Aspen Matis Quotes

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

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

Childhood is a wilderness.

~ Aspen Matis

I was beginning to feel compassion for myself.

~ Aspen Matis