124 Quotes & Sayings By Aspen Matis

The trees were friendly, they gave me rest and shadowed refuge. Slipping through them, I felt safe and competent. My whole body was occupied. I had little energy to think or worry. Aspen Matis

Beneath hot sun, desert roses bloomed. Under cold moon, I still refused to. Aspen Matis

And so, despite the complex web of paths, waterfalls, cliffs, as a hiker wanders downhill, drainages merge, faint, abstract paths coalesce, thicken, until there is one path — the one, natural, trodden way. Aspen Matis

Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity–a sacred thing. Drinking was no longer something to take for granted. I’d never needed to consider water before. Aspen Matis

I was passive by nature. I had always been. Arguing felt unnatural and uncomfortable. I was always agreeing even when I didn’t really, instinctively looking for ways to forfeit power, to become more dependent, to be taken care of. I realized how intensely Icecap reminded me of Jacob. They were similar, both diligent and harsh in their judgments–and my big brother’s sureness had always comforted me. But as I ran on sore legs to keep up with Icecap, my tendency toward silence stressed me. . Aspen Matis

This was trail magic. Sea Breeze’s fire, his light, his heat, his life, remained, their salvation. It is a fact that all drainages, if followed downhill, lead to the same lowland water body. Lost and fallen hikers follow drainages down because walking ridges is harder. And so, despite the complex web of paths, waterfalls, cliffs, as a hiker wanders downhill, drainages merge, faint, abstract paths coalesce, thicken, until there is one path — the one, natural, trodden way. It isn’t a coincidence that Sea Breeze, Brandon Day and Gina Allen, and countless other hikers all wandered, lost, down the same steep slope to nowhere. Aspen Matis

I saw now that bad men existed who would take advantage of any weakness and insecurity they found when violating a victim. I saw it was not my fault; I did not choose to be raped or kidnapped. But now I was learning how to protect myself from the predators, to trust my No and my instinct and my strength. I was learning I was not to blame, I couldn't prevent men from trying to hurt me, but I could definitely fight back. And sometimes fighting back worked. Aspen Matis

There was so little I wanted to carry. Packing my backpack took me all of four minutes Aspen Matis

The bravest thing I ever did was leave there. The next bravest thing I did was come back, to make myself heard. Aspen Matis

I’d believed I needed to be steady in myself before I could function with others–but surviving alone no longer felt like a good way either. Aspen Matis

On this walk I'd had so much time and space to actually figure out who I was without my mother's influence. I understood now: the things that my mother had found made her happy were not the same as the things that made me happy. And I understood: that was okay. Aspen Matis

Still I walked into the snow, moving to keep warm, burning precious energy searching for an answer I couldn’t think of. I didn’t turn back, compelled to continue without the trail. I didn’t want to risk futilely backtracking. If I couldn’t find the trail before dark, I could wake tomorrow disoriented and desperate, without having even made any new miles; my loss of the PCT should have distressed me, but a new instinct led me forward. In this moment of despair I was refusing to stop fighting. I asked the mountains for some guidance, the strength to get myself out of here, and pulled wild power from within myself I’d never known I’d had. I was no longer following a trail. I was learning to follow myself. Aspen Matis

And if I'd be left alone in the woods again, I smiled to think how I'd find new gifts and thrive. At the end of a long trail and the beginning of the rest of my life, I was committed to always loving myself. I would put myself in that win-win situation. Aspen Matis

I realized that the most empowering important thing was actually simply taking care of myself. Aspen Matis

I was promising myself strength. I had to write it, say it, make the effort and fake it before I actually believed I could do it. Aspen Matis

I was the director of my life, it was already true, and I would soon lead myself to my dreamed-of destinations. It was the task of my one thousand miles of solitude. Aspen Matis

I no longer needed to peel myself of my skin, or to hide. To Dash the colorless ephemeral things that existed just beneath my surface were as vivid as the beauty marks he traced on my cheek. Aspen Matis

I knew with certainty now– I could say no, and he would stop. Above all, I felt the fierce beauty of the choice. I knew now what it was that had held me from falling into my desire to be with him fully: I first needed to make sure he was a man who would respect my 'No. Aspen Matis

