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.

The struggle to find a poetry in which your survival rather than your defeat is celebrated, perhaps to find your own voice to insist upon that, or to at least find a way to survive amidst an ethos that relishes your erasures and failures is work that many and perhaps most young women have to do. In those early years, I did not do it particularly well or clearly, but I did it ferociously.

The fight wasn’t just to survive bodily, though that could be intense enough, but to survive as a person possessed of rights, including the right to participation and dignity and a voice. More than survive, then: to live.

“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.”

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.

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

There are so many ways people are forced to disappear, uprooted, erased, told that this is not their story and not their place.

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.

My friend Heather Smith remarked to me recently that young women are urged to “never stop picturing their murder.” From childhood onward, we were instructed to not do things—not go here, not work there, not go out at this hour or talk to those people or wear this dress or drink this drink or partake of adventure, independence, solitude; refraining was the only form of safety offered from the slaughter. During those years at the end of my teens and the beginning of my twenties, I was constantly sexually harassed on the street and sometimes elsewhere, though harassed doesn’t convey the menace that was often present.

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.

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

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.

What is rape but an insistence that the spatial rights of a man, and by implication men, extend to the interior of a woman’s body, and that her rights and jurisdiction do not cover even that territory that is herself?

I was hungry for stories, books, music, for power, and for a life that was truly mine, hungry to become, to make myself, to distance myself as far as possible from where I was in my teens, to keep going until I arrived someplace that felt better.

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.

I could fly, though now I wonder if the problem was how to come to earth.

When the truth is unspeakable you say it indirectly; when your speech is taken away other things speak; sometimes the body itself speaks with the tics, eruptions, numbness, paralysis that are cyphers for what happened.

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.

Writing is often treated as a project of making things, one piece at a time, but you write from who you are and what you care about and what true voice is yours and from leaving all the false voices and wrong notes behind, and so underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to make.

Your life should be mapped not in lines but branches, forking and forking again.

Often, when a woman says that bad things have happened to her or to women and the perpetrators were men, she’s accused of hating men, as though the reality of those events is not relevant, only her obligation to be sunny no matter what is, or 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. 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. Everyone is penetrable, and everyone is penetrated incessantly by the vibrations of sound traveling into the inner ear, by the light shining in our eyes and on the surface of our bodies, by the air we must never stop breathing, by the food and water we take in, by the contacts that generate sensations that run from the surface of our skin to our brains, by the pheromones and bacteria we transmit imperceptibly to each other by air and contact, by the smells that are tiny particles we have inhaled, by the myriad species of beneficial bacteria in our gut and elsewhere that constitute so vast a portion of a human body that self is something of a misnomer or at least a crowd and maybe a party. If you were truly impenetrable you’d be dead in minutes, and there was a kind of deadening inertness that was part of the equation of imagining you could be so.