Lost
The messy art of disappearing
Artful Wobbler
Writing this my wifi is flickering. Every few minutes a message says I’m offline, which feels familiar. Disappearance appears in enough of my writing it’s practically it’s own character. Sometimes it’s temporary, sometimes forced by circumstance or people. Often it’s voluntary, or at least self-inflicted. In a flash accepted (!) but not yet published the vanished one is envied, a kind of patron saint to yearning girls and women who fade inside themselves but never, like this star, actually just leave. In leaving is liberation. Even as around the world women are forced into disappearance. Even their voices forbidden. Even their lives.
Girls have have long been pushed toward erasure before they have a chance to grow. If it’s not state-sanctioned or church sanctioned it’s in the little diminishments pressed on them often invisibly, sometimes by women as well as men. This erasure has always been combined with violence. Even when it’s silent and under the surface violence is done, either to yourself or by others. Both erasure and violence is compounded when adding other identities.
This was overt when I was growing up, receded a bit and is overt again. ‘Your body my choice’ is a sickness, one of the many markers of a society in decline. Though it may always have been common let’s not pretend it’s normal. History is a warning, not a how-to guide
These two little pieces, published by the great folk at @rfpress.bsky.social (please support them, they’re cool, fun and smart and very present, no erasure) touch on this theme of disappearance, even by those we most expect to support and protect us but who can’t admit the enormity of their own loss. And so it goes.
The cycle is rotted through and prone to breakage. There are many places to slip out. For each way to vanish there’s a way to appear.
