Sense of Belonging and Liminal Identity
Liminal: of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition.
The first challenge when physically leaving a fundamentalist world is perhaps that of integration into the “other” world, the formless universe void of meaning and coherence that lies just outside the boundaries of your original faith community.
The biggest challenge in that is that your mind has been diligently working in binary fashion — us vs them — for a very long time. At first you don’t realise it, but you’re viewing the “outside” exactly as that: one big community, just as yours (just a lot bigger). Despite the differences between individuals, everyone shares the same worldview, that is, not yours. Your mind has been used to think in 2D for such a long time, that you can’t even conceive for a moment that people around you don’t just belong to the “outsider community”, that they don’t necessarily have to be grouped under one big category. Categories. That’s the term. Categories are everything for a fundamentalist mind. They’re order, they’re meaning, they’re your cosmos. It’s very hard to think outside of categories.
And once you start realising that perhaps the “outside” is more than one big community of equally-minded people, you start categorising people. That’s right, you break them into sub-categories. The fundamentalist mind is incapable of thinking without categories: categories are the fundamentalist’s alphabet. Even when you think you’re not doing that, you are categorising, constantly and scrupulously categorising.
Categories also mean boundaries, walls. And to a person who has recently left a fundamentalist environment the “outside” may appear either as protected by one big, impenetrable wall, or as landscape covered with cities protected by their own little impenetrable walls. Inaccessibility is the keyword here, and by your own spell, you are bound to live a life in the wilderness, so to speak. A life where going back is not an option, and going forward means isolation. You end up living your life sitting on the fence of other people’s worlds, never belonging, but always striving for that sense of belonging that was once so deeply rooted within you. Liminality is now what defines and circumscribes you, you’re defined by what you’re not. Liminality becomes your identity, and a hollow space, your habitat.
It takes dedication, effort, time, and humility to slowly break down those walls that are after all only in your mind. And perhaps, if on the one hand you’re bound to spend the best years of your life learning how to walk again, you can also relish such a journey of self deconstruction and discovery, knowing that there’s more to life than meets the eye.
