YouSaid · the spoken record

Tara Westover

lines on the record: 80
first: 2019-05-06
most recent: 2019-05-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That I could have given to myself. Say, hey, look, here's a story of a set of circumstances and decisions that I made. And I think stories, they exist so that we read them and we judge people in the more positive sense of that word where we say, what do I think about what you did? And we use that to decide how we feel about our own decisions. So I offer this book not to say to anybody, oh, here's a blueprint for how you behave, if you might become astray from someone, and you should do everything I did because I handled it perfectly. I super didn't. But more to say, here are the decisions I made. And you can judge me and you can decide if you think I should have done it differently and you can use those judgments you're making to decide how you feel about yourself and your own life. And I just wanted that so desperately when I was going through it.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think anyone would buy it or believe it. Buy it in both sense of that word. And then I think the other thing I thought was just what I needed was a face. I needed someone who was willing to say this happened to me. A theoretical fictional character wouldn't have been as helpful for me. And I also decided to write it when I was young, which people think is a weird decision because there's a convention that you write a memoir at the end of your life and you're looking back and you say what everything means. And I didn't feel like that was appropriate because a lot of the book is about estrangement. One of the things that is hard about estrangement is that you don't know how the story ends and you have to wake up with that decision every day and not know what the future will be like. And it feels different, I think, being estranged at 65 or 75 than it feels that I'm 32. That feels different. And I wanted to write something.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About faith is when people that you love or the people around you don't believe in you, but you still believe in yourself, I think that is an act of faith. And it took me a long time to realize maybe I don't, maybe I can believe in myself even if she doesn't. But I guess I just felt so isolated that I thought I'll write this story and then I thought I'll make it a novel because I definitely don't want anyone to know it's me and then I had two problems with that when no one would believe it because it's a little crazy.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How can I believe that I'm a good person when I know that my mother doesn't think I'm a good person? And the sense of shame that that created in me, I just thought if anyone finds out that my mother thinks that, how could they ever trust me with anything? I mean, how could anyone think well of me when they know that my own mother doesn't think well? She's supposed to love you no matter what. And I think I felt so alone and so frightened of people finding that out about me for so long that when I finally stepped out from underneath that shadow, I just felt like, oh, what would have really helped me is someone saying, you know what, this happened to me and it's okay. And there's a life after, and it can be a life that you want, and you can find that way to believe in yourself. That's another way to think.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Insanity might attribute for a little bit of that. I don't know. I think I wanted to write it. I felt really alone when I lost my family. I think estrangement is one of those things that there's such an intense stigma around it that even people who've gone through it, especially public figures, they don't really want to talk about it. And I understand that really well because I remember having this thought when I first became estranged to my parents and for maybe a year, I remember thinking.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has changed is trying to think which of my feelings even do I want to have in my life? And what is this anger doing for me? And do I want it? Do I need it? When is it useful? And when can I just let it go? And writing the book for me, the writing of it and the publishing of it is a whole other can of worms.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is learned, I suppose, is that there is this kind of intractable, untouchable thing that is you. And the trick maybe is to keep the rest of your life still enough so that you can listen to it and be aware of it and not get so busy chasing all these other crazy things. And that can be true even if the thing you're chasing is in the past. I think that there were a lot of years for me where I was holding on to a lot of anger with my family. And I have a theory about anger. I think anger has a role to play. I think it comes from your brain as a self-preservation instinct to get you out of bad situations that are not good for you. But I think you can hold on to it too long and it can become defining of you. It can become something that you think you need and something I had to learn through writing the book and then through thinking about, well, now what, now that all this stuff...”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting I think I am not that much different from other people, and so that there are things that I imagined if, oh, if I had that, then my life would be sorted and better and fixed and everything would be better. And I think what I've been amazed by is, oh, all these wonderful things have happened and we sold all these books and it's going so well. And at the end of the day, you're still yourself and you like the people you like and you like the things that you like to do. You still like to do those same things.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's pretty divided. I think if you read the book and you were to make a conjecture of how everyone would respond, you would be right.