How to Be a Feminist When You’re Completely Alone

Long story short, I live in the middle of nowhere. Rural North Dakota, to be precise. I arrived one month ago, and I’ll be here for four more. I knew that I wanted to work on a farm this season, but I didn’t exactly plan for that farm to be in North Dakota. And still, I can’t imagine being anywhere else. As Tupac Shakur once said, “I didn’t choose the rural life; the rural life chose me.”

The farm that I work on covers three acres, and there are three farmers including myself. That’s an acre per person, for all you non-math majors. Though the work is hardly split into three equal parts, my days do consist of a lot of alone time—weeding alone, planting alone, watering alone, etc. And on weekends, my days off, I’m almost always on my own. I don’t have a car, so with the nearest neighbor a mile away, and the nearest city thirty-five miles away, I’m damn near secluded out here. I’m not telling you this to complain or to whine, but rather to illustrate my circumstances, and then explain how I am still a practicing feminist out here. Though I greatly miss the comfort of a gender studies classroom, and the support of a liberal arts campus, I’m here to tell you that those things are great, but ultimately unnecessary, reinforcements. I was a feminist in a place where it was normal to be one, and I remain a feminist in a place where it’s either unheard of, or frowned upon, or both. For my fellow lone wolves and recovering academics out there, here are a few things that you can always do to remain steadfast in your feminism, none of which require the company of other people:

1. Be critical. When you’re watching Paula Deen on TV because you can’t change the channel because the person who put it on might come back and you don’t want to be #rude in a house that isn’t yours, at least be critical of Paula Deen. Think about how she speaks to the women around her, and to the men. Think about what others might be thinking about when they watch her. Think about what makes you different from other viewers, and how your criticisms may have elitist roots, and how they certainly carry many privileges. Think about what kinds of food Paula Deen makes, and what kinds she doesn’t make. Think about all the different groups of people whose foods are never cooked on TV, whose stories are never told. Always be a critical consumer, especially when someone is literally telling you what to consume.

2. Be good to yourself. A Buzzfeed quiz called “Are You A Feminist?” asks, “Do you believe in the complete equality of men and women?” Those who answer YES are apparently feminists, and those who answer NO are not. While I’m glad to see feminism reaching the mainstream stage that is the Buzzfeed quiz, I don’t think that we can define who is and is not a feminist by a simple yes-or-no question. In my experience, feminism is much more about your relationship with yourself. It’s about finding out what you stand for, what you don’t stand for, what you think about other people and things, and how any of that relates to your self-discovered gender identity. There are, of course, political and economic underpinnings to any feminist movement, but feminism isn’t only about the movements. When you’re completely alone in the middle of nowhere, you can’t march in a rally or attend an event, but you can be good to yourself like a good feminist would. Realize what your strengths are, and accept your inabilities without chalking them up to incompetence. Give yourself enough time to do whatever you need to do, and know that only you can know how long that is. Too often, we let others regulate the pace of our lives. We are told how fast we should work, grow, and heal, without considering if those timelines actually make sense. When you’re on your own, time doesn’t have to constrain you.

3. Create something. If you have some free time in your sad solitude, make something! Write a short story, record a song, try out a new recipe. Whatever it is, do it and put your stamp on it. Sharing it with the world is OPTIONAL. You do you, gurlboi. And when you come out of the wilderness, if you do, you’ll have proof that you lived there, and I mean actually lived there. I say this because I personally used to die a little bit whenever I was alone. Not die as in “I’m so depressed for lack of human contact,” but die as in “What’s the point of doing anything if no one else is here?” But there’s always a point! The point is that we all have one life to live (which, coincidentally, was my mom’s favorite soap opera) and all of those lives are equally important! Sharing your life with people is vital to survival, but you can’t just put your life on pause because all your friends went on vacation without you. Use your time that you found in Tip #2 and actually do something with it. And if you do decide to bake that cake, let me know. I have an empty mailbox here in the middle of nowhere, and I would love to try your feminist creation.

4. Read a goddamn book. Before you read that tip as bossy and then think all these bossy thoughts about me, you should know that I never used to read. Sure, I would read for school, but that’s not the same. I would read for school because I wanted to get an A+ in every class because everyone I had ever met told me that that was the barometer of success. Well, I racked up countless As, and I don’t feel all that successful. So, in this summer of solitude, I have started reading for myself. I’m no longer reading to impress a teacher or classmate, or so I can have something to compare the movie to. Now I’m reading to enrich myself, to learn something for myself, and to escape this world only to fall deeply in love with a fictional one. I especially enjoy autobiographies, because I find other people’s lives, as told by them, to be inevitably fascinating. As a 22-year-old who has time in the day to write this, you can imagine that my life is fairly uninteresting. So why not, in my spare time that I found in Tip #2, read about someone else? We can all learn from each other, and I think we indeed must do that before we dare to teach anything to anyone else. Reading can also be an act of resistance, as we can choose to fill our heads with the thoughts and voices that are left out of the canons and best-sellers lists. We can seek out the marginalized authors, poets and journalists, and consume everything that they have to offer, remembering or discovering that we’ve had the choice to do that all along. You can read anything you want to read when you’re alone, and then you can share it with others later. Today I read about how large-scale farmers are basically pornographers. Are you intrigued yet?

5. Go outside. If you are not in the middle of a Minnesota winter, do yourself a favor and go outside. If you are truly a feminist, and you truly care about the lives of all men and women, then you inherently care about life itself. Life begins and ends with the earth, and you can’t experience that indoors. You can’t see how the bees pollinate the flowers, or how the tomato plant so kindly shades the lettuce leaves when they need it. When you go outside, you appreciate what humankind has built for itself, but you also realize that we can’t survive on that alone. We’re at the mercy of the earth, and we must be good to it before we can be good to ourselves. More to the point: we are not being good to ourselves if we are not being good to the earth. We must always think about our footprints, and how they’re changing someone’s life, for better or worse, somewhere else in the world. Because when I say I’m alone out here, I know that I’m not really alone. Everything I do has a consequence of some sort, and that’s life. It would be incredibly vain and ignorant of me to think that real solitude actually exists. When I’m outside, looking at the sun or at the moon, I think about how my part of the world is affecting some other part of the world. Ultimately, we’re all in this together, and a true feminist understands that. So while Buzzfeed asks “Do you believe in the complete equality of men and women?”, it seems like the real question should be, “Do you understand that the way you live your life, whether that’s as a man or a woman or both or neither, directly affects others? Now what are you going to do with that understanding?”

So there you have it, folks. I am completely alone right now, and I’m still a feminist. I’m still kicking and breathing and fighting the proverbial man. If this past month has taught me anything, it’s that your beliefs will stay intact if you truly believe them, no matter which Midwestern state you find yourself in. I was a vegetarian when I got here, and I remain a vegetarian today. Sure, I might take a walk when they’re butchering the chickens, but that’s a compromise that I’m willing to make. And, just the same, I’m as much of a feminist now as the day I got here and realized it probably wouldn’t mean much. I’m in the middle of nowhere, and I’m standing strong. If I can do it, then so can you. Who needs friends when you have feminism?