How I Lost My Faith

Aella's 2017 memoir-essay about being homeschooled by a professionally evangelist father and stay-at-home mother — media censored, computer use secretly monitored, friends vetoed unless sufficiently Christian, science books deriding evolution as baseless. The piece traces the long arc from total embeddedness in that worldview to its slow unravelling, the social and family costs of leaving, and the specific intellectual and emotional moves that made losing belief possible. Written with the precise self-observation that has since defined her writing.