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I never experienced the obsession with Fang. I mean, I never was anywhere that I would have seen a magazine or be even remotely aware of that as a thing that people had. So I wouldn't say it seemed ridiculous to me because I never experienced it at all. I moved to New York recently and I've seen a bit of it then. And yes, it seems pretty ridiculous.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it weird to say I never think about it? It defined my whole life, I would say, for years and whether God was angry or mad or wanted me to do this or wanted me to do that. What did he want me to? And I don't worry so much about it. I try to worry more about my opinion of myself and whether I'm doing right by other people. And I assume I am a big fan of John Stuart Mill. He's one of my favorite philosophers. And I just try to live my life that if there is a God and if he is, he has to be a loving being because that's the only form of God I would accept. Then I try to live in such a way that that would be acceptable. And I don't worry about it.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not at all. I just hold on to that scripture because I love it. No, I'm not Mormon. I haven't been for a long time. So for me, I think that these concepts are beautiful.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, I'm not superstitious in any way, and I kind of move away from ideology and all of its forms now. I don't like anything that if you think one thing, you have to subscribe to all these other beliefs”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've written a lot of, I give talks occasionally now, and I have about five talks that all say in them education is with a totally different. Definition and I change all the time, and one day someone's gonna call me out on it, but I wait a second, I saw your other talk and you said education is, I don't know, and that's what's so great about it. I think it's discovery, it's your mind growing, it's taking responsibility, it's letting go, it's holding tight. I think it's all of those things. But importantly, it's having enough knowledge and perspective and empathy for yourself and empathy for other people to make decisions so that you can do all of those things that you need to do.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We attract those people, we repeat those patterns, and I think I love this idea of faith as a belief in a better world, in a different world, in a different life than you've experienced. Love that you may not have experienced yet. But to let go of what is and try to see what things could be, I think of as a really amazing intersection between faith and education because it's those two things together. It's the ability to see your life as it is and imagine a different life.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think for me, there was one of the things that made it hard for me to let go of my family not being able to imagine any kind of future or life that didn't have them in it. And I think that's what everybody does. We grew up in these families and we learned certain patterns and we think that we're all liberated and changed and then as soon as we get back in that situation we repeat those patterns. Or worse, very often we have dysfunctional family relationships and then we go out into the world and we find people who will repeat that pattern with us.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for me, it comes down to being able to conceive of a different thing than the life you have in front of you. There's a scripture that I really like. It's about faith. My favorite scripture. I loved it when I was Mormon and I love it and I'm not Mormon stuff. And it says that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the love has to be separated because I can't control them. I don't want to have control over them. I love them and that has to be separated from whether they change and that's their own decision.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Real disservice when we make it about control and power and changing people, and that's not what it is. You love people, you give them that for free, and then you decide whether that's something that you want to have in your life. And the alternative is to say, well, I'm going to change them and then I'll have them in my life. And that's not love. That's not what love is. That's not what it does. That's not the power that it has. So I would say with my own family, I love them now. I'm estranged from half my family. I love them very much, but I've accepted the fact that I need them to change, to have them in my life and whether or not they change is something I have no control over. And so the love.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there was a long time for me, I thought, because I loved them, that meant maybe I'd made the wrong decision, or because I missed them, and then I would second guess myself and think, oh, because I miss them, it must mean that I've made a mistake. And it took me a really long time to figure out that, yeah, love is just love. One of the last things that happened between me and my father, the last time I saw him, he came over and he gave me this really awkward side hug and he said to me, I love you. You know that? And I said, I do. That has never been the issue. And I always knew my father loved me. Of course I knew he loved me. And I don't think my dad did anything that he did from a lack of love. I think there's a difference between intention and effect or between the way people try to love you and the actual way that that dysfunctional thing can manifest in your life. But no, I don't think that love is the issue and I think we do love”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trade out my father's memories, his whole idea of reality for my own, and I wasn't, I just wasn't able to do that. It wasn't a trade that I could make. I had my own ideas now that were different about history, about the present, about everything. And it was not really possible to go back to a time where his reality was the only reality I had access to.