fear of assault, of rape, was also a fear of violent death.

This.

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.

There’s a kind of indignation I know well, when someone feels that the wrong done them has been unrecognized, and a kind of trauma that makes the sufferer into a compulsive storyteller of an unresolved story. You’ll tell it until someone lifts the curse by hearing and believing you. I’ve been that person with firsthand experiences sometimes, but something of that was what I felt about violence against women in general.

I was told to move to someplace more affluent (though some of my most malevolent harassment occurred in such places), to get a car, to spend money I didn’t have on taxis, to cut my hair, dress as a man or attach myself to a man, to never go anywhere alone, get a gun, learn martial arts, to adapt to this reality, which was treated as something as natural or inevitable as the weather. But it wasn’t weather; it wasn’t nature; it wasn’t inevitable and immutable. It was culture, it was particular people and a system that gave them latitude, looked the other way, eroticized, excused, ignored, dismissed, and trivialized. Changing that culture and those conditions seemed to be the only adequate response. It still does.

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.

Seriously. Folks on the extreme margins have high rates of crime committed against them; they also commit fewer crimes than the general population. It’s been like that for a long fucking time — too long to be ignorant about. People understand this — they don’t care, tho.

I wrote once that I grew up in an inside-out world where everywhere but the house was safe, and everyplace else had seemed safe enough as a child in a subdivision on the edge of the country, where I roamed freely into town or into the hills that were both right out the door.

Once I left home I was almost never in danger inside my home again, but by then home often felt like the only place I was safe.

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.

At the art of nonexistence, since existence was so perilous. It was a strategy hard to unlearn on those occasions when I wanted to approach someone directly. How do you walk right up to someone with an open heart and open arms amid decades of survival-by-evasion? All this menace made it difficult to stop and trust long enough to connect, but it made it difficult to keep moving too, and it seemed sometimes as though it was all meant to wall me up alone at home like a person prematurely in her coffin. Walking was my freedom, my joy, my affordable transportation, my method of learning to understand places, my way of being in the world, my way of thinking through my life and my writing, my way of orienting myself.

At the worst point, I would sleep with the lights and the radio on so it would seem as though I was still alert. (Mr. Young told me men had come by and asked which apartment I lived in, which of course he didn’t tell them, but it fed my nervousness.) I didn’t sleep well and still don’t. I was, as they say of traumatized people, hypervigilant and I was setting up my home to appear hypervigilant too. My flesh had turned to something brittle with tension.

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.

Ok. I definitely hear this. A younger me would have had a hard time confronting this thought.

When I was young, human beings were routinely described as mankind, and mankind could be described as a singular man, and he, and even men in liberation movements—Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin—fell back on this language, because the absence of women was so absent from our imaginations that few noted that it even could, let alone should, be otherwise. The 1950s brought books like The Family of Man and LIFE’s Picture History of Western Man; the 1960s a conference and book titled Man the Hunter that all but wrote women out of evolutionary history; by the 1970s we got a long BBC series about The Ascent of Man. The current online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary notes, “Man was considered until the 20th cent. to include women by implication, though referring primarily to males. It is now frequently understood to exclude women.” 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 cit...

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. A landscape full of places named after women and statues of women might have encouraged me and other girls in profound ways. The names of women were absent, and these absences were absent from our imaginations. It was no wonder we were supposed to be so slender as to shade into nonexistence.

I read Wordsworth’s book-length autobiographical poem The Prelude twice in order to write a chapter of my book on walking. I was so immersed in his language—unhurried graciousness, elaborate and sometimes inverted syntax, circumlocutory ways of saying things—that my casual remarks to strangers and check-out clerks were met with baffled looks. There’s a benefit to being untethered from your own time. I think I gained a sense of how differently constituted the idea of being human, the purpose of life, the expectations and desires had been even a generation or two ago, let alone half a millennium before, of how the definitions metamorphosed, and how that meant you could step outside the assumptions of your time, or at least wear them lightly, and at least in theory not let them punish you. That being human can mean many things, in other words.

