Educated

by Tara Westover

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.

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’s no greater power than that.

But in that moment, I realized how much I’d been counting on that conflict coming to an end, how deeply I believed in a future in which we would be a father and daughter at peace.

Same for me and my father.

“But it wouldn’t be if I were a woman. Women are made differently. They don’t have this ambition. Their ambition is for children.”

Yuck.

I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I’d felt since learning about the Holocaust and the civil rights movement—since realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others.

I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness. Praise was a poison to me; I choked on it.

“The most powerful determinant of who you are is inside you,” he said. “Professor Steinberg says this is Pygmalion. Think of the story, Tara.” He paused, his eyes fierce, his voice piercing. “She was just a cockney in a nice dress. Until she believed in herself, then it didn’t matter what dress she wore.”

“If you’re in America,” he’d whispered, “we can come for you. Wherever you are. I’ve got a thousand gallons of fuel buried in the field. I can fetch you when The End comes, bring you home, make you safe. But if you cross the ocean…”

He ultimately wants to protect her.

positive liberty is self-mastery—the rule of the self, by the self. 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.

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery None but ourselves can free our minds

“I need to get my vaccinations,” I told the nurse. “Which ones?” she asked. “All of them.” I said.

Lol

From the moment I had first understood that my brother Richard was a boy and I was a girl, I had wanted to exchange his future for mine.

Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known.

I actually agree with this.

The room suited my father perfectly: it was larger than life and wonderfully incongruous.

What was needed—what Emily needed—was a woman emancipated from pretense, a woman who could show herself to be a man. Voice an opinion. Take action in scorn of deference. A father.

As long as we had never asked, it was possible to believe that they would help. To tell them was to risk the unthinkable: it was to risk learning that they already knew.

I think mother has always known.

I should have protected you.

That's all she needed to hear. From her whole family.

“You’re a woman, ain’tcha?” he said. “Well, this here’s a kitchen.” We stared at each other and I contemplated the distance that had sprung up between us—how natural those words sounded to his ears, how grating to mine.

I hate this attitude.

I bought a ticket to Idaho for Christmas.

I don't think she's missed a single Christmas from idaho.

“Your anger that night,” she told me on the phone, meaning the night Shawn had killed Diego, “was twice as dangerous as Shawn has ever been.”

What!?! Fuck this. Fuck the hypocrisy. I want to kill this whole damn family myself.

I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. 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.