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never actually was that good at algebra. I was studying history by then, thank God. My parents, one of the ways that they tried to understand why I had said these things about my brother, that they just could not deal with was they decided I was possessed and that I had said all these things because I was possessed by the devil, which if you think the way my parents think makes perfect sense. And if you don't, it doesn't. And so they came to Harvard, and my dad offered to give me this blessing, which was kind of like an exorcism. And there was a moment that I was a pretty long moment. I was very tempted by that where I thought I can just recant everything. I mean, it was the easiest way out ever. I just say, oh, right. The devil made me say it. I take it all back. And I could have my family. And I really wanted that. And I didn't take the blessing, but the reason was just because I felt like what I was being asked to do was”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My parents, you know, they came to Harvard. One of the things that they had told themselves to explain why I said what I'd said about my brother.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, like it's a much more comfortable story for me to tell. But I think becoming aware of the fact that so many of the ideas that you have, they're not the way it is, they're just the ideas that you have. And there's another way to look at it. There's another way to look at other people's lives, which is important. And there's another way to look at your own life. Like the view that your own life, the life that you're living, does not have to be the only life that there is. It's not the only life that's possible even for you. And I do think it's that ability to have different perspectives, different points of view. It's crucial to having empathy and respect for other people, but it's also crucial to having empathy and respect for yourself. They function together.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was completely shocked at the depth of my own ignorance and the possibility of that, but something I learned from the civil rights movement was That actually happens to everybody, and we all learn a certain version of the past. And the best historians of the civil rights movement have told us about these concepts of historical memory and that you can have something happen, and two communities will remember. Different way. I think I said this a minute ago, but I think There's a reason that for a lot of white Americans, Rosa Parks is so much more comfortable than Emmett Till. And it's a fact of human life. We always remember the good things we do for other people and the bad things they do to us, and that makes a disconnect.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we all do, and that's what's deceptive about the ideas that we get from other people they feel like there are ideas. They feel like, you know, when my dad's version of history that I learned, that didn't feel like his version of history. That felt like history. I did not experience it as particular to his point of view. And that's why I think history became so important to me because one of the things I realized when I learned about the Holocaust was, okay, it's possible for something on that scale to happen and for everyone else to know about it and for me not to know about it. And that's insane and frightening. But the next thing I realized”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were fighting about it essentially. I mean, I think it was probably one of the first kind of willful things I did with my dad. I was rolling my t shirt up so that it was hot, and then he would yank it down and say this ain't a whorehouse. And then we would kind of do that five or six times. Maybe the first time I ever just really stood up to my dad, which is a very small thing to stand up to someone about. It's not a huge flag to plant. But I think, yeah, there was an inch of that of just saying this is my body and I'm going to take control of all two inches of this shoulder”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought she was like a Jezebel. I thought she was, yeah. I mean, these are Mormon women as well. I mean, there's not a lot of immodesty going on. But, you know, Mormons have a different standard than my dad had a much further standard. So my normal Mormon would wear a tank top in her house maybe. But for my dad, there was no question of that.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I thought of them. My dad called people who weren't in our little way of looking at the world Gentiles, which was everybody except our family.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I would have been around 16. Yeah, around that age. And it was a lot of, I mean, a lot of it was my brother Tyler, who had, my dad had been more extreme when he was, as he got older, you know, so when he was younger, some of my brothers had actually gone to some school, and Tyler was one of those. And so he'd gone to some school, he'd even done some high school. And then he's just this genius freak who taught himself trigonometry, taught himself algebra, and went to college. And he's the one who came back when I was 16 and said, this is not a good place for you. He knew what my brother Sean was like, and he just, he witnessed something and said, you've just got to get out of here. You have to do what I did. And you can. I did it. You can do it. I didn't do it as well as he did. We should be clear, but I survived that test. Yeah, barely, but I did.