Educated

“It’s not necessarily a question of whether you love them; it’s a question of whether they belong in your life... You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them. You can miss someone every day and still be glad they are no longer in your life.” 

“I remember thinking: how can I believe I’m a good person when my mother doesn’t think I’m a good person? And the sense of shame that created in me, I just thought, if anyone finds out my mother thinks that, how could they ever trust me with anything? I mean, how could anyone think well of me when they know my own mother doesn’t think well? She’s supposed to love you no matter what. And I think I felt so alone and so frightened of people finding that out about me for so long... And it took me a long time to realize: maybe I can believe in myself even if she doesn’t.” ~Tara Westover 

(*These first two quotes are from interviews, not from the book itself.)

I spent a good portion of the last three days resting and recovering from a cold while listening intently to the audiobook Educated by Tara Westover.  It made a deeper impact on me and connection with me than I expected.  Her life story is truly fascinating, and her resilience in the face of repeated abuse and trauma is inspiring.  To make the most of yourself, to form your own worldview, and to rise above how others perceive you and the limits they may place on you!

Below are some of my favorite quotes, the moments I bookmarked while listening and the quote about gold that immediately made me cry for reasons I'm still trying to figure out...

“'It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you,' I had written in my journal. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there is no greater power than that.”

“This is a magical place,” I said, “Everything shines here.”

“You must stop yourself from thinking like that. You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. YOU are gold. And returning to BYU or even to that mountain you came from will not change who you are. It may change how others see you; it may even change how you see yourself.  Even gold appears dull in some lighting, but that is the illusion. And it always was.”

“Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved, and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations... “Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known.” Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge. It seemed to say, whatever you are, you are woman.”

“It wasn’t the clothes that made this face, this woman, different. It was something behind her eyes, something in the set of her jaw, a hope or belief or conviction that a life is not a thing unalterable. I don’t have a word for what I saw, but I suppose it was something like faith.”

“I willed myself to believe there was no real difference between what I knew to be true and what I knew to be false. To convince myself that there was some dignity in what I planned to do - in surrendering my own perceptions of right and wrong, of reality, of sanity itself to earn the love of my parents.”

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind... If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument, I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay - I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”

“I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money... Curiosity is a luxury for the financially secure.”

“The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you’re having one, it is not obvious to you.  'I’m fine,' you think.  'So what if I watched TV for 24 straight hours yesterday?  I’m not falling apart; I’m just lazy.' Why it’s better to think yourself lazy than to think yourself in distress, I’m not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital.”

“How do you thank a brother who refused to let you go, who seized your hand and wrenched you upward just as you had decided to stop kicking and sink? There aren’t words for that.”

“I realized that all my siblings except Richard and Tyler were economically dependent on my parents. My family was splitting down the middle: the three who had left the mountain, and the four who had stayed. The three with doctorates, and the four without high school diplomas. A chasm had appeared and was growing.”

“Guilt is the fear of one's own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people. I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine, without thinking of my father at all. I learned to accept my decision for my own sake, because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it. It was the only way I could love him.”

“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.” ❤

“They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things.  Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.”