Short Form: Educated

Spoiler alert: going to talk about details of the book

Educated is a really good book. Tara (the author) manages to tell the story as she experienced it without passing judgement on her family for things they did wrong, giving us a clearer view of the struggle to figure out what is “true” when living for decades in others’ distorted (and sometimes abusive) realities. I’m interested in other’s hot-takes, and if you haven’t read it yet, take this as a pitch!

My takeaways:

• Especially when so many things that matter (family, livelihood, safety) are tied to our beliefs about the world, it can be very, very hard to figure out what is true. There is part of her (and part of me) that wants to believe fake realities we’ve been told, and it took many years for both of us to step further away from those.
• Guilt is a very powerful weapon for abusers – abusers decrease others’ self-worth and use that to get what they want. Abusers are kind sometimes, and rationalize their abuse to make it reality, leaving the abused with an alternative reality. Abusers often have some sociopathic qualities. And then they use the fact that the abused are not sociopathic to mainpulate them into thinking they are in the wrong.
• One of the hardest things in figuring out how to deal with abusive people is that they seem to believe what they are saying, and can convincingly explain their side of the story without the years of first-hand experience to understand their patterns. It seems likely that many abusive people actually do believe their distorted stories – that lying to oneself and then being “honest” to others is common, maybe because humans have norms that it’s not ok to purposefully deceive people but that it is ok to be “mistaken” about what actually happened.
• When you have to be self-reliant to survive, have tried to trust your loved ones and they’ve repeatedly failed you, it’s hard to ask for help. “I can fix this” is dangerous – sometimes we need to ask for help. Also, sometimes it’s better to decide not to abandon the problem altogether. This helped me realize ways in which I was being unnecessarily self-reliant.
• So much of beliefs are based on what we’ve seen happen in similiar situations – it takes conscious effort to think about what one should say instead of the brain’s auto-fill function. It’s wild how many people never escape from the “reality” they are born into, and further wild that even those who do learn to believe other things still have trouble breaking free of cached beliefs and habits.
• The book helped me develop more empathy for Trump supporters and other people that seem to live in different realities than I do. When everyone around you believes a version of events that is very believable without a bunch of effort to learn other things, and when there are strong incentives to believe what others believe to fit in, have a family, job, etc., it’s very hard to break free.