Educated

by Tara Westover

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

way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself. 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.

began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.

My professors came into focus, suddenly and sharply; it was as if before the grant I’d been looking at them through a blurred lens. My textbooks began to make sense, and I found myself doing more than the required reading.

I wrote my paper on the effect bipolar parents have on their children. It was accusative, brutal. I wrote that children of bipolar parents are hit with double risk factors: first, because they are genetically predisposed to mood disorders and second, because of the stressful environment and poor parenting of parents with such disorders.

This estrangement was not formalized: I just didn’t feel like seeing him, or hearing his voice, so I didn’t.

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.

that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she had been, she became that mother for the first time.

doubted whether, in the years he had left, I would be able to prove to him that I was not what my father said I was, that I was not a wicked thing.