Aspen Matis Quotes

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

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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My malady was submission.The symptom: my compliance.The antidote was loud clear boundaries.

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I felt unready to hold myself responsible for the decision if I slept with him

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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.

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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

Childhood is a wilderness.

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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

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

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.

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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.

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Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity—a sacred thing.

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After twelve years of trying, I just decided to stop missing.

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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.

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The PCT would lead me to an otherworld, through the sadness I felt here, out of it.

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I was no longer following a trail. I was learning to follow myself.

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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.

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I wanted to come close to fierce wild things. They seemed prehistoric, rare and sacred.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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He understood. In lovesickness we had found a common language.

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It was my first lesson in the fragility of attraction.

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I walked without breaks, slept through nights without waking, inhumanly smooth – a small machine.

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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

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.

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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.

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I wrote through darkness, vividly seeing: my passivity was not a crime; my desire to trust was not a flaw.

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From that unremarkable gap in dense northern forest, I could finally see clearly that if I hadn’t walked away from school, through devastating beauty alone on the Pacific Crest Trail, met rattlesnakes and bears, fording frigid and remote rivers as deep as I am tall—feeling terror and the gratitude that followed the realization that I’d survived rape—I’d have remained lost, maybe for my whole life. The trail had shown me how to change.This is the story of how my recklessness became my salvation.I wrote it.

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I began to lust after our conjoining life.

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But I couldn’t say any of this yet. No one answer felt it could contain anything close to the truth about her. My thoughts of my mother were wild chaos, I didn’t know how to tell him we’d been enmeshed for as long as I could remember.

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Happy people have everything to give.

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Fire is not essential. Fire is warm comfort. From fire, cultures are born.

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I wanted him to declare in shock how overlooked and underestimated I had been ever since I was a child. How lucky he felt to be the one to have discovered me, to have me. I wanted him to look at me like maybe I was magic.

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I wanted him to look at me like maybe I was magic.

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I wanted both things: strength in my independence and also this new desire. This felt like the beginning of a new kind of love.

Aspen Matis

I don’t remember having one conversation with my dad in the three days I was home, but looking back at my journal, I see I wrote about him. I scrawled about how I heard him telling my mom that I needed to go back. I was unhappy; he thought the hiking was better for me.I wonder why he told these things to my mother, nothing to me.I wonder if overhearing his approval encouraged me to finally fly back to the trail. Maybe. Maybe my father’s faith in my walk—in me—made me feel strong enough to leave. His actual words, as I wrote them in my notebook, were, “She’s an adult now, she can do what she wants. It doesn’t mean she’s not selfish.” He almost understood.

Aspen Matis

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Aspen Matis Quotes

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