In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

by Bobi Conn

What is history anyway? A story: The last man standing holds the pen. A sense of place: I am on this path that is hardly comprehensible. A birthright: I may be from, but I am not of that world.

Home—can anyone define that? For some, it’s simple: Where the heart is. Cross-stitch that and hang it on a wall. For the rest of us, it’s a negation: Where I’ve never been. Perhaps it is, after all, that one place to which we can never return. I left my home and grew up, carrying my child self everywhere I went, full of longing and fear and memory.

I hid myself deep so that on the surface, people would see quiet and good girl. I thought I could control their understanding of me, keep my inner torment a secret—it seemed like another sin to be so angry—but I did not realize how much my sense of self was controlled by all that hiding.

At some point, I stopped trusting myself to know the difference between what made sense and what did not. I learned that when things looked wrong, felt wrong, there had to be something I didn’t understand. I learned I should trust the man telling me to trust him, to accept whatever he was doing, no matter what my own good sense had to say. I learned to ignore my own judgment, and for a good long time, I had no idea that I could trust myself.

I thought the story of Hansel and Gretel got it backward—you don’t get lost in the woods, because that’s the safest place to be. No one eats children or lays traps for them out there. The real danger is where people are comfortable and cloaked and never truly laid bare—in their homes, in their cities, in their churches.

We fight the demons that embedded themselves into the fabric of our consciousness, not knowing why we always feel like we’re in a fight. We walk through the world as if we are part of it, but our anguish constantly reminds us that the world neither loves nor wants things that are broken.

They didn’t know how it felt to live in the shadow of a valley that pulled you to it and hid you from the world and gave you so much beauty to adore but no protection from the men who wanted everything inside it.