She is also trying to raise an additional $10,000 to fund RAINN's hotline, a goal of her hike that she did not complete while on the trail. Not even a Tic-Tac!!” But, completing one of the most demanding physical feats possible, Matis showed herself her mother had been wrong: She could do everything necessary to take care of herself.īy learning to love and trust her body, Matis also shed the shame of her assault and at last internalized the message she had received from a Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) counselor before the hike: “No one causes rape but rapists.” To support the recovery of other victims, Matis is donating 5 percent of the personal profits from her book to RAINN. She scribbled lists titled “Things I Can’t Do,” including “ride a bike” and “swallow a pill. She also overcame 19 years of learning that she was helpless.ĭuring Matis’s sheltered childhood in Newtown, Massachusetts, her mother bathed and dressed her and forbid her from walking alone. But as I read Matis’s memoir and the Modern Love column from which it was born, it became clear that she healed from far more than her assault with her time on the Pacific Crest Trail. Shattered and alone, I fled to the Mexican border and headed north through 2,650 miles of desert and mountains to Canada, walking the height of America in search of home,” reads the cover of Aspen Matis’s " Girl in the Woods" (out Tuesday from William Morrow). “On my second night of college, I was raped.
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