Old Stories, New Beginnings

I’ve thought a lot about stories and story-telling this past year and Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, has my head spinning. Recounting the tale of her childhood, she describes what it was like growing up in a Mormon survivalist household in Buck’s Peak, Idaho, headed by a paranoid bipolar father and seconded by an all-too accommodating mother. The first third of her memoir describes an upbringing mired in poverty and neglect, spent home schooling at the kitchen table and metal scrapping in the family junkyard. The middle section charts her escape, shifting back and forth between Brigham Young and Buck’s Peak, and tracing the widening chasm that going to school creates between herself and her family. The final third details both the apotheosis of her educational journey – completing a PhD at Cambridge University – and the inevitable parting of ways between herself and most of her family members. Throughout, the memoir is shot through with recollections of violence she suffered primarily at the hands of her sadistic older brother, Shawn, and the stories that her parents and others repeatedly manufactured to protect him. As the narrative makes clear, this dynamic played perhaps the greatest role in ultimately driving her out of Buck’s Peak and away from her family for good.

Considering that she completed her PhD in history, little surprise that Educated often has the feel of a family history grounded in the oral testimonies of Westover’s immediate family members. As such, the book is also a meditation on the vagaries of memory and the impossibility of ever capturing the past – or anyone in it – just right.  Bringing a historian’s scrutiny to her family’s story, she elaborates in footnotes when, where, how, and why different family members’ stories fail to align. As she explains at the end of the book, for Westover, the precise details of a memory tell us far less about the moment itself and far more about who a person is – and was – to us. That is, memory is less factual truth than emotional truth. And for Westover, leaving her family behind was about gaining access to both. As she puts it, “Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind” (304). This privilege, for Westover, is education, and it came at a high cost.

What I appreciated so much about Westover’s approach was how capaciously she defined education.  Certainly, the memoir, especially the middle section, abounds with classic first-gen student experiences regarding formal education within institutional settings that are then heightened for the author given her singular upbringing. Indeed, I have never encountered a narrative that encapsulated in so extreme a form the wide range of social, emotional, cultural, psychological, financial, and academic hurdles that students from poor families who are the first to attend college may face in higher education settings. Moreover, it lends itself quite easily to a feminist reading. It is, after all, the story of one young woman’s flight from patriarchy, higher education serving as her unlikely escape route. But at the end of the day, while attending college and then graduate school was undoubtedly life-changing, it is not the education to which Westover’s title refers. Instead, as she makes clear at various turns in the narrative, she considers education to be a journey towards self-liberation and one’s own truth, the effort to achieve mastery over one’s own voice and to develop a sense of self in the world. As she puts it succinctly, it is "the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else's" (197). 

In my last post, I wrote about struggling to achieve something similar, describing how critical thinking in academic settings and now reflective writing in this blog have helped me develop my own voice and thus “live in my own mind.” But I can’t help but notice that, throughout most of this yearlong process of self-authorship, I’ve been telling myself the same narrative, one in which going away to college serves as my origin story. In fact, this has been the case for nearly a decade, especially in professional settings. Only very infrequently, very obliquely, do I refer to a time before. And of course, there are obvious reasons for that. I did start my career as a diversity practitioner in higher education. The only experiences that “mattered” in a straightforward sense were the ones pertaining to college and graduate school. In order to explain my motivation to be in that field, I simply drew parallels between the only two institutions with which I was most familiar and situated myself and my journey within those contrasts. 

What I’m thinking now, though, is not so much that this origin story is a lie. Certainly it’s fabricated, but only insofar as every story is. Rather, as Westover might say, this origin story is problematic because it only conveys the factual truth, obscuring a greater emotional truth that’s getting harder and harder to avoid.

Nine months ago I transitioned into a career in secondary education. Since then, I’ve been confronted time and again with uncomfortable questions about my childhood, my upbringing, my adolescence, posed by curious students and new co-workers alike. I use the word “uncomfortable” because that’s how those questions make me feel. They’re the usual things, the stuff of friendly getting-to-know-you conversations and other collegial chit-chat, but for me, they feel invasive, personal, unwelcome. It’s simply a time in my life, and a part of myself, for which I lack neat, pre-packaged stories, ready for mass consumption, which isn’t to say I haven’t tried. This last year, for example, there have been one or two occasions when I’ve tried to make sense of that time before, but by and large those stories were developed within the universe of the same origin story, barreling headlong toward the “real” story – my eventual academic and professional life in higher education and whatever observations I had to make therein. 

As I’ve mulled over this conundrum the last few months, the answer became clear. I swept that part of my past away for good reason, and I’ve been reluctant to return to that foreign country ever since. You see, going away to college was the first time that I was given the opportunity to create and receive new stories, better stories, about myself, ones that didn’t make me feel isolated, rejected, unloved. By going away to college, I cleared a necessary path, one on which my survival depended. That path allowed me to think, to learn, to explore, and to experience life outside of my father’s house, as Westover might say. More importantly, it permitted me to experiment with telling myself new stories about myself, and to hear new stories about myself from people who saw me in the way I needed to be seen. This, I believe, is at the heart of the emotional truth that propelled me into this career and the one strand that runs through its many twists and turns: initially, I wanted to be a university professor because I wanted to ensure every student who came from a tough family background would have the opportunity to develop new, dignity-restoring, potentially life-saving stories about themselves once they got to college. Later, when I transitioned into diversity work, it was because it broke my heart that, for so many students, college didn’t have that effect at all.  

This inevitable reckoning with the emotional truth of my past has forced me to see something I’ve avoided for a long time. I trace so much pain back to my time in graduate school, and rightfully so. It truly was a place of shame, embarrassment, unkindness, unhappiness. That is factually accurate. But the emotional truth is that the million little ways that that place and its people hurt me belong to an initial trauma schema whose patterns were put in place much earlier than that. As it turns out, grad school simply replicated the kind of constraining, punishing features of my childhood, a time when nothing was certain, nothing was safe, and no one was to be trusted.  Facing the emotional truth underlying the last 15 years is challenging to say the least. But it also frees me from having to contend further with the specific details of that period of my life which, in any case, I believe I’ve sufficiently mined in this blog. 

In other words, it’s time for new stories. And, as Westover has shown me, sometimes new stories are simply old stories remembered anew and thus made truer. That’s as worthy a goal as I can think of for 2020.

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Identity, Authorship, and the Limits of Empathy

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Silence, Obedience, and Voice