“ 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… 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
“ 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… 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
“ 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. On… 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 li… 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… 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 ow… 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. Aspen Matis
“ Somewhere in the sun-washed space between Southern California’s hills of sand and the present desolate volcanic sprawl I was crossing, my legs had strengthened, but – invisibly – so had my will. The w… Aspen Matis
“ 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 w… 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… 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'… 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 lo… Aspen Matis
“ It was heartbreaking to realize how we can fail the people we most love without even trying. 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. 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
“ 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
“ 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… Aspen Matis
