Aspen Matis Quotes

A red leaf danced from a branch like a dropping flame, down into the calm blue lake. A gust had broken it free. There was a cold bite in the wind. It was now deep autumn in the mountains.
Aspen Matis
Somewhere in the sun-washed space between Southern California’s hills of sand and the present desolate volcanic sprawl I was crossing, my legs had strengthened, but – invisibly – so had my will. The wisdom of my body had cultivated vibrantly since those sadness-drunken months after the rape when I’d felt so numbed by the hurt and shame that I didn’t move further. No longer.
Aspen Matis
She told me that my rape was not my fault, that I should feel no shame, that – simple as it may sound – I hadn’t caused it. No one causes rape but rapists. No one causes rape but rapists. No one causes rape but rapists. It was true. And it had not been obvious to me. And hearing it from someone else, a professional, someone who should know, helped me believe that soon I would believe it.
Aspen Matis
Helplessness didn't have to be my identity, I wasn't condemned to it. I was willing - able - to change. Our enmeshment had been enabled by my belief that I needed [my mom] to help me, to take care of things for me - and to save me - but, back in the home where I'd learned this helplessness, I found I no longer felt that I was trapped in it.
Aspen Matis
In the power of my newfound strength, I saw clearly—even though I’d been empowered to have my old college finally address my “horrific trauma,” make me finally feel heard, this event would never have happened had I not first given myself my own voice, the permission to call my rape rape and not shame. In telling, I forced the school that silenced me, that minimized my trauma, that blamed me for the rape, to finally respect my voice and give me the platform they should have given me in the first place. I did not need the school to call it by its name; I did it myself, and they listened. I was the powerful party that brought the closure and empowerment I’d hoped, in first finding their invitation, that Colorado College would bring.
Aspen Matis
I had no evidence. No physical signs of my rape existed anymore. My body had already purged them. That was the irreversible reality.
Aspen Matis
I was so much more powerful than anyone knew. I was an animal learning to fight back, instinctively, fiercely. I was a brave girl. I was a fit fox.I realized that the most empowering important thing was actually simply taking care of myself.
Aspen Matis
If I could mark clearly, convincingly and consistently what was good for me and also what was bad—if I could say yes and also no, as if it were the law—it would become my law.
Aspen Matis
I had once again proven that again alone, I was again enough.
Aspen Matis
Maybe I'd die. Maybe I'd burn to ash in wind, or blacken like the pines. Charred skeletons, I'd add one to the count. I didn't feel scared. I didn't think to panic. The trail wasn't burning. I was raw, ripe for loving. I wasn't stopping.
Aspen Matis
I realized that no, no one would actually come to save or even stop me, I had absolutely no choice. The scale tipped: the moment not doing it became more difficult and unbearable than just doing it.
Aspen Matis
The night Junior stayed, my right to myself was taken from me in a way that had felt more final than ever before. Then the school had denied my rape—my word. The subsequent silencing and exile—misplaced shame—were the catalysts for me to finally break free of my mother's grasp and my voicelessness and do what I truly wanted, alone. I wished to prove myself as independent and valid and strong—to my mother, and to the world. I'd believed I had needed something huge and external that no one could deny was impressive, so I could show my family I was able—so they could finally know that I was strong.Instead I had shown myself.And it felt wonderful.
Aspen Matis
Because I feared I couldn't walk to Newton Centre without her, I needed to hike through desert, snow and woods alone.Childhood is a wilderness.
Aspen Matis
She had wanted me to hold rape inside me like a dark pearl, keep it in there, as it grew, as I grew cramped, as it overtook me as hidden things do. Secrets become lies. I'd carried in every step I took this lie, the shame of it.
Aspen Matis
It was heartbreaking to realize how we can fail the people we most love without even trying.
Aspen Matis
Absolutely devout in her complete care of my body, she had only taught me to be weak and voiceless. But I had unlearned that lesson. Our enmeshment no longer felt to me like proof of love. I was no longer willing to permit this silencing. Helplessness didn't have to be my identity, I wasn't condemned to it. I was willing—able—to change. Our enmeshment had been enabled by my belief that I needed her to help me, to take care of things for me—and to save me—but, back in the home where I'd learned this helplessness, I found I no longer felt that I was trapped in it.
