Alone in her dorm room at night, researching the PCT and planning her hike helped propel Matis through the year. She moved off campus so that she would not have to live in the same dorm as her rapist, and began planning her escape. The college’s rape counsellor was kind, but advised Matis to pursue mediation, and the mediator’s inconclusive finding plunged her into depression and drinking. Matis’ college career went off the rails before classes even began on her second night on campus, she was raped. In 2009, at the age of nineteen, Aspen Matis dropped out of Colorado College only weeks before completing her first year, and headed south to join the 2650 mile Pacific Crest Trail, where it begins at the Mexico-California border. And yet leaving college to walk was such a massive leap of faith already, and nothing I’d ever trusted or believed in seemed true any longer.” It seemed like a tremendous leap of faith to forsake the tools I’d always been told I needed. “I doubted I could survive in the woods without these very basic things to help me. All quotes are based on an uncorrected text.

She was scared, as she says several times but Matis explains her process and how her fear and her “recklessness became salvation.Disclaimer: I received a free review copy of this book at ALA Annual 2015.

The connection you feel to Matis is powerful as you go through her journey of self-discovery. Her rational and train of thought through each and every experience allows you to live what she lived even if you have nothing to base these experiences on in your own life. Matis has this incredible ability to cause you to be sucked into her mind and you understand her every thought. The tightening in my chest, the wish to fade away like a shadow in diffused light.” As a reader you become aware of how this issue is poorly understood by so many and you feel the same tightening as Matis when she reveals, “ shame was unearthed, alive. She encounters someone on her hike that is ignorant of her past and her feelings who makes very unexpected comments. Not only do readers gain a sense of how Matis deals with the events she goes through but there is also an interesting view of how others perceive her story. Matis does not write this as a trauma story but as an incredible success story that empowers people to find their own way of bursting through the wall that is their insecurities and breathe fresh air on the other side.Īny university student can pick up this memoir and instantly connect to Matis’ thoughts and fears as a first year. This is a very real fear for women in today’s society and Matis’ memoir sheds some light on how truly difficult recovery can be when it is too often glazed over. Aspen Matis undergoes a traumatic event that occurs far more than is openly spoken of as she was sexually assaulted on her second night in college.

Girl in the Woods by Aspen Matis