“One of the rights that the powerful often assume is the power to dictate reality.”
— Rebecca Solnit, Whose Story Is This? (Goodreads)
That sentence has been sitting with me.
Not for an afternoon. Not for a day or two.
For weeks. Maybe months.
I keep turning it over in my head because the more I think about it, the more places I see it.
Childhood. Work. Men. Doctors. Politics. Relationships. Institutions. Authority.
It is the same thing wearing different clothes.
The powerful don’t always have to threaten you into silence. Sometimes they simply tell you that your version of reality isn’t reality at all.
That’s not what happened.
You’re remembering it wrong.
You’re too sensitive.
You’re overreacting.
That’s just how things are.
You’re misunderstanding.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
And if you hear it enough, from people with enough authority, you can begin to wonder whether maybe they’re right.
That is the truly insidious part.
Power doesn’t always look like a fist.
Sometimes it looks like a person sitting across from you calmly explaining your own life back to you.
I have been on the receiving end of that more times than I care to count.
As a kid, there were things I experienced that other people had their own preferred explanations for. Adults get very good at deciding which version of a family story is acceptable and which version must never be spoken aloud.
Then there were the terrible bosses I encountered at an insurance company where I once worked.
There is a particular kind of corporate power that can make you question your own instincts. Someone above you can rewrite an interaction, redefine a problem, minimize something that happened, or make you feel like your discomfort is actually the problem.
And then there was bartending.
I learned a lot about power behind a bar.
Especially male power.
A drunk man can walk into a room believing that because he bought a beer, he bought a little piece of everyone in it.
He gets louder.
He gets meaner.
He gets handsy.
He crosses a line.
And then, somehow, you’re the one who is supposed to manage his feelings about being told he crossed it.
I’ve watched men behave badly and then watched them construct an entirely different story about what happened.
And I learned something important:
Someone’s confidence in their version of events does not make their version true.
That lesson has followed me into adulthood.
It followed me into the doctor’s office, too.
There is something uniquely infuriating about sitting in front of a doctor and describing what is happening inside your own body—only to have someone with a medical degree decide that because they cannot immediately explain it, it must not be happening.
You know your body.
You know when something isn’t right.
You know when you’ve been dismissed.
And there is a particular arrogance in being told, implicitly or explicitly, that the person experiencing the symptoms has less authority over them than the person reading the chart.
Expertise matters.
Doctors know things I don’t.
But expertise should not require pretending the patient knows nothing.
There is a difference between saying, “I don’t know yet; let’s investigate,” and saying, “I don’t see it, therefore it isn’t real.”
The first is medicine.
The second is power.
And then there is politics.
This is where the quote gets especially uncomfortable.
Because I don’t think the instinct to dictate reality belongs exclusively to one political party.
Democrats do it.
Republicans do it.
Progressives do it.
Conservatives do it.
Religious people do it.
Secular people do it.
Corporate executives do it.
Activists do it.
Institutions do it.
And ordinary people do it.
We all have the capacity to become attached to a story so tightly that admitting the story is incomplete feels like admitting we are wrong.
Political identity can make this particularly vicious.
Sometimes the argument isn’t really about facts anymore.
It’s about allegiance.
Our people don’t do that.
Their people always do that.
My side is defending reality.
Your side is denying reality.
And suddenly we’re no longer asking, “What actually happened?”
We’re asking, “Which version of what happened protects my identity?”
That’s dangerous.
Because reality doesn’t owe us ideological loyalty.
It doesn’t care whether the truth makes Democrats uncomfortable.
It doesn’t care whether it embarrasses Republicans.
It doesn’t care whether it ruins someone’s carefully constructed worldview.
Reality is reality.
And sometimes the most honest thing a person can say is:
“I was wrong.”
Which brings me to women.
I have spent enough of my life being told—directly and indirectly—that my boundaries, perceptions, discomfort, instincts, and experiences should be negotiable.
That women should accommodate.
Women should be understanding.
Women should be polite.
Women should not make people uncomfortable.
Women should explain themselves.
Women should be quiet when the conversation becomes inconvenient.
And I’m increasingly uninterested in that bargain.
I don’t believe respecting another person’s humanity requires me to surrender my own.
I don’t believe empathy requires pretending biological sex doesn’t exist.
I don’t believe acknowledging someone else’s identity requires me to deny my own.
And I don’t believe women should be shamed into surrendering privacy, safety, language, or sex-based boundaries simply because someone else has a different understanding of gender.
That isn’t hatred.
It is disagreement.
And disagreement is not violence.
Women are allowed to say no.
We’re allowed to have boundaries.
We’re allowed to have private spaces.
We’re allowed to describe our own experiences.
We’re allowed to disagree with people—including people who insist that their interpretation of womanhood must supersede ours.
And perhaps most importantly:
We are allowed to define our own reality.
Because that is what Solnit’s quote keeps bringing me back to.
Power doesn’t just determine who gets to make decisions.
Sometimes power determines whose version of events gets believed.
Whose pain counts.
Whose memory counts.
Whose discomfort matters.
Whose voice is considered credible.
Who gets called difficult.
Who gets called unstable.
Who gets called hysterical.
Who gets told they’re imagining things.
Who gets told to sit down, shut up, calm down, move along, get over it, or stop making everyone uncomfortable.
And who gets to walk away believing they were right simply because they had more authority.
I’ve spent enough of my life watching that happen.
I’m not interested in participating in it anymore.
I don’t need everyone to agree with me.
That’s an important distinction.
I don’t need to dictate your reality.
But you don’t get to dictate mine.
You don’t get to tell me what I experienced.
You don’t get to rewrite my memories.
You don’t get to define my boundaries.
You don’t get to tell me what my body is doing.
You don’t get to demand that I call something acceptable when I don’t believe it is.
You don’t get to manufacture a version of events and then punish me for refusing to repeat it.
And you certainly don’t get to silence me simply because my voice makes you uncomfortable.
I’ve learned something over the years:
Being silenced and being disagreed with are not the same thing.
I can tolerate disagreement.
I can tolerate criticism.
I can tolerate being wrong.
What I won’t tolerate anymore is blatant disrespect disguised as authority.
I have spent too much of my life making myself smaller so other people could remain comfortable with their version of reality.
I’m done with that.
You can disagree with me.
You can challenge me.
You can tell me I’m wrong.
But you don’t get to tell me that I didn’t experience what I experienced simply because acknowledging it would inconvenience you.
I know what I know.
I know what I’ve lived.
And I am no longer asking permission to say so.
I will not be silenced.
Not because I believe I’m always right.
But because I have finally learned that someone else’s power does not give them ownership of my reality.
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