Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,4

their cages when the door is open, sometimes people free to make their own choices choose to abandon that power. For a flickering moment in the plaza, I felt vividly, viscerally, what they were offering and why it was alluring to people my age: the possibility of handing back all the weight of responsibility that comes with adulthood, of not having to make decisions every day or deal with the consequences of those decisions, the possibility of returning to something like childhood and arriving at a semblance of certainty that was not hard-won but handed over. I could feel the freedom from agency buried in that surrender of freedom, but I loved my independence and privacy and agency and even some of my deep solitude, and there was never a chance that I was going to give them up.

I’ve met people who came from happy families who seemed to have little work to do as adults: they would carry on as they had been taught; they were the acorns that didn’t fall far from the tree; they were on a road that didn’t fork or they had no journey at all ahead, because they had arrived before they set out. When I was young, I envied them the comfort of their certainties. When I was older, I felt the opposite way about lives not requiring so much self-invention and inquiry. There was real freedom to being on my own and a certain kind of peace to being accountable to no one.

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 na?veté 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 most of all of being engaged in the heroic task of becoming.

Sometimes now I envy those people who are at the beginning of the long road of the lives they’ll make, who still have so many decisions ahead as the road forks and forks again. Imagining their trajectories, I picture a real road, branching and branching, and I can feel it, shadowy, forested, full of the anxiety and the excitement of choosing, of starting off without quite knowing where you will end up.

I have no regrets about the roads I took, but a little nostalgia for that period when most of the route is ahead, for that stage in which you might become many things that is so much the promise of youth, now that I have chosen and chosen again and again and am far down one road and far past many others. Possibility means that you might be many things that you are not yet, and it is intoxicating when it’s not terrifying. Most of the