I just finished reading "Educated: A Memoir" by Tara Westover. It's a story of the author's experiences as a girl raised in the mountains of Idaho by survivalist Mormon parents. It's a fascinating and psychologically penetrating account of some of her formative experiences, both beautiful and abusive, and her long journey to move beyond the confines of the subculture in which she was raised. It was difficult to read for many reasons, and I found myself crying multiple times, both for Tara and for myself.
Tara was raised by a father who sounds like he was mentally ill and a mother who supported and enabled his extreme views. They are not bad people. They are products of their biology and of the culture in which they were raised. Tara doesn't appear to blame them; in fact, she seems more open than I felt in allowing for some of the unhealthy behaviors they and others in her family exhibited. In reading her account, I found myself wondering how I could have a more forgiving attitude like her. And I found myself identifying with her experiences, both as a child who experienced less than ideal circumstances and was subjected to some extreme views, and also as the parent who inherited and/or learned some extreme views and passed them on to his children.
If you have read the book, you know that Tara's situation was pretty bad. There are people who suffer abuse much worse, and many who suffer much less. I suppose it's possible there are some children who do not feel they were abused at all. But I'm in the camp of those who suffered less than her. I'm not a martyr. My experiences were far less extreme than hers in almost every way. My parents were good people. They had their challenges, but they did the best they could with what they were given. But I still felt a connection to Tara as she described concepts and principles drilled into her by well-meaning parents and physical abuse suffered at the hand of someone who should have been (and sometimes was) her protector. I feared for her every time she went home, and by the end of the book, I wanted to scream at her NOT to go home. Those parts were hard to read.
But the hardest part for me was seeing myself in her parents. Being raised in a conservative religion pushed me to some pretty extreme views years ago, and I still don't really know what kind of damage I have done to my wife and children as a result. I bought into some conspiracy theories to explain discrepancies between what I saw in society and what I believed a "good" society should look like. My upbringing had taught me to avoid (and sometimes fear) the sinful ways of the world, which set up an us-vs-them mindset that cast me in the role of hero, armed with truth and right, fighting the evils in the world to make the world a better place. The black and white thinking that I inherited along with reverence for authority didn't mesh well with the critical thinking skills I learned later in college. Not that religion and open-mindedness are fundamentally incompatible, but eventually, my search for truth led me to another extreme view - of skepticism of our ability to know anything, which ultimately led me to question and dismantle the rest of my extreme views. And this letting go dissolved the boundaries, connecting me with a world that was more beautiful and loving than the one I had been taught to fear.
I can't comment on the truth of various conspiracy theories. Some are probably true. Most feel false. I can only definitively talk about how they affected me. I was not happy when I explored and embraced them. I was motivated by fear. Those ideas helped me find a mechanism for explaining the degradation of society that would ultimately lead to the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus Christ. This was driven in part by teachings from the Bible and church leaders and partly by my own experiences. From a young age, my relationships with people outside of my church had somewhat inoculated me against the us-vs-them mentality, but I couldn't reconcile a growing sense of the goodness of people with what the Bible said about society's future state leading to Armageddon. Conspiracies filled the gaps. But they left me with a feeling of us-vs-them in a different way. Fear and suspicion tended to crowd out love and acceptance, and my life was pretty dark. My final reconciliation came by letting go of the idea of the end of the world, among other things. Not that the world won't end someday - it will because everything does. It's just that my concept of the world's end is no longer colored by religious teachings. And there is no more division in my mind. We're all just people.
Some of what Tara talks about in her journey is a transition from a black/white mindset to an open and inquiring mindset. I started life the same way. Certainty, dogma, black/white, truth/lies, good/bad, right/wrong, in/out, us/them - these were fundamental to my world view. I can't say how much of this came from my religion, how much from my family, and how much from the larger society, but I'm pretty sure all three of them were instrumental for me. It was a long, slow process of maturing for me to move beyond this fundamental paradigm. To dissolve the boundaries that separate us. To step into the dark and realize the world is so much brighter than I had imagined.
And the process is ongoing. I realized recently that I am still driven by some psychological baggage that was buried at a very early age. Two ideas stand out to me: 1) There is never enough and 2) I am not enough. I think Tara's book helped me uncover those. My scarcity mindset has been challenging for me and my family, and I am getting better at letting those impulses go. I'm hopeful I can transcend that idea completely one day - hopefully soon. But the idea that I am somehow not worthy or good enough is deeply seated and bleeds into so many aspects of my life in subtle ways. I think that I may struggle with that one for quite some time - possibly the rest of my life.
Growing up is hard - whether on an individual level or as a society. I think segments of our society are on the verge of social adulthood and some are firmly stuck in the teenage years, or maybe even the toddler years. Hardline thinking and dogma are powerful forces in our society right now. It's hard to hear one another because we make enemies of anyone who disagrees with us. But what if we dissolved the boundaries? Wouldn't it be nice to live in a world with fewer (or no) boundaries? What if we could tear down the walls that separate us long enough to listen to one another without feeling the need to judge them or prove them wrong if they disagree with us? What if we sought out sources of information that challenged our world view? What if we let go of the need to be right, or even the need for certainty, and allowed the other view to be heard and validated? We don't have to agree with each other. We just need to listen with respect.
We don't see things the same, but we are all trying to do our best with what we have. Maybe we can open our minds, drop our judgment, and through kindness, respect, and compassion build a better world. Together.
