Educated

by Tara Westover

“Men like to think they’re saving some brain-dead woman who’s got herself into a scrape. All I had to do was step aside and let him play the hero!”

The word “slaughter” came to mind, because slaughter is the word for it, for a battle when one side mounts no defense.

Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.

all the decisions that go into making a life—the choices people make, together and on their own, that combine to produce any single event. Grains of sand, incalculable, pressing into sediment, then rock.

She had a migraine. She nearly always had a migraine.

The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.

I stood and quietly locked the bathroom door, then I stared into the mirror at the girl clutching her wrist. Her eyes were glassy and drops slid down her cheeks. I hated her for her weakness, for having a heart to break. That he could hurt her, that anyone could hurt her like that, was inexcusable. I’m only crying from the pain, I told myself. From the pain in my wrist. Not from anything else.

“The longer you stay, the less likely you will ever leave.”

“There’s a world out there, Tara,” he said. “And it will look a lot different once Dad is no longer whispering his view of it in your ear.”

Then I understood why I hadn’t come sooner. I’d been afraid of how I would feel, afraid that if he died, I might be glad.

In the reality she constructed for herself nothing had been wrong before her brother fell off that pallet. I wish I had my best friend back, she wrote. Before his injury, I never got hurt at all.

I understood that no future could hold them; no destiny could tolerate him and her. I would remain a child, in perpetuity, always, or I would lose him.

I didn’t feel much like an object of desire or temptation. I felt like a human forklift. How could an inch of skin matter?

The truth is this: that I am not a good daughter. I am a traitor, a wolf among sheep; there is something different about me and that difference is not good.

I am not sorry, merely ashamed.

The admissions committee was efficient; I didn’t wait long. The letter arrived in a normal envelope. My heart sank when I saw it. Rejection letters are small, I thought.

Suspended between fear of the past and fear of the future,

Fixed, anchored to a former version of myself.

I don’t know what Shawn saw on my face—whether it was shock, anger or a vacant expression. Whatever it was, he was delighted by it. He’d found a vulnerability, a tender spot. It was too late to feign indifference.

Shawn had meant it to humiliate me, to lock me in time, into an old idea of myself. But far from fixing me in place that word transported me.

that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested.

But something had shifted nonetheless. I had started on a path of awareness, had perceived something elemental about my brother, my father, myself. I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant.

because retaining power always feels like the way forward.

The word and the way Shawn said it hadn’t changed; only my ears were different.

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

The third time I returned to the table, Shawn pulled me onto his lap. I laughed at that, too.

He couldn’t save me. Only I could.

I hear my voice begging him to let me go, but I don’t sound like myself. I’m listening to the sobs of another girl.

Why didn’t he stop when I begged him?

If I was larger, at that moment, I would have torn him apart.

I have often wondered if the most powerful words I wrote that night came not from anger or rage, but from doubt: I don’t know. I just don’t know.

I evolved a new understanding of the word “whore,” one that was less about actions and more about essence. It was not that I had done something wrong so much as that I existed in the wrong way. There was something impure in the fact of my being.

It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you,

I didn’t know if I could do this without feeling powerful.

Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure:

I submitted my homework and studied for my exams, but I did so out of terror—of losing my scholarship should my GPA fall a single decimal—not from real interest in my classes.

A clinic sounded like a part of the Medical Establishment, but I reasoned that as long as they were taking things out, not putting anything in, I’d be okay.

“This is ridiculous,” he said. “Apply for the grant! You’re poor! That’s why these grants exist!”

“I make a lot of money,” the bishop said. “I pay a lot of taxes. Just think of it as my money.”

I was cleaning houses in Draper when the mail came, so Robin left the letter on my bed with a note that I was a Commie now.

I had believed the money would be used to control me, but what it did was enable me to keep my word to myself:

“Did your uncle ever get treatment?” “No,” I said. “He thinks doctors are part of a Government conspiracy.” “That does complicate things,” he said.

With all the subtlety of a bulldozer

I was so focused on what was working, I didn’t notice what wasn’t.

She hadn’t sent any remedies for the strep or the mono. Only for the penicillin.

“God has given him a special calling. To help people. He told me how he helped Sadie. And how he helped you.” “He didn’t help me.”

“He said he’ll hurt me,” she said. “I know it’s because of Satan. But sometimes I’m scared of him, I’m scared of what he’ll do.”

“That place has a hold on me, which I may never break.”

I’d been wondering how I could be a woman and yet be drawn to unwomanly things.

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