Educated:A Strong Inner Heart is the Cure for Everything

If you come to this world before you get a strange bad life script, are you willing to go through?

If you come to this world, you find yourself at the poker table, holding a bad hand, and what attitude will continue?

In her autobiographical novel Educated:A Memoir, the American writer Tara Westover truly recalls her life reversal experience of climbing out of the garbage pile and making her way to Cambridge University and Harvard University, completely turning her fate around.

She escaped from the mountains, broke through her own stubbornness and narrow-mindedness, opened the door to a new world with education, and finally reaped the true meaning of independence, happiness and freedom.

As soon as the book was published, it immediately hit The New York Times bestseller list.

And from Tara's true life story, it is easy to see that:

The reason why a person is strong inside and lives a happy and free life is not because of a good birth, not because of a strong family, but because she has the four abilities to reinvent herself.

Overcoming Inner Fear

Tara grew up in the mountains of Idaho in the United States with a father who suffered from severe bipolar disorder and a mother who had no opinions and who looked up to her father.

Tara's parents were conservative Mormons who did not believe in modern science or education. As a result, Tara never went to the hospital, let alone to school, since she was sick as a child.

She was pulled by her father from the age of seven to help out at the scrapyard, where she was once knocked to the ground by a huge wrecking ball and nearly killed by her father's forklift.

In that harsh environment, Tara had also witnessed her brothers' bodies being cut, burned, and even having their fingers cut off.

As a child, Tara once imagined that the magical junkyard was a playground for demons and witches, elves and thugs to fight, but now she realizes that it is like a purgatory, and there is fear everywhere.

On top of that, the family was riddled with violence, contempt for women, and other problems.

The older brother,Shawn , was unpredictable, violent, and had a personality disorder. He would insult Tara as a prostitute, etc., and would even grab Tara's hair and push her head into the toilet.

Even when Tara went to college, Shawn would always use the excuse of playing around with her and became more violent towards Tara, who also dreamed of being killed by Shawn more than once.

This painful past, like a carving knife, cut deep and shallow scars in Tara's low self-esteem and sensitive heart, and Shawn once became her nightmare.

Someone said, "When you are afraid, all doors are closed for you."

Very often, what defeats a person is not the difficulties he or she faces, but the fear, frustration and lack of confidence in the heart, which is the low energy that cannot be released from the heart after a long period of suppression.

These low energies shape and distort perceptions and become one's way of understanding the world.

Tara is fully aware of this, and under this invisible weight, she is not broken, but with a sense of resilience, she takes the road with fear, dances in shackles, and begins to let the gray fate blossom into life little by little.

Unobtrusive Efforts

The roar of the junkyard, the noise of the family, the brutality of Shawn, the domineering father, Tara wanted to escape countless times.

Her brother Tyler,who was enrolled in college, became a light in the darkness of Tara's life. Under the influence of Tara, Tara decided to go to college.

She picked up this book, using fragments of time immobile buried in self-study, she secretly study trigonometry, study physics, she always believed that outside this door is a rule and rational world.

After failing her first exam, Tara did not get discouraged, but continued to study, and through another battle, she finally received a letter from Brigham Young University.

When Tara entered the college , she faced even greater challenges.

Since she had never been educated in school, she had no vocabulary to build up, could not write papers, and had difficulty completing even the most basic assignments.

She was also mistaken by her teachers as a deliberate troublemaker because she often asked very childish questions.

Tara was disliked by her teachers and classmates, making her feel for a while that going to college was a mistake. Although her heart wavered, she never gave up.

To pay her rent, she endured stomach pains and went to work as a cleaning lady at 4 a.m. every morning.

To pass her exams, she stayed up late into the night, pulling her hair out of her head and pondering over her textbooks, studying her notes.

She endured the pain of a broken toe by Shawn and limped to the exam room with determination.

Because she has suffered more, she is not afraid of the tiredness of studying, and because she has gone through too many trials and tribulations, she cherishes every opportunity to study.

Through continuous efforts, she was recommended for a master's degree at Cambridge college as an outstanding graduate.

Through continuous efforts, she has transformed from a conservative Mormon believer to a spiritually free academic elite.

It has been said, "Life is a thick and thin process, and I would like to see myself improving every day through continuous learning and getting a little closer to those seemingly distant dreams."

And every effort of Tara is carving herself, and every persistence is making life downward rooted heel.

Only unobtrusive efforts, there will be a silent precipitation after the thick and thin; only persistent to pay, will shine in the years of sharpening.

Destiny is in your own hands, whether you are muddling through the sea of people, or living a unique and wonderful life, it is entirely up to you.

Learn to be Alone

When Tara first entered college, her loneliness stemmed from a fierce conflict between her inherited perceptions and the real world.

Growing up in a rigid environment, she thought that girls who wore short knee-length skirts were slutty and that going to the movies on the Sabbath was disrespectful.

