Educated

"My father had built a world and convinced us we lived in another"

"I could not trust my own memory"

"Shawn was my father's son in all the ways that mattered"

"I had to become a stranger to my family to find myself"

"Education was my only exit"

"I learned that loyalty to family and loyalty to truth cannot always coexist"

"Once you see the truth, you cannot unsee it"

"Buck Peak was a prison of the mind"

"I could not become educated and remain who I was"

"My mother had sacrificed her life to a man's delusion"

"I had believed in a history that was not true"

"What you do defines who you are"

"I am not the child my father raised"

"The past is a physical thing"

"I understood that I had been raised not to think, but to obey"

"My father held the knife, and I was the blade he wielded"

"To accept a thing is not to accept it—it is to surrender to it"

"I had been divided so long between two worlds that I couldn't remember which was real"

"Once you arrive at your own interpretation, you leave behind anyone who refuses to contemplate your version of events"

"I had a choice. I could accept their reality and lose myself, or cling to my reality and lose them"

"I had been educated in the version of myself my father had created"

"You can love someone and still choose to leave them"

"What if I had simply said no?"

"I was my own denial"

"The greatest education I received was learning to trust myself."

"My father believed that ignorance was a virtue, but I found it to be a prison."

"I am both a product of my past and a creator of my future."

"Knowledge gave me the power to question what I had been taught."

"I learned that it is possible to love someone and still protect yourself from them."

"The scars from my past remain, but they no longer define who I am."