The way to self-love and admiration is to behave like someone whom you love and admire. Aspen Matis

I'd crossed a border– Speaking openly, exposing the weak girl I'd been, I was no longer her. Aspen Matis

I didn’t know if I was brave or reckless. Aspen Matis

The harsh dimness that follows loss isn’t static, but charged with the energy of immanent change. Hurt, I was left with a choice: wallow and stay in the dark, or seek light and fight to reach it. These two paths emerged. I had this choice to make. Loss is the shocking catalyst of transformation. I saw that this mountain valley, haunted by senseless murders, darker, had absorbed unthinkable violence and turned it into mesmerizing light. My rape became my catalyst. Rape gave me cause to flee the muteness — forced me into making a bold and forceful change. I chose to fight to find a way to leave to seek my own strength and beauty. I was searching to find the way to make light. . Aspen Matis

I saw for the first time that I could stop giving people the power to make me feel disrespected. In my anger I began to see the absurdity of allowing this boy to shame me. Aspen Matis

You don’t need extra food, extra water, extra clothing for extra warmth — anything extra. You don’t need soap or deodorant. Everything you carry you should need daily. Aspen Matis

If I couldn't find the trail before dark, I could wake tomorrow disoriented and desperate, without having even made any new miles; my loss of the PCT should have distressed me, but a new instinct led me forward. In this moment of despair I was refusing to stop fighting. I asked the mountains for some guidance, the strength to get myself out of here, and pulled wild power from within myself I'd never known I'd had. I was no longer following a trail. I was learning to follow myself. Aspen Matis

For this entire walk, my desire had ashamed me, as if my wanting to be kissed that night mitigated the fault of Junior's sudden deafness. I'd been given stacks of reasons to blame myself for an act of violence committed by another. I had blamed my flirting for his subsequent felony. My college taught me: my rape was my shame. Everyone I'd trusted asked only what I might have done to let it happen. In my gut, I'd always believed I'd caused it. I finally questioned it. . Aspen Matis

For all my life, I had been passive when faced with dangers. I was stunned as I swam to find that I had, for the first time in my history, asserted myself and been truly heard–respected. It felt monumental, I was buzzing with adrenaline. It was as if I’d become someone else entirely. I had escaped a kidnapper. It finally felt real. My body unclenched tension in the balmy pool. I was proud of the strength I’d found. I was the one who asserted he take me back; I caused him to listen. I was no longer a passive Doll Girl, trapped. This was me learning I could trust my voice– I’d used it, and it finally worked! I was triumphant. This escape showed me: I had grown, and grown vividly. Aspen Matis

I had feared this end, wondered where I would go from it, from the moment I first stepped on this footpath in the desert. But I found I was not afraid of reaching it now. I was happy. I hadn't found every answer for where I was going, but I now had all I needed to take these next steps. I knew I would do what I needed to become a writer now. 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. They’d vanish like the teeth children lose when they get hit. Only after the blood was washed away would I see that they were gone. . Aspen Matis

As if violence could make light. Maybe violence could make light. Aspen Matis

It finally had to. I understood that it wouldn’t be easy, it would be very hard; I’d need to resist the habit I had developed long ago — with conviction. 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 threats like a Taser gun. I’d stun them. They’d bow to me. I’d let my no echo against the mountains. . Aspen Matis

We aren’t afraid of what we can explain. Aspen Matis

In the aftermath of destruction, a silence settles — the stillness of fresh loss. People’s cheerful chatter is fainter, the blue color of sky dimmer; now that horror is undeniable and feels inescapable, the value of life seems lessened. Aspen Matis

But the truth was stranger than an aimless road, it always was. Aspen Matis

My relationship with my mother trapped me in the identity of a child. Aspen Matis

Living as Wild Child, I could no longer be Debby Parker comfortably – this name that I’d been given at birth that defined me before I’d had the chance to define myself. Aspen Matis