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working in the junkyard, I was working for this mine at a nut factory down the road. My mother was a midwife. It just didn't happen. And so there was, I remember being taught to read. I remember being taught how to do some basic division. And then after that, there just wasn't, I mean, the books weren't in the house, so you couldn't, when I decided to learn algebra and trigonometry, I had to go buy them. And I know my brother Tyler also had to buy them. So there wasn't really...”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was erratic, I would say. My mother started out, I think, contending to homeschool the kids, and then she had seven kids, and then she was a midwife, and then she was herbalist. And just by the time I came along, for me and my brother Richard, my sister, there wasn't a lot of school. I mean, when I wanted to...”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My family, you could say they're confident, arrogant might be a better term. No, we have that. My dad has that. He has this insane presence, I mean. He's just... I also think my parents had given us, if there's one thing I'm really grateful to them for. They definitely had raised us with this idea that we could learn things, that our education was our responsibility, is something that we could do. And if we wanted to learn something, we should go learn it. And I think they took it a bit far. But that fundamental thing that they would say, my mother would say this to us all the time, that you can teach yourself anything better than someone else can teach it to you.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never read them. I read the Bible really well. I didn't read a lot of other books, but luckily the Bible is hard to read. Actually, like. So I think I was reading at a high level, but only because when I started reading normal books, it was like, oh, this is cake. Totally get this. Yeah, no, I think I read at a really high level because reading was important to my family. I think literacy, you really have to have, even with literacy, though, I mean, I had never read a science book. I'd never written an essay. I'd never taken an exam before.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I was lucky with the reading. My family, because you had to be able to read the scriptures, my family were very literate, so we were taught to read pretty high standards. We could read the Bible in the Book of Mormon. So I was taught to read when I was very young. But math was a real issue. I didn't know any math, really. My mother taught me. I think long division might have taught me”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we became estranged. That, I think, was the first time everything else, it was just my life, and I never thought very much about it in that critical way of stop going. What do you mean stop? You can't stop. And I think that was the first time I just thought, I've been working really hard. I've been trying to get an education. I'm getting a PhD. Here I am at Cambridge or Harvard. I think I was a Harvard on why. Like none of this means anything to me. The thing I want I can't have because what I wanted was my family and I wanted a healthy family.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a lot of healing for me that happened. It was almost like she became that mother for the first time because I realized, well, she wanted to be a better mother. She wanted to look after me. The thing with my mother, though, is there's kind of two versions of her. There's what I think of as my mother, and then there's what I think of as my father's wife. And they're not the same person. They're not even remotely related. And so when my father decided not to believe me, my mother...”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't remember ever thinking of not keeping going being an option until I became estranged for my parents. I think that was the first time I confronted them about my brother, my mother believe me, and I had this incredibly healing conversation with her on chat actually, where she said to me, you know, really hard but important things where she was really being hard on herself for not having put a stop to it and I said to her, Oh, you know, it's not your fault, basically. You've got this head injury and then it's not your fault. And she said to me, no, I'm the parent. I should have looked after you. That's my job. Until she said that, it was a strange thing. I never had any idea how much I needed to hear her say that until she said it. And then I realized this kind of weird thing that happened when she admitted to me that she hadn't really been the mother to me that she wished she'd been.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, we didn't believe in it. Doctors were going to, you know, they were trying to kill you, by the way. You didn't know, but they were.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but you're being treated well, nothing made me feel more like a whore than someone treating me well, you know, that word that was in my head that my brother, nothing made me feel that gap so strongly as being when someone was nice to me. And I really had to trade out that self-conception. And it took a really long time. You know, it wasn't easy. I think it's possible. I don't have a problem now.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think because the gap between who I thought I was and how I thought of myself and the way that people would treat me when they treated me well was really excruciating. It was really painful. Whereas just being treated badly was actually not that painful. I was completely shut off from my own feelings.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And respect that it doesn't give you the power to change other people. And you can love someone. That's why you can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them. Because it's not necessarily a question of whether you love them. It's a question of whether they belong in your life.