A girl who has never been to school before the age of 17 and has left the mountains, can her life still perform miracles?
The American historian Tara Westover, in her autobiographical novel "When You Fly Like a Bird to Your Mountain", uses an inspiring story to provide the perfect answer to this question.
The protagonist, Tara, was born into a secluded family, and before she entered college, she spent her days wandering through the mountains full of broken copper and iron.
There were no schools, no hospitals, just the roar of cranes, the fury of my father, and the abuse of my second brother.
However, it was in such a harsh environment that Tara fought all the way back, becoming a well-known historian, best-selling author, and was named "Influential Person of the Year" by Time Magazine in 2019.
Even Bill Gates couldn't help but marvel: "It's a truly inspiring story that everyone will love, and it's even better than what you've ever heard of." ”
Read Tara's counterattack journey and you will understand:
Even if we are in the corner of the well, without the favor of fate, we can still rely on the strength of our hearts to achieve the turnaround of life.
The new semester is just around the corner, if the child is temporarily behind, please let him see this "You Fly Like a Bird to Your Mountain".
Life is not a 100-meter run, don't care too much about the starting line
In the rapidly modern united States, the Tara family lives in an isolated garbage mountain.
All this stemmed from her domineering and dictatorial father.
He was paranoid about "Mormonism", firmly believing that the end of the world would come, and instilled in his children from an early age: "Sick can not go to the hospital, school is to brainwash students, girls wear skirts is frivolous ..."
Under the deformed education of his father for many years, the six Tara brothers and sisters have all lived as "freaks" in the eyes of outsiders.
In response to what their father called the "end of the world," the children were divided into teams of miscellaneous teams, working day and night to make canned food and stock up on survival supplies.
The long-term overload of labor has left Tara with no time to explore the world outside the mountains; The father's brutality and oppression also made his brother Shaun gradually develop a violent tendency.
He would drag Tara into the bathroom and press her head into the toilet for a few minutes before letting her out;
Or curl her fingers and palms into a spiral until Tara cries out for forgiveness.
The dictatorship of his father and the violence of his second brother once made Tara lose hope for the future. She had thought she would live under her father's haze for the rest of her life, like her mother or sister.
Until one day, the third brother Taylor told her: "There is a world outside, and once Dad is not around, everything will look very different." ”
With Taylor's encouragement, Tara is determined to fight a battle.
Having never received a schooling education, she could only start a difficult self-study from the most basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
In order not to delay the work of the scrap yard, she had to come to the dim basement every late night and early morning to die with the strange knowledge.
This high-intensity revision continues until the day before the exam.
In the end, Tara received an acceptance letter from Brigham Young University with a score of 28 points. The life that once thought it would end at a glance ushered in infinite possibilities.
Liu Yuanyuan, the "talented woman of the cold door" of Peking University, once said passionately on "Super Speaker":
"Fate gives you a lower starting point than others to tell you and let you fight for a Jedi Strikes Back story."
In this strange world, there are people living in tall buildings, and there are people struggling at the bottom of deep ditches.
The world is uneven, and perhaps each of us cannot decide our own starting point. But we can, like Tara, firmly grasp the turning point of fate.
Life is not a 100-meter sprint, but a protracted marathon; The contest is never a momentary speed, but who can survive more before the end.
Don't stop, don't give up the chase, no matter how low the starting point, there is a possibility of headwind overturning.
The weak escape the problem, and the strong face reality
In the book, in addition to Tara, there is also her sister Audrey.
After learning that Tara had also been abused by Sean, she decided to join Tara in exposing Sean's violence to her family.
Unexpectedly, after listening to it, my father only gently interpreted all this as a joke between the family and scolded them for this "accusation" as a betrayal of the family.
Faced with her father's partiality and the family's doubts, Audrey's heart was strongly shaken.
Under pressure, she gave up her resistance, accepted all the brandings given to her by this family, hypnotized herself with "Shaun is just playing", and even sided with Tara in order not to be isolated by her family.
As a result, because of her weakness and evasion, Sean not only failed to realize his mistake, but also intensified his persecution of other family members.
Tara, on the other side, is in a completely different situation than Audrey.
In the face of family questions, she has never succumbed.
In order to make sure that her memory is not confused, she also runs to Sean's girlfriend to verify.
Eventually, Tara's suspicions are confirmed, and she stays away in time after confirming that Sean is a hopeless violent maniac.
In addition to family strife, the bigger crisis Tara has to face is in school.
Since she had never received a systematic education before entering college and had been seduced by her father's fallacies in the past, Tara was far behind her classmates in her homework.
Sometimes, she couldn't even tell which book was the textbook; He is also often mistaken by the teacher for deliberately causing trouble because he asks common sense questions; Halfway through the semester, Tara's grades in all subjects were lit up with red lights.
