Recollections of My Non-Existence

by Rebecca Solnit

Beyond every beginning is another beginning, and another and another,

Sometimes at the birth and death of a day, the opal sky is no color we have words for, the gold shading into blue without the intervening green that is halfway between those colors, the fiery warm colors that are not apricot or crimson or gold, the light morphing second by second so that the sky is more shades of blue than you can count as it fades from where the sun is to the far side where other colors are happening.

Like beginnings, endings have endless recessions, layers atop the layers, consequences that ripple outward.

Some people have others who will tend and fund and sometimes confine them all their lives, some people are gradually weaned, some of us are cut off abruptly and fend for ourselves, some always did.

Sometimes birds return to their cages when the door is open, sometimes people free to make their own choices choose to abandon that power.

There was real freedom to being on my own and a certain kind of peace to being accountable to no one.

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

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.

I read books standing up in bookstores or got them from libraries or searched for months or years to find the cheapest used copy; I listened to music on the radio and made cassette tapes of albums at friends’ houses; I eyed things and was spurred and pricked and bothered by the promise things make, that this pair of boots or that shirt will make you who you need or want to be, that what is incomplete in you is a hole that can be stuffed with stuff, that the things you have are eclipsed by the things you want, that wanting can be cured by having, beyond having what is essential.

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.

Memoirs at their most conventional are stories of overcoming, arcs of eventual triumph, personal problems to be taken care of by personal evolution and resolve.

It was a kind of collective gaslighting. To live in a war that no one around me would acknowledge as a war—I am tempted to say that it made me crazy, but women are so often accused of being crazy, as a way of undermining their capacity to bear witness and the reality of what they testify to. Besides, in these cases, crazy is often a euphemism for unbearable suffering. So it didn’t make me crazy; it made me unbearably anxious, preoccupied, indignant, and exhausted.

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.

The rage: it was as though they expected me to obey strangers, as though any woman belonged to any man, as though everyone, anyone, owned me except me.

When no one else seems to trust you, it’s hard to trust yourself, and if you do, you pit yourself against them all; either of those options can make you feel crazy and get called crazy.

We were trained to please men, and that made it hard to please ourselves. We were trained to make ourselves desirable in ways that made us reject ourselves and our desires. So I fled. My body was a lonely house. I was not always home; I was often elsewhere.

Roxane Gay wrote in her book Hunger that “we should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men…. And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.”

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.

Your mother’s maiden name is often requested as the answer to a security question by banks and credit card companies, because it’s assumed her original name is secret, erased, lost as she took on the name of a husband. It’s no longer universal for women to give up their names but still rare to pass them on if they’re married, one of the ways women vanish or never appear.

So much was so absent that its absence was rarely noted, the lack built into the current arrangements and the possibili...

You furnish your mind with readings in somewhat the way you furnish a house with books, or rather the physical books enter your memory and become part of the equipment of your imagination.

As a would‑be writer, it was more complicated. In my teens and well into my twenties, I mostly encountered the literature of heterosexual men, where the muse or the beloved or the city they explored or the nature they conquered was a woman.

I also struggled secretly against the men around me who were convinced that they were the artists and I was the audience. Young women like me were supposed to exist as orbital figures, planets around a sun, moons around a planet. Never stars.

You should be yourself some of the time. You should be with people who are like you, who are facing what you’re facing, who dream your dreams and fight your battles, who recognize you. And then, other times, you should be like people unlike yourself. Because there is a problem as well with those who spend too little time being anyone else; it stunts the imagination in which empathy takes root, that empathy that is a capacity to shape-shift and roam out of your sole self.

You depend on men, and what they think of you, learn to constantly check yourself in a mirror to see how you look to men, you perform for them, and this theatrical anxiety forms or deforms or stops altogether what you do and say and sometimes think. 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.

Sometimes the women devoured to the bone are praised; often those insistent on their own desires and needs are reviled or rebuked for taking up space, for making noise. You are punished unless you punish yourself into nonexistence in this system. The system is punishment. A novel like Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark in which the ambitious, amorous, extraordinarily talented heroine is not punished comes as a shock.

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.

Most conventional stories for girls and young women ended in marriage. Women vanished into it. The end. And then what happened and who were they?

But when it comes to writing, every chapter you write is surrounded by those you don’t, every confession by what remains secret or indescribable or unremembered, and only so much of the chaos and fluidity of experience can be sifted and herded onto pages, whatever your intentions and even your themes. You’re not carving marble; you’re grabbing handfuls of flotsam from a turbulent river; you can arrange the detritus but you can’t write the whole river.

