Top 96 Aspen Matis Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. My mom used to tell me, "I don't like my mother, but I love her.
Aspen Matis
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. She wrote something down. She held her eyes firm on the pad. "Marijuana is a hallucinogen," she said softly.
Aspen Matis
#8. I wanted him to look at me like maybe I was magic.
Aspen Matis
#9. The small word, "No." I'd see its deity.
Aspen Matis
#10. 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
#11. She was my mirror image, slightly distorted, flipped, older, larger, more able to coexist with a pack of men. I'd be their pawn. She was their queen.
Aspen Matis
#12. I realized she was finding Junior innocent of rape. That meant that I was guilty of lying.
Aspen Matis
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. I had once again proven that again alone, I was again enough.
Aspen Matis
#18. This is the story of how my recklessness became my salvation.
Aspen Matis
#19. I felt the seed of something strong sprout something real in me and felt a surge. I'd be in the woods, homeless, walking north with my fellow self-exiled desert pilgrims. I'd be a dropout.
I had nothing left to lose.
Aspen Matis
#20. I walked home holding Tom's hand, not letting it go even as he tottered across a soccer field where there was nothing that could hurt him.
Aspen Matis
#21. But the truth was stranger than an aimless road, it always was.
Aspen Matis
#22. The PCT would lead me to an otherworld, through the sadness I felt here, out of it.
Aspen Matis
#23. There was so little I wanted to carry. Packing my backpack took me all of four minutes
Aspen Matis
#24. When I felt strongly I would say it strongly.
Aspen Matis
#25. Beneath hot sun, desert roses bloomed. Under cold moon, I still refused to.
Aspen Matis
#26. After all this time questioning whether I could trust myself, my instinct had proven right - I'd found a path in pathless woods.
Aspen Matis
#27. The implication: I had hallucinated a rape.
Aspen Matis
#28. 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
#29. I flushed - this time not in shame - but in rage.
Aspen Matis
#30. 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
#31. I wanted to come close to fierce wild things. They seemed prehistoric, rare and sacred.
Aspen Matis
#32. In fact, because I liked him so badly, I needed to continue on my course. I was finally becoming the woman I wanted to be, and she was whom I needed to show Dash - and myself.
Aspen Matis
#33. After twelve years of trying, I just decided to stop missing.
Aspen Matis
#34. Fire is not essential. Fire is warm comfort. From fire, cultures are born.
Aspen Matis
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. I was beginning to feel compassion for myself.
Aspen Matis
#38. I needed only to allow myself to know what I already knew.
Aspen Matis
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. I didn't know if I was brave or reckless.
Aspen Matis
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. I was no longer following a trail.
I was learning to follow myself.
Aspen Matis
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. In lovesickness we had found a common language.
Aspen Matis
#48. As if violence could make light. Maybe violence could make light.
Aspen Matis
#50. 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
#51. If I was going to put myself into a situation wherein I had no one to depend on, I needed to step up and be the one to actually take good care of myself.The universe wouldn't simply do it for me.
Aspen Matis
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. I told myself that my separation from Dash was necessary. I couldn't wreck my hike for anyone, not Dash, no one. I knew this now.
Aspen Matis
#57. Loss is the shocking catalyst of transformation.
Aspen Matis
#58. I'd entered the bliss of Washington, physically and emotionally: eating huckleberries, feeling beautiful and finally in control of my self. Feeling the changing season, my self changed.
Aspen Matis
#59. 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
#60. We aren't afraid of what we can explain.
Aspen Matis
#61. The freedom of the woods lingered in me here; I felt lighter. I hoped to be changed by it, allow this seeding independence to root in my childhood Eden's soil and grow until at last it was undeniable.
Aspen Matis
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. I began to lust after our conjoining life.
Aspen Matis
#65. My relationship with my mother trapped me in the identity of a child.
Aspen Matis
#66. 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
#67. Vividly seeing that love had always been my mother's guide, I could finally release my anger - let go of it there in the woods - and move past it.
Aspen Matis
#68. The way to self-love and admiration is to behave like someone whom you love and admire.
Aspen Matis
#69. Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity - a sacred thing.
Aspen Matis
#70. I was safe in this world. This was a place for creatures - I felt I had become more of a creature than a girl. I could handle myself in the wild.
Aspen Matis
#71. 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
#72. I wrote through darkness, vividly seeing: my passivity was not a crime; my desire to trust was not a flaw.
Aspen Matis
#73. My body was smarter than I was. I was with someone who would never hurt me, and so I finally relaxed.
Aspen Matis
#74. Each year, Gracie Henderson moons a thousand strangers, collects their shocked faces in an annual photo album.
Aspen Matis
#75. I sensed he was the one who might be able to see me clearly, the way I most wished to be seen.
Aspen Matis
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. And I thought: What am I doing here? What am I doing here? What am I? I wanted to feel like a pretty girl, even out in Colorado with no one who knew me. To be beautiful. To live beautifully. I drew on maroon Make Me Blush lipstick.
Aspen Matis
#82. I'd crossed a border -
Speaking openly, exposing the weak girl I'd been, I was no longer her.
Aspen Matis
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. It was my first lesson in the fragility of attraction.
Aspen Matis
#88. I walked, floated, lighter - forty miles, my biggest day yet. I'd lifted the burden of guilt and shame off my body. I held my new hard-won wisdom, the gift three months of walking in the wilderness had carried me to: compassion for my younger self - forgiveness for my innocence.
Aspen Matis
#89. I was placeless. I carried everything on my back, exactly what I needed to survive. I didn't know how I'd survive without this structure, silent bears and vista highs, the infinite beauty.
Aspen Matis
#90. 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
#91. The bravest thing I ever did was leave there. The next bravest thing I did was come back, to make myself heard.
Aspen Matis
#92. 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
#93. 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
#95. 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
#96. It was heartbreaking to realize how we can fail the people we most love without even trying.
Aspen Matis
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
