Educated

"I realized that my trauma wasn't something to be ashamed of. It was something to be understood."

"I had to unlearn everything in order to learn anything."

"I chose education because it was the only way out I could see."

"To become myself, I had to first become a stranger to myself."

"Forgiveness doesn't mean forgetting. It means deciding that the past doesn't have to control your future."

"The person I became in college was not a rejection of my past. She was a continuation of it—but conscious."

"I learned that you can love someone and still recognize that they were wrong."

"Isolation had been my entire world. Then I discovered there were other worlds."

"I had to learn that being educated meant learning to be comfortable with uncertainty."

"My father's world was small. Education showed me how much larger the world could be."

"The most radical thing I could do was think for myself."

"I was homeschooled by people who didn't believe in history. So I had to teach myself."

"To become someone new, I had to first understand who I had been."

"My past was a weight I carried, but education gave me the strength to set it down."

"I had been told that questioning was a sin. I learned that not questioning was the real tragedy."

"Knowledge is power, but only if you're brave enough to use it."

"My father believed the government was our enemy. But I learned that ignorance was the real threat."

"I had been taught to distrust my own mind. Now I had to learn to trust it."

"I had spent so much energy trying to forget who I was that I had forgotten who I might become."

"I had to become my own teacher."

"Survival is not the same as living."

"I learned that the world is far more complex than the one I grew up in."

"Knowledge is power, but only if you're willing to leave everything behind to obtain it."

"My mother's choices were not my own."

"I had to choose between the family I was born into and the person I wanted to become."

"The scar on my face was a reminder of what happens when you question authority."

"I had been educating myself all along, I just hadn't realized it."

"Everything I had worked for, all of my years of study, had been to free myself from my father's philosophy."

"I was not my father's daughter, I was my father's son."

"Asking questions became my rebellion."