Best 130 quotes of Aspen Matis on MyQuotes

Aspen Matis

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    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.

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    Aspen Matis

    After all this time questioning whether I could trust myself, my instinct had proven right — I’d found a path in pathless woods.

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    Aspen Matis

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Aspen Matis

    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.

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    Aspen Matis

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

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    Aspen Matis

    Back home, my mother would still impulsively choose my clothes as she'd chosen my name. But all the identities she'd chosen for me felt wrong, now. I could not return to the person she'd picked for me to be. My relationship with my mother trapped me in the identity of a child.

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    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.

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    Aspen Matis

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

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    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.

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    Aspen Matis

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

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    Aspen Matis

    Childhood is a wilderness.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Aspen Matis

    Each year, Gracie Henderson moons a thousand strangers, collects their shocked faces in an annual photo album.

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    Aspen Matis

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Aspen Matis

    Happy people have everything to give.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Aspen Matis

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

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    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,

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    Aspen Matis

    I began to lust after our conjoining life.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Aspen Matis

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Aspen Matis

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

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    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.

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    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. 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. And better to feel bad for a moment saying no – and stop it – than to get harmed.

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    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.

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    Aspen Matis

    I flushed—this time not in shame—but in rage.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Aspen Matis

    I had once again proven that again alone, I was again enough.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.