As a kid who'd been beaten for asking questions, I wanted to analyze arguments, understand the phrases chosen, and question-everything. Books saved my life then, and I read my way into college, into an honors degree in literature, into learning how to approach the world with a mind open to diverse viewpoints, rather than the extremist perspectives under which I'd been raised.Īs a kid who'd been denied books, I wanted to read-everything. I longed for the life of the typical American teenager, but when I got excommunicated and enrolled myself in a Houston high school, I felt like I was from another planet. After a life of being trafficked and abused throughout Asia and Latin America as a child born into the third generation of the religious sex cult, the Children of God, everything I knew about the outside world was through select Disney movies and surreptitious reading. Until then, I hadn't thought of myself as a writer, only a voracious reader. Find the thread in the story of your life." A few days after I woke up blind from a brain tumor pressing on my left eye, made only more intense because I was a soldier deployed to Afghanistan, my commander said to me, "Write it all down.
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