Aspen Matis
I'd have to be impolite, an inconvenience, and sometimes awkward. But if I could commit, all that discomfort would add up to zap predatory threads like a Taser gun. I'd stun them. They'd bow to me. I'd let my no echo against the mountains.And better to feel bad for a moment saying no—and stop it—than to get harmed.I would take better care.That small word, no. I'd see its deity.
Aspen Matis
I made a conscious effort to name my needs and desires. To carefully listen to and accurately identify what I felt. Hunger, exhaustion, cold, lower-back ache, thirst. The ephemeral pangs: wistfulness and loneliness. Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament.
Aspen Matis
My malady was submission.The symptom: my compliance.The antidote was loud clear boundaries.
Aspen Matis
I felt unready to hold myself responsible for the decision if I slept with him
Aspen Matis
The small word, “No.” I’d see its deity.
Aspen Matis
Second—I’d take much better care of myself.There were simple things I could do. I could start with my poor feet. These little two feet carried me each day for miles and miles, steady and flexed, tired and aching from constant daily pounding, bruised scratched and sometimes rubbed red-raw, my weight pressing and pressing them. I decided now that each night in my tent I’d massage them. I would knead them with lotion because they always ached, and at the end of thirty-mile days they burned—and it would be luxurious—something I could have done the entire way because I had been carrying sun lotion but had never taken the ten sacred minutes to do for myself.
Aspen Matis
Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament.
Aspen Matis
When I felt strongly I would say it strongly.
Aspen Matis
I needed to stop hiding: I was raped. It was time to honestly be exactly who I was. I saw—the shame wasn't mine, it was his, and I could stop misrepresenting myself, and I could accept myself.
Aspen Matis
And the idea of light unexplainably produced out of nothing was haunting, it shook me. A flat drab mountain could produce its own light, no one in this whole world knows why, and if that was possible then of course there must be other things that seemed impossible that weren’t, and so anything—great and terrible—felt possible to me now.
Aspen Matis
Childhood is a wilderness.
Aspen Matis
I was beginning to feel compassion for myself.
Aspen Matis
I had stripped naked in front of men. Drunk. In morning’s somber brightness I tried to remember why I had done it. Total exposure had seemed like the only way to be seen more clearly, heard, but now it seemed the opposite: a wild act that would define me.
Aspen Matis
When we apply the lessons we've struggled for our whole lives to learn to the lives of people we love, our love becomes judgment—which is toxic. Our fear our daughters will fail leads us to fail them.
Aspen Matis
I doubted I could survive in the woods without these very basic things to help me. It seemed like a tremendous leap of faith to forsake the tools I’d always been told I needed. And yet leaving college to walk was such a massive leap of faith already, and nothing I’d ever trusted and believed in seemed true any longer.
Aspen Matis
We aren’t afraid of what we can explain.But the truth is stranger than an aimless road, it always was. The world was full of blinding mysteries, and I was blind to truth of what they were. There were things about the world I couldn’t understand.
Aspen Matis
She told me that women who wore makeup had bad values. Putting on makeup would have been a statement—a rebellion. I didn’t try it. I grew to feel guilty for wanting to feel attractive.
Aspen Matis
It was suddenly Technicolor clear: the only thing holding me from giving myself vision this entire time had actually simply been me.I saw how in the fall and winter of my childhood, I'd walked through the golden aspens. And then I simply committed and gave myself my own eyes.I had once again proven that again alone, I was again enough.
Aspen Matis
Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity—a sacred thing.
Aspen Matis
After twelve years of trying, I just decided to stop missing.
Aspen Matis
Children believe they are immortal, death is an empty word like the name of a country they’ve never been to on a time-faded map. I wasn’t a child anymore.
Aspen Matis
The PCT would lead me to an otherworld, through the sadness I felt here, out of it.
Aspen Matis
I was no longer following a trail. I was learning to follow myself.
Aspen Matis
I needed only to allow myself to know what I already knew.
