Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

I am a woman who by the first years of my teens had to learn to squirm and worm and fade away when adult men pursued me because telling them to leave me alone was in that era of my youth inconceivable as something I had the right or even the safety to say and they had the obligation or even inclination to heed. I am a woman who during my youth thought it likely I would be raped and maybe also murdered and all my life have lived in a world where women were raped and murdered by strangers for being women and by men they knew for asserting their rights or just being women and where those rapes and murders were lasciviously lingered on in art. I am a woman who has been told at crucial times that I was not believable and that I was confused and that I was not competent to deal in facts. And in all that I am ordinary.