She never even washed her hands after going to the bathroom, didn't dare to take painkillers for her sore ears, didn't know what the "Holocaust" was, and steadfastly refused government aid when she couldn't afford to pay for school.

Her classmates looked at her with disdain and regarded her as a freak, and she was always alone.

Through her studies, she learns about modern civilization, gradually closing the gap with her classmates and redefining herself to live like a normal person.

Solitude is a gift from God, and solitude is also the best period for one to add value.

Those anxieties gradually turn into peace, and those voices that bother you slowly quiet down. Tara finds her own rhythm in solitude, and it also allows her to make her own rational judgment on many things.

Of course, Tara's sense of loneliness came from the campus, and from her family of origin.

When the enlightened Tara begins to expose Sean's crimes to her parents, her stubborn parents believe she is possessed by the devil and hallucinating, and she begins to be isolated by her entire family.

But Tara touches an inner truth in these isolated days, and she steadfastly defends the truth and steadfastly goes after her faith and truth.

She reread the best works of sages such as Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mill , and engaged in solid academic research in an effort to unravel the "unanswered questions" of her family.

It took her a year to complete the first draft of her dissertation, receive confirmation of her PhD at Cambridge college , and begin to build a new way of life, with answers to the questions that had tormented her for years.

There has never been success overnight, behind all the achievements, there are loneliness and hardship that ordinary people do not know.

That is the reluctance to sink after the despondency, is a kind of enlightenment after crying, is a kind of persistence in the darkness of the night, is the pain of nirvana before breaking the cocoon into a butterfly.

Someone said, "Mediocre people fill the void with hilarity, excellent people achieve themselves with solitude."

Life is a lonely solitary walk, in the days when no one asks to refine, in the time of silence to build up strength.

You do not have to try to fit in, nor do you need to look up to authority, you quietly cultivate, silent precipitation is the best look of life at the moment.

Let Go of Inner Obsessions

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said,"The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size."

The reborn Tara also experienced this "no return" when she came into contact with her family, who were stuck in the same place.

Whenever Tara tried to imply that Shawn was a violent maniac and sought support from her family, her father yelled at her, "Did you come back from Cambridge to bring chaos to your family?"

While his father is ever protective, his mother says nothing.

Shawn thinks Tara stabbed him in the back, calls in abusive rants, and threatens to hire someone to kill her.

Under Shawn's threat, and in the midst of her parents' monstrous favoritism, Tara's sister Audrey, surprisingly, chooses to break off her sisterly relationship.

The family agrees that Tara has turned away from God, is controlled by the devil Satan, and will destroy the family.

What is paradoxical and laughable is that, despite their contradictory beliefs, the parents plan to return Tara to conversion, exorcise her, and hope that Tara will be reborn.

Her parents' "love" for her was always there, but it was too perverse.

Tara was reluctant to sever the ties of blood with her parents, but family is the most difficult place to sort out right from wrong, and her parents were still the same, but she was no longer who she once was.

For a long time, Tara's mind was in a state of severe schizophrenia. She was cowardly, broken, self-doubting, watching TV every day to numb herself, often crying and laughing hysterically at night, and running out into the street screaming.

It was only through psychotherapy that she realized that the new educational philosophy and perceptions had long been implanted in her belief system, and that cutting herself off from her family of origin was her inevitable destiny.

Adult leaving parents is a kind of inevitable, real family relationships also exist clutch demand, you are holding your own life script, not the sequel of parents.

After a painful struggle, Tara finally shook off her guilt and decided to truly say goodbye to her parents, make peace with her heart, and insist on being herself.

As Tara put it in an interview:

"You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye. You can miss someone every day and still be glad they're not in your life."

Some people, not suitable to meet, can change another way to exist in your life; There is a kind of feeling, only suitable for miss, you can change a farther distance to remember.

Don't get too close or condemn yourself.

When the sun is too hot, we choose to turn around and embrace the moon, but this does not mean that we forget or betray the warmth and brightness of the sun.

Let go of your burdens so you can move on to your new life.

Postscript

Tara through self-rescue, break free of the shackles of the family of origin, step by step towards the open world of life;

She explores human nature through education, reshapes herself through updated cognition, and strives to realize the transformation and counterattack of life.

According to Lin Qingxuan , a renowned Chinese writer and essayist,"Like pearl shells, people should also develop the ability to reshape their wounds and transform the trauma of life so that it becomes a beautiful pearl."

Life is a lifetime, a autumn of vegetation, there are fruitful scenery, there are also devastated barren.

Only let go of obsession, after the destruction of reconstruction, will meet a new yourself.

Only by learning to be alone and constantly looking inward will you find your own home.

Only by overcoming fear, hope in difficulties and faith in disappointments can we find happiness and find the courage to survive.

For the rest of my life, I hope you and I can be the same as Tara, will taste the bitterness of life, through the wind and rain mud, all into the foot of the continuous ladder.

Flee as a bird to your mountain -- don't wait for the wind, but chase it. The process of chasing is the meaning of life.