Educated

by Tara Westover

“Of all my children,” she said, “you were the one I thought would burst out of here in a blaze.

God will provide either trials for growth or the means to succeed.

Praise was a poison to me; I choked on it.

I preferred the family I had chosen to the one I had been given,

A wife does not go where her husband is not welcome. I will not be party to such blatant disrespect.[*]

But what has come between me and my father is more than time or distance. It is a change in the self. I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her.

You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.