However, all this did not crush Tara, but on the contrary, it aroused her fighting spirit.
In order not to be dropped out of school, she developed a high-intensity study plan, learning two or three o'clock in the morning every night; When she encountered problems that she did not understand, even if she would be ridiculed, she forced herself to ask the professors and classmates for advice.
All the efforts were not in vain, and at the end of the semester, Tara won a government scholarship with an all-A and was given the opportunity to go to Cambridge University for an exchange.
Self-media person @ classical once compared life to a process of climbing uphill: only by climbing over a small hill can you see the higher peaks behind you.
Many times, the difficulties we encounter are like a hillside on our way forward.
Blindly escaping, not only will it not help, but it will also be trapped in the same place and stagnate, until it is overwhelmed by more and more mountains.
Only by facing reality and overcoming difficulties can we climb over the lofty mountains and grow freely in the wider world.
More important than the low starting point is the accumulation of power at the low point
After entering the university, Tara found that she did not completely break away from the shackles of her original family as she expected.
On the contrary, as she continued to receive new knowledge, she felt more and more torn from herself and the world.
She does not know how to get along with her classmates, always subconsciously apologizes, and even feels inferior because of her body structure that is different from men.
The misconceptions she was forced to receive in her early years also prevented her from establishing normal links with the outside world:
She thinks that girls in short skirts are debauched, and dare not face their well-dressed classmates, almost causing contradictions;
Her father did not allow her family to go to the hospital for medical treatment, so even if she took painkillers, she had to overcome a huge psychological obstacle;
Because she did not trust the government, even if she could not afford to pay the tuition fees, she still firmly refused to apply for financial aid;
In one class, Tara was also confused, causing everyone to mistakenly think that she was joking about war, and they all threw contemptuous glances at her.
On a vast campus, Tara lives as an island that no one cares about.
However, what torments Tara even more than the loneliness from the campus is the time she returns to Buck's Peak every summer vacation.
Whenever Tara wants to expose Sean's crimes to her parents and tries to correct their misconceptions, the recalcitrant parents believe that she is hallucinating from being brainwashed by the school and mobilize the whole family to isolate Tara.
In the days of being abandoned by the whole world, Tara can only find solace in books.
The search for truth, the thirst for knowledge, became a beam of light in her gray days, supporting her to grit her teeth and move forward.
In the book, Tara learns about modern civilization.
After realizing how ridiculous her past ideas were, she studied even more eagerly and tried to reshape her three views.
Slowly, Tara gradually shortened the distance between her classmates, from the first time she took medicine, to the first time she wore a skirt, to the first time she applied for a bursary...
She began to live like a normal person and gradually had her own social circle.
Through reading, Tara learns that her father's paranoia stems from a disease called bipolar disorder.
When she tried to let go of the resentment in her heart, she understood that behind her father's incomprehensible words and deeds, there was a deformed love at work.
In the end, Tara was relieved of the harm her father had caused her, and she also completely got rid of the guilt of her original family.
She freed herself from spiritual slavery and flew like a bird to her mountain.
In psychology, there is a "self-selection" effect, which refers to the choice you make and decide what kind of life you live.
As Tara writes in the book, "The most powerful factor in determining who you are comes from within you." ”
With faith in the heart and strength under the feet, only with rock-solid persistence can we break through the obstacles on the road to pursuing dreams, and open up the road of prosperity in the thorns with the strength of perseverance.
The attitude in the face of the trough determines the height of a person's life, and the belief in the desperate situation determines the upper limit of everyone's life.
The English title of the book "You Fly Like a Bird to Your Mountain" is "Educated," which translates to "educated." Symbolizes "the power of education to change the destiny of man." ”
However, compared with its English name, many people commented after reading it that "I prefer the Chinese name of the book".
Perhaps it is precisely because, in the eyes of many people, education is only the external cause that changes Tara's fate, but what really makes her embark on this path of bitterness and self-knowledge, and step forward in setbacks, is always the force in her heart that is not willing to compromise and is unwilling to accept defeat.
From this point of view, Tara's story is more like an educational apocalypse that inspires thousands of parents, rather than a bowl of chicken soup for the soul of the weak.
The new semester has begun, please tell the children:
Learning is the practice of our first life, don't give up on yourself because of a momentary backwardness, this is the opportunity given to you by fate to fight back;
Bravely face the challenges of learning, do not avoid every difficulty on the road to growth, it will be a stepping stone on your way to the top;
Find long-term learning goals, don't forget what you set out for, that's your inexhaustible motivation to get out of the trough.
For the rest of our lives, may we all become brave birds, awaken our inner strength, and fly to our own dazzling peaks.
Click "Watching" and encourage jun.
Author | Mu Mulin, with just the right amount of love and dedication, do a good job of writing
Image | Visual China, Network (if there is infringement, please contact to delete)