"Educated" by Tara Westover

Words couldn't describe it, but she did. Her life, her experience, her feelings, her evolution, her pain; they were mine, too, their memories trapped in an obscured cage of my own making.

I don't know how to explain this resonance. I don't know how to explain why I spent hours on the verge of tears, nearly overwhelmed that someone else's existence, while different in many ways, could mirror mine in such an uncanny way. Tara Westover was an alternate doppelganger of my growing up; her memoir stirred countless visions of the battles I now relive only in smoky recollections as my mind gazes at the bleached bones of my formative years.

I wanted to gush to my siblings about this book. I wanted to demand they read it, corroborate the similarities, to validate me somehow. But it will not be; my own brother wrote an autobiography, one which he has repeatedly asked me to read, but which I cannot. He even sent me my own copy so that I wouldn't have to be troubled by the meager cost of purchasing it online. I haven't figured out why I've been unable to bring myself to read it; maybe because I don't want to soil my fragile memories with the perspective of another sibling, for fear that I will forget how it was for me, that I will rationalize away years of my own biased knowledge, only to be replaced with an alternate history that belonged to my brother.

I won't take the time today to describe the similarities; this would take me too long. Perhaps I'll have to buy a copy of the book and annotate in the margins where I identify aspects of my life.

Regardless, the book ends with her still in the midst of a struggle between her identity and her aspirations of identity. I wonder how hers will play out, as much as I wonder the same for myself. Here's to the years ahead.