And of course in those early years we talked about the boys we were pursuing or entangled with or disentangling from, but that was mixed in with books, politics, ideas, projects, and plans.

Perhaps you could tell a story the way children play hopscotch, returning to the beginning and going a little further each time, tossing your token into another square, covering the same ground in a slightly different pursuit each time. You can’t tell it all at once, but you can cover the same ground a few different ways, or trace one route through it.

I wanted to live by books and in books and for books. It was a lovely goal or rather orientation when it was far away throughout my childhood and teens and college years, but when it came time to do it—well, the mountain is beautiful in the distance and steep when you’re on it. Becoming a writer formalizes something essential about becoming a human: the task of figuring out what stories to tell and how to tell them and who you are in relation to them, which you choose or which choose you, and what the people around you desire and how much to listen to them and how much to listen to other things, deeper in and farther away. But also, you have to write.

The film begins with a woman opening the drapes and picking up after her husband: “Early morning in the universe. The wife is getting up, opening up the windows. She’s a painter and her husband’s a railroad brakeman….” She never acquires a name, never paints, but is only the wife, the one who gets the kid breakfast and dispatches him to school, tends the house, and represents all the things the men are escaping or avoiding and definitely disdaining.

How do you make art when the art that’s all around you keeps telling you to shut up and do the dishes?

My formative years had been peppered with men who wanted to be Kerouac, and who saw that job as the pursuit of freedom, and saw freedom as freedom from obligation and commitment, and, when it came to art, stream‑of‑consciousness spontaneity, art freed up from composition and plan.

Writing is an art; publishing is a business, and in starting my first book I was launching myself on a series of adventures with small and large publishers.

The writing was me alone in a room with ideas, sources, and the English language, which went well, overall. The publishing was me negotiating with organizations that always had more people and more power and sometimes acted as my advocate and collaborator and sometimes as my adversary.

It had been a long time since I’d recalled how bitter my early endeavors to put out books were, in their own small way, or rather how fervently men had sought to prevent me from publishing. I was lucky in that I overcame the obstacles they erected, but I presume others did not. And now I can see how white the world of publishing was and is, and that though some doors slammed because of my gender, others remained open because of my race.

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.

James Baldwin famously wrote, “If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.”

I roamed and explored and made the most of the invitations that came my way. I was rich in time, and alive with excitement about the worlds and connections and ideas opening up to me. I miss the ability I had then to jump into my truck and go someplace for a week or two, to take the long way around, to linger and explore and not worry too much about obligations. I was free.

The present becomes the past through increments too small to measure; suddenly something that is becomes something that was, and the way we live is not the way we lived.

Everything else I ever wrote was on a subject I chose and approached intentionally, but feminism chose me or was something I couldn’t stay away from.

The next day an enormous bouquet arrived with a card quoting back what she liked best of what I had said: “It’s not you, it’s patriarchy,” which might be one of feminism’s basic messages. That is, there’s nothing wrong with you; there’s something wrong with the system that bears down on you and tells you you’re useless, incompetent, untrustworthy, worthless, wrong.

The essay poured out with ease or rather tumbled out seemingly of its own accord. When this happens it means that the thoughts have long been gestating and writing is only a birth of what was already taking form out of sight. So much of the work of writing happens when you are seemingly not working, made by that part of yourself you may not know and do not control, and when the work shows up like that your job is to get out of its way.

Since the essay I wrote that morning was published, I’ve heard from lawyers, scientists, doctors, scholars in many fields, athletes and mountaineers, mechanics, builders, film technicians, and other women who’ve had their field of expertise explained to them by men who didn’t have any idea what they were talking about but thought the world was so ordered that knowledge was inherent in them as lack of it was in women, that listening was our natural state and obligation and holding forth their right, perhaps that it is her job to let his sense of self expand as hers shrivels.

You don’t really know what you do when you write, because it depends on how people read, and there are ways that knowing their appetites and interests can guide you down familiar paths and ways that not knowing can take you to appetites and interests you didn’t know existed and sometimes your readers didn’t either. There’s a Buddhist phrase about the work of bodhisattvas: “the liberation of all beings.” I see feminism as a subset of that work.

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.

Audibility means that you can be heard, that you have not been pressed into silence or kept out of the arenas in which you can speak or write

Credibility means that when you get into those arenas, people are willing to believe you,