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think the fact that I couldn't see it with my brother. Yeah, I think we have an incredible capacity to just see what we want to see. And the thing about my family is the love was real. I wasn't tricked into loving my brother. I actually loved my brother. And I think he loved me. And the same is true with my parents. The love was real. And I think that sometimes maybe our ideas about love are really simplistic. And we think of it as something that fixes everything, or if the love is real, then you definitely have to stay and the relationship is great because there's love in the relationship. And I've almost developed this bizarre idea that maybe the only way to respect love, really respect love, is to respect its limits.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just think that stereotype of a man and a wife beater, and he's drunk, and he's always terrible. And I had a brother who 95% of the time was wonderful and loving to me and was important to me and was the only adult in my life who was taking a whole lot of interest and looked after me. And I was willing to let go of the 5% of the time because I thought, well, he's not a bad person. And I thought, and he struggles a lot himself when he always feels bad after. And I just, the idea that I have all classic now, you know. All classic. But the idea that I had of him didn't fit the stereotype I had in my head, so I discarded it. And so when I wrote the book, it was...”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's kind of funny. I don't think I did. I remember when I was 15 or 16, I saw some movie at my grandmother's house, and I remember actually having the thought, I wonder if my relationship with Sean is abusive. I remember thinking those exact words. And I decided that it wasn't.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think it was the first time probably that I didn't know what he'd experienced. Maybe he had thought it was a game, but I knew what I had experienced and I knew that I had not been having fun. That was not the experience that I had had. And I think that moment where I left the two narratives, I left them both on the page. I left his and I left mine and I let them both be. And that's what he thinks happened. And this is what I think happened. And I don't need to be a memory fundamentalist and claim that I have the absolute truth. But it was important to say, That's my view of it. And I'm not going to change that to accommodate you or make you more comfortable. Like that's what I think happened.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much more violent, and after it was over, I went home and I wrote that this journal entry. And it was the first time I think that I just wrote what had happened. And I wrote that I'd been frightened and I wrote that I had been in pain. I wrote that I would have torn my brother apart in that moment if I had been able to because of what he was doing. And then when I was writing that entry, he knocks on the door and he comes in and he says to me, oh, it was just a game and I had no idea that I was even hurting you until we got back to the construction side and I saw that you were limping and that your wrist was cracked. And, you know, next time we're having fun, you really need to make sure that you speak clearly and tell me if something's wrong. And then he left, and I was sitting there that passage you just read, and I had this journal entry I'd written, and I had this whole other narrative, this whole other way I could look at it.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what you read about that passage is there's a war going taking place even when you read that. My brother, a month before that incident happened, my brother had attacked me in our house and he grabbed me by the hair and he dragged me down the hallway and he shoved my head in the toilet. And he did this in front of a friend of mine. And when it was all over, my brother came to me and he said, that was just a game and we were having so much fun. And next time we're having fun, you should really tell me if something, if you're not having a nice time, I had no idea and you really need to speak more clearly next time we're having fun. And I said, oh, okay. And I believed that because I wanted to. It's a lot more pleasant to think that you maybe just didn't speak clearly than to think that your brother's assaulting you. I was eager, I would say, to replace his understanding of what had happened with my own memory. And then a month later, this altercation happens in a parking lot, and it was much worse, and it was much more...”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And even when I started to resist it, I was not confident enough in saying this isn't all right with me. I would just fight with myself about it almost as much as I would fight with him or my parents.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I wrote it. It was a journal entry I wrote when I was 16, or I wrote, it's strange how you give the people you love so much power over you. Because I think my brother, he had defined me to myself, and I don't think there's a greater power than that. When people convince you, I mean, I have a theory. I think all abuse is foremost, I think it's foremost an assault on the mind, and if someone's going to have an abusive relationship with you, they really have to invade your reality and they have to distort it. And they have to change how you see yourself and what you think happened, and they have to have this almost kind of mind control. And my brother had that over me. I'd grown up in a household that had violence in it, and I had had this relationship with him for many years, and it was to an extent normalized for me.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source