Educated

by Tara Westover

education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience;

no righteous God would deprive a man of homemade strawberry ice cream on a hot summer afternoon.

I realize now that that night I was seeing her for the first time, the secret strength of her.

“I slipped into the scatterbrained-woman routine,” she told me and Audrey, her voice growing louder, catching hold. “Men like to think they’re saving some brain-dead woman who’s got herself into a scrape.

“Who worship at the altar of God one day and offer a sacrifice to Satan the next.”

never again would I allow myself to be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand.

“First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.”

Chills.

“Everyone has undergone a change,” he said. “The other students were relaxed until we came to this height. Now they are uncomfortable, on edge. You seem to have made the opposite journey. This is the first time I’ve seen you at home in yourself. It’s in the way you move: it’s as if you’ve been on this roof all your life.” A gust of wind swept over the parapet and Dr. Kerry teetered, clutching the wall. I stepped up onto the ridge so he could flatten himself against the buttress. He stared at me, waiting for an explanation. “I’ve roofed my share of hay sheds,” I said finally. “So your legs are stronger? Is that why you can stand in this wind?” I had to think before I could answer. “I can stand in this wind, because I’m not trying to stand in it,” I said. “The wind is just wind. You could withstand these gusts on the ground, so you can withstand them in the air. There is no difference. Except the difference you make in your mind.” He stared at me blankly. He hadn’t understood. “I’m just standing,” I said. “You are all trying to compensate, to get your bodies lower because the height scares you. But the crouching and the sidestepping are not natural. You’ve made yourselves vulnerable. If you could just control your panic, this wind would be nothing.” “The way it is nothing to you,” he said.

To have positive liberty, he explained, is to take control of one’s own mind; to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from addictions, superstitions and all other forms of self-coercion.

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.

Why it’s better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I’m not sure.

What is a person to do, I asked, when their obligations to their family conflict with other obligations—to friends, to society, to themselves?

When I discovered, finally, that the decision could be upheld for my own sake.