Aspen Matis
It took me almost two thousand miles in the woods to see I had to do some hard work that wasn’t simply walking—that I needed to begin respecting my own body’s boundaries. I had to draw clear lines. Ones that were sound in my mind and therefore impermeable, and would always, no matter where I walked, protect me. Moving forward, I wanted rules.First—when I felt unsafe I’d leave, immediately. The first time, not the tenth time. Not after a hundred red flags smacked in wind violently, clear as trail signs pointing the way to SNAKES. Not after I’d been bitten—the violation. If I wasn’t interested, I would reject the man blatantly.
Aspen Matis
In lovesickness we had found a common language.
Aspen Matis
I wanted to come close to fierce wild things. They seemed prehistoric, rare and sacred.
Aspen Matis
She taught me only how to need to be taken care of. I was here because I needed to learn to take responsibility for making my own decisions — to earn my own trust.
Aspen Matis
I’m so drunk,” I said through the bathroom door, though it wasn’t true. I’d declared it to him in my anxiety to take pressure and responsibility off of myself for what I wanted to do next. I had already decided I at least wanted to kiss him, be held. Yet my desire surprised me. I felt the weight of shame not only on rape now, but on sex too. I was confused by it. I felt unready to hold myself responsible for the decision if I slept with him.
Aspen Matis
The wisdom of my body had cultivated vibrantly since those sadness-drunken months after the rape when I’d felt so numbed by the hurt and shame that I didn’t move further. No longer. The way I felt about being sexually shamed had changed. Now I was angry that others were trying to shame my sexuality in the first place. I flushed—this time not in shame—but in rage.
Aspen Matis
These tools were my parents’ way of saying: What you’re doing is important. We support it. We want to help you find your way.
Aspen Matis
I was desperate not to confront the fact that this really could be it—that "nineteen" didn't matter, that there really was a point at which even young bodies fail. I was not immortal.
Aspen Matis
Though I was starved for contact, I didn’t stop to talk to any of these strangers. I had forgotten how to convincingly speak the polite things strangers say to each other.
Aspen Matis
He understood. In lovesickness we had found a common language.
Aspen Matis
It was my first lesson in the fragility of attraction.
Aspen Matis
I walked without breaks, slept through nights without waking, inhumanly smooth – a small machine.
Aspen Matis
All I could think as he was speaking was that, if he touched me at all, all the miles I’d walked, the pain I’d felt, the beauty I’d drunken like milk, like good wine making me happy, the four million steps I’d taken, would all add up to nothing. They’d be stolen.
Aspen Matis
I reached into my pack and held something small in the fist I made. “It’s a pocketknife,” I said, enunciating each letter. I was asserting myself, I’d snapped out of something; he visibly snapped out of something too. I saw it acutely in his dropping posture: doubt in his movement. I said, “The truck works.” And so it did.
Aspen Matis
Each year, Gracie Henderson moons a thousand strangers, collects their shocked faces in an annual photo album.
Aspen Matis
I was able to pitch a tent and carry a backpack twenty-five miles a day through mountains—I’d mastered a thousand amazing physical feats—physically I’d become undeniably confident and capable—but physical weakness had never been the problem that I had. My true problem had been passivity, the lifelong-conditioned submission that became my nature.
Aspen Matis
I needed to begin respecting my own body’s boundaries. I had to draw clear lines. Ones that were sound in my mind and therefore impermeable, and would always, no matter where I walked, protect me. Moving forward, I wanted rules.
Aspen Matis
I’d begun at the soundless place where California touches Mexico with five Gatorade bottles full of water and eleven pounds of gear and lots of candy. My backpack was tiny, no bigger than a schoolgirl’s knapsack. Everything I carried was everything I had.
Aspen Matis
If I wanted to go to bed at ten o’clock I did. If I wanted to go to bed at six p.m., I did. I woke at sunrise because the new sun lit my eyes. The sun was my clock; my body my pace-keeper. I started walking when I wanted, kept going until precisely when I wanted to stop.When I was tired, feeling like stopping but wanting to persist, I’d listen to Blood On The Tracks.
Aspen Matis
I felt like I belonged to an ancient tradition of all young people given this same task of finding their own ways through to the futures they wanted for themselves.
Aspen Matis