Educated

by Tara Westover

The past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. —Virginia Woolf

My strongest memory is not a memory. It’s something I imagined, then came to remember as if it had happened.

A decade later my understanding would shift, part of my heavy swing into adulthood, and after that the accident would always make me think of the Apache women, and of 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.

The seed of curiosity had been planted; it needed nothing more than time and boredom to grow.

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

I could have told him all that, could have surrendered the weight, let the relationship carry it and grow stronger.

A poorly written sentence was a poorly conceived idea, and in his view the grammatical logic was as much in need of correction. “Tell me,” he would say, “why have you placed this comma here? What relationship between these phrases are you hoping to establish?” When I gave my explanation sometimes he would say, “Quite right,” and other times he would correct me with lengthy explanations of syntax.

But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.