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 and brought me in contact with the authors themselves, indirectly in their fictions, directly in the essays and journals and first-person accounts that I gravitated to as I came to understand that my own vocation was going to be essayistic nonfiction. I swam through rivers and oceans of words and their incantatory power. In fairy tales naming something gives you power over it; a spell is some words you say that make things happen. These are just concentrated versions of how words make the world and take us into its heart, how a metaphor opens up a new possibility, a simile builds a bridge.

I went back to di Prima’s declaration in her famous “Rant.” Further down, the poem continues: There is no way out of the spiritual battle There is no way you can avoid taking sides There is no way you can not have a poetics no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher you do it in the consciousness of making or not making yr world

In 2008 I wrote an essay called “Men Explain Things to Me” that contains the sentence “Credibility is a basic survival tool.” In a way, credibility is also my profession or at least part of the necessary equipment of any writer of nonfiction.

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.

My life had changed while I was writing Secret Exhibition, and if that first book laid the foundation for me to understand recent and local history just before my era, this second book would be a broader and deeper inquiry into the American West and its myths, wars, blind spots, wonders, criminals, and heroines. This book, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West, was about how invisibility permits atrocity. The war at the center of the book’s first half was at the Nevada Test Site, where the nuclear wars generally regarded as a terrible thing that might happen someday were in fact happening at the rate of about one nuclear bomb detonation a month from 1951 to 1991, more than a thousand in all, with dire impact on the local environment and the human beings downwind. The second half of the book was about Yosemite National Park, where the Indian wars widely regarded as something bad that happened long ago were going on in the present by other means against Native people who had not, contrary to what was then conventional belief, disappeared, vanished, reached the end of the trail, set off into the sunset, or been the last of their kind. Native people had been rendered invisible by representations or rather nonrepresentations—in signage, in the more visible of its two museums, in land management practices, and in the depiction of Yosemite by environmental organizations and artists as an uninhabited wilderness recently discovered by white people and a...

The book’s epigraph was James Baldwin’s spectacular sentence “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime,” meaning that it’s not cunning but obliviousness, willful or otherwise, behind so much brutality.

“I spoke with my former professor Ben Bagdikian about the matter today, and he condemned the action as wrong. Bagdikian, former ombudsman for the Washington Post, currently a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley, and a national authority on journalistic ethics, said that although it is customary to circulate unpublished academic writing within academic circles for review, the circumstances here are different: your attack on my book was sent not to impartial authorities but to concerned parties who also happen to be governmental officials, an unheard-of compromise of journalistic independence for writing dealing with social and political issues. A likely effect of such an act is to create pressure on the publishers to withhold publication.” Recruiting a powerful man was, like throwing published data into a conflict, another chess move to compensate for my own lack or sense of lack of credibility in the conflict. And I pointed out to my editor that in raging about my sins of interpretation—and only those sins—this reader had apparently found no factual errors worth mentioning. Credibility is a basic survival tool.

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. The process of writing and publishing nonfiction convinced me of my own credibility and capacity to determine what was true and just more than anything else did, and that made me able to stand up, sometimes, for myself, or for others.

Often what a woman says is weighed for what kind of woman that makes her and whether she’s still pleasing to others rather than its factual content. My twenties included a wonderful boyfriend who was with me from my twenty-first birthday until my late twenties, and my younger brother who drew me into his activism and supported my work that became increasingly intertwined with this activism. And gay men, as friends and as a huge cultural force in the city I lived in and models of what else being male could mean. And what being human could mean.

For thirty years, I lived a short walk from the Castro District, and even before I’d been a San Franciscan, I’d gone to see movies at the Castro Theater, one of the few grand movie palaces that hasn’t been demolished or converted to a multiscreen cinema. I’ve seen hundreds of films in its dim, majestic cavern. Sitting there for film festivals, for classic Westerns and musicals, for the annual film noir festival, for the AIDS documentary We Were Here, for scads of Tarkovsky and Antonioni and the feature film about Harvey Milk that let us see the theater we were sitting in on the screen, I learned from the murmurs and sighs, the cheers and groans and snickers, to read the homoerotic subtexts, to note the camp, to call out the hate in the old films and the botched ideas in the new ones. Gay men taught me to read closely, to celebrate and critique, and to share in the jokes, even when we were (mostly) quiet in the dark.

