Cherr’s Reviews > Educated > Status Update

“The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you’re having one, it is somehow not obvious to you.”

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see an experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create.”

“I imagined how esteemed I would be, as a newly cleansed vessel. How loved. All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs, and I could have my family.”

“I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I only know this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she had been, she became that mother for the first time.”

“She was just a cockney in a nice dress. Until she believed in herself. Then it didn’t matter what dress she wore.”

“…It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lights—but that is the illusion. And it always was.”

“You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are…”

“I read them to learn what to think, not how to think for myself.”

“The wind is just wind. You could withstand these gusts on the ground, so you could withstand them in the air. There is no difference. Except the difference you make in your mind.”

“I can read my journals from this period and trace the evolution of a young girl rewriting her history. In the reality she constructed for herself, nothing had been wrong before her brother fell off that pallet. I wish I had my best friend back, she wrote. Before his injury. I never got hurt at all.”