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.

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 and loneliness. Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament.

The wisdom of my body had cultivated vibrantly since those sadness-drunken months after the rape when I__ felt so numbed by the hurt and shame that I didn__ move further. No longer. The way I felt about being sexually shamed had changed. Now I was angry that others were trying to shame my sexuality in the first place. I flushed__his time not in shame__ut in rage.

I was able to pitch a tent and carry a backpack twenty-five miles a day through mountains____ mastered a thousand amazing physical feats__hysically I__ become undeniably confident and capable__ut physical weakness had never been the problem that I had. My true problem had been passivity, the lifelong-conditioned submission that became my nature.

The night Junior stayed, my right to myself was taken from me in a way that had felt more final than ever before. Then the school had denied my rape__y word. The subsequent silencing and exile__isplaced shame__ere the catalysts for me to finally break free of my mother's grasp and my voicelessness and do what I truly wanted, alone. I wished to prove myself as independent and valid and strong__o my mother, and to the world. I'd believed I had needed something huge and external that no one could deny was impressive, so I could show my family I was able__o they could finally know that I was strong.Instead I had shown myself.And it felt wonderful.

I sensed he was the one who might be able to see me clearly, the way I most wished to be seen.

My malady was submission.The symptom: my compliance.The antidote was loud clear boundaries.

If I wanted to go to bed at ten o__lock I did. If I wanted to go to bed at six p.m., I did. I woke at sunrise because the new sun lit my eyes. The sun was my clock; my body my pace-keeper. I started walking when I wanted, kept going until precisely when I wanted to stop.When I was tired, feeling like stopping but wanting to persist, I__ listen to Blood On The Tracks.

I__ 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__ knapsack. Everything I carried was everything I had.

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.

Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament.

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 own desires first. In the glint of the silver cage bars I saw the same steely repression, the same cold entitlement that allows people to feel it is okay to steal bodies and lives as I glimpsed while frozen beneath Junior. The boy who had put his few minutes of pleasure before my entire life.

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, __ou have to know what you want, and you have to get it,

I was no longer following a trail. I was learning to follow myself.

I needed only to allow myself to know what I already knew.

All I could think as he was speaking was that, if he touched me at all, all the miles I__ walked, the pain I__ felt, the beauty I__ drunken like milk, like good wine making me happy, the four million steps I__ taken, would all add up to nothing. They__ be stolen.

Squatting on my bed__fter twelve years of trying and missing, in about two minutes total__ put my own contacts in for the first time. Second try on the right eye, first try on the left. I blinked in the contact, my apartment where I now lived alone and my story coming into focus.

I needed to stop hiding: I was raped. It was time to honestly be exactly who I was. I saw__he shame wasn't mine, it was his, and I could stop misrepresenting myself, and I could accept myself.