The gay men and lesbians around me encouraged me to imagine that gender is whatever you want it to be, and that the rules were breakable, and that the price to pay for breaking them was generally worth it and then some. The men made it clear that what troubled and frustrated me in straight men was not innate to the gender but built into the role. Or as the direct-action group Queer Nation put it in the stickers they scattered around town in the early 1990s, “What causes heterosexuality?” They modeled for me the radical beauty of refusing your assignment, and if they did not have to be what they were supposed to be, then neither did I.

Across the United States and elsewhere are people who imagine and desire and sometimes demand homogeneity as a right, who claim coexistence compromises or menaces them. I wonder about them, about what it must be like to be the kind of person who expected to dominate a country and culture forever and to find safety in homogeneity and danger—mostly imagined, or of a metaphysical variety—in heterogeneous society.

From the 1970s protests against antigay legislation through the White Night riots after Milk was assassinated by a conservative ex-cop to the ferocious activism of ACT UP and Queer Nation into the 1990s, it was a politically charged place. It was both a center of the AIDS crisis and of organizing to respond to it, from the work of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to educate about safe sex to ACT UP and Queer Nation to Cleve’s AIDS memorial quilt project, a project so massive that the last time it was displayed in its entirety, in 1996, it covered the entire Mall in the nation’s capital. I watched the AIDS crisis as a bystander passing through a Castro that suddenly had bulletin-board notices and gay newspaper articles about a strange new disease, then skeletal men teetering along the sidewalks, memorial displays, protests and marches.

David was tall, willowy, with pallid skin, an archly aristocratic manner, and much delight in decadence and transgression. I was who he called the night his HIV turned into AIDS. I rushed over to the glamorous flat he’d put together, bringing fruit juice, soup, and the fluffiest films I could find. Reclining in his bed in the bay window of his Victorian apartment, we watched Picnic with Kim Novak and William Holden, one of those movies whose over-the-top heterosexual rites were a perfect occasion for snarky remarks. We stayed up late over soup and movies, and in the morning he went to the doctor. Neither of us was equipped to talk directly about what was happening, but it happened anyway.

“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.

Inside homophobia is misogyny: the act of being a man is a constant striving to not be a woman.

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. Everyone is interdependent. Everyone is vulnerable.

James Baldwin famously wrote, “If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.” Redefining women and their roles redefined men and masculinity and vice versa. If the genders were not opposite but a spectrum of variations on some central theme of being human, if there were many ways to execute your role or refuse it, and liberation for each gender was seen as being allowed to take up what had been considered the proper role and goods and even feelings of the other or find some third (or seventh) way, then the citadel would be broken and everyone could travel freely.

If humor consists of noting the gap between what things are supposed to be and what they actually are—and much humor of the nonbrutal variety is—then those least invested in things as they are supposed to be, or who are actually adversaries and victims of conventionality, are most inclined and able to celebrate those gaps. The straight man is a figure in humor, the one who doesn’t make or get the joke,

Queer culture made it clear that a life can have as its stable foundation friendships so strong that they are a form of family, that family too can be liberated from the conventional roles of spousal contracts and begetting and blood kinship. It was a bulwark against the widespread, wearing insistence that only the nuclear family supplies love and stability—which sometimes it does, but we all know that sometimes it supplies misery and sabotage.

I sometimes answered the intrusive questions about why I didn’t marry and bear offspring with reference to being a San Franciscan, to being among people who had less conventional ideas of what a life could look like and what kinds of love could shore it up. It was a tremendous gift.

Human infants are born with craniums made up of four plates that have not yet knit together into a solid dome so that their heads can compress to fit through the birth canal, so that the brain within can then expand. The seams of these plates are intricate, like fingers interlaced, like the meander of arctic rivers across tundra. The skull quadruples in size in the first few years, and if the bones knit together too soon, they restrict the growth of the brain; and if they don’t knit at all the brain remains unprotected. Open enough to grow and closed enough to hold together is what a life must also be. We collage ourselves into being, finding the pieces of a worldview and people to love and reasons to live and then integrate them into a whole, a life consistent with its beliefs and desires, at least if we’re lucky.