quote

"When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing."

— Adrienne Rich, Invisibility in the Academe

I... yeah, this. Just, this. Brain is not good for word making right now, so yeah, just this. Except that I think for us it was sort of more like we spent a large portion of our life staring into what we thought was a mirror with nothing in it, except it turned out it actually wasn't a mirror at all, it was a painting someone had made of the world behind us that we mistook for a mirror because everyone else around us seemed to think it was a mirror, and we weren't in it. Or people forcibly holding it up to us to "show" that we weren't in it. But it was a picture. Not real. So couldn't be used as a guide to judge what really was and was not there.