She’d taken care of me in all the ways my body needed, but the devastation of my rape had made me feel the weight of the essential way she had neglected me: she hadn’t nurtured the potential of my strong and healthy independence. Aspen Matis

Squatting on my bed—after twelve years of trying and missing, in about two minutes total— I put my own contacts in for the first time. Second try on the right eye, first try on the left. I blinked in the contact, my apartment where I now lived alone and my story coming into focus. Aspen Matis

I hoped my solitude would help me reclaim my innocence, remember who I’d been, to find who I wanted to be. To become her. To love her, Deborah, Debby, Doll Girl, Wild Child, me, despite the irreversible truth that I’d been raped. I was learning again that I could trust myself and, also, I was seeing, other people. I was brave enough now to go out alone towards what I wanted, to trust that I was strong enough for it, to know that help would come when I needed it. It always came. Aspen Matis

I didn’t know what I would do. There was no way I could survive. I stared at my damp tent ceiling, feeling the frigid air against me, the frozen ground against my bottom, so cold my bare skin burned. I needed to get to the next trail-town, Mammoth Lakes. There was no one here to save me now. Aspen Matis

This was a vision of wildness contained — caged. Huge, powerful animals whose wild dignity was stripped from them. Panic jolted me. These animals had had their freedom seized by people who put their own desires first. In the glint of the silver cage bars I saw the same steely repression, the same cold entitlement that allows people to feel it is okay to steal bodies and lives as I glimpsed while frozen beneath Junior. The boy who had put his few minutes of pleasure before my entire life. Aspen Matis

He hadn’t treated me with the love and compassion I wanted, but I was worthy of that love, and someday some boy would have it for me. I hadn’t found it yet, but I would find it soon. Aspen Matis

My path, beyond doubt or denial. I just hadn’t looked toward it. I wasn’t lost. I’d always known the way. If I’d only allowed myself to look. I had never been lost, only scared. Aspen Matis

Death is not a pretty flower that had almost pricked me. It was not a small annoyance I could simply bypass and quickly disregard. It was really The End. Aspen Matis

I couldn’t yet piece together the disconnected clues to understand the origin of these lights. To explain away strange magic, I’d convinced myself there was an unseen road cutting across the boundless desert floor like a scar. I imagined its different possible courses. The mystery intrigued me. I couldn’t think of the real destination this road would have been built to lead to, but I accepted I couldn’t see, and I accepted it was there, strange but — from where I stood — a beautiful vision. Aspen Matis

My mother overstated the dangers of the world — invented threats. And so I saw: Starbursts’ hoof-made gelatin never gave me mad cow. Mad cow was not a threat to me. And so I thought: most risks weren’t truly real. Aspen Matis

I sensed he was the one who might be able to see me clearly, the way I most wished to be seen. Aspen Matis

The entire time, he’d only ever looked at my body, never at my face, his empty eyes hungry, never seeing me at all. I wasn’t the presence of a person, but a body. I could have said anything, he wouldn’t have heard me. He’d never responded, not by stopping, not with his words. Aspen Matis

Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This journey had begun with the coercion of my body, with my own wild hope. 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

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

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. . Aspen Matis

I began to lust after our conjoining life. Aspen Matis

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. Aspen Matis

Happy people have everything to give. Aspen Matis

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

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. Aspen Matis

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

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

It felt amazing to make visible my boundaries. The rumors dissipated, then changed. Eventually I turned down enough men that I became the girl who turned down men. Aspen Matis

He was sprightly and uncommonly good looking, with a quiet, magnanimous confidence that attracted people. He was my hero, too, and I listened to him. He gave me lots of wise advice. He told me to put myself in win-win situations, and that, “You have to know what you want, and you have to get it, Aspen Matis

I was going to mean what I said, to be direct and firm. I found my moleskin notebook and on the page behind the pages addressed to Never-Never and my family–two unsent letters– I wrote: I am the director of my life. Aspen Matis

Already, this little-walked gigantic trail through my country’s Western wilderness held in my mind the promise of escape from myself, the liberation only a huge transformation could grant me. This walk would be my salvation. It had to be. 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

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