What certainty used to provide
I have several clients who are in the middle of walking away from systems they used to belong to. Sometimes the system is a political tribe, sometimes a church, sometimes an unhealthy family, sometimes a career that felt like an identity. The specifics vary but the felt experience does not. They tell me about running into friends and former community members at the grocery store, or at their kid’s soccer game, or at a family funeral, and describe the encounters as strange, awkward, and unfamiliar. They tell me about waking up on a Sunday morning or a holiday or a workday and not knowing what to do with themselves, because the thing that used to organize the day has stopped organizing it. They tell me about lying awake at night wondering if they have made a terrible mistake, even when their rational mind is certain they have not.
What they are describing is what happens when a person crosses a threshold and leaves behind a form of certainty that had been providing them with protection they didn’t know they were receiving. They feel like a fish that has been lifted out of water and set on the shore. The air is technically breathable for the fish’s neighbors on land, but the fish’s whole body was built for a different medium, and every breath now takes effort that used to be automatic.
Or, they feel like a traveler who has been dropped without warning into a city in a country whose language they don’t speak. The buildings around them look normal enough. The people are going about their lives. But every sign is illegible, every custom is unfamiliar, and every simple task requires deliberate effort where before it was a reflex.
Both metaphors point at the same underlying reality. Certainty is a form of nervous system regulation, not just an intellectual position. When you are certain of what you believe, who you are, what side you are on, and how the world works, your body is running on a set of automatic assumptions that free you from having to figure everything out in real time. Your energy goes toward doing rather than toward navigating. Your relationships come with pre-established scripts. Your calendar comes pre-populated with the rhythms of the group. Your identity is already formed and doesn’t need to be constantly reconstructed. All of this feels like it costs you nothing while you have it. Only when it leaves do you discover how much it was doing for you.
The Hero’s Journey framework that Joseph Campbell laid out in The Hero with a Thousand Faces describes this phase of the journey. Campbell called it Crossing the Threshold, the moment when the hero commits to leaving the known world and steps into the unknown. He observed this crossing is not culturally specific and it is not unique to any single mythological tradition. Every story of transformation includes this moment, because human beings across all times and places have understood that the movement from a familiar life to an unfamiliar one requires the person to leave something behind, and the leaving is always harder than the person expects. Campbell described the threshold as a boundary, often guarded by figures the hero must reckon with, and the crossing as a commitment that can’t easily be undone. The hero passes through the boundary and finds themselves in a new territory where the old maps no longer apply.
Campbell also observed that once the hero has crossed, the old world is not fully available to them anymore. They can look back at it, and they can visit it in some limited way, but they cannot fully live in it again as who they used to be, because they are no longer that person. This is one of the hardest truths of threshold crossings. The crossing is a passage from which the person emerges different, rather than a temporary trip from which the person returns unchanged.
The old world knows this before the person does, which is why the friends and family members who stay behind often feel the change more sharply than the person crossing does. They see someone they used to know and can’t quite reach anymore. They may respond with confusion, or grief, or hostility, or a kind of grieving silence, because their own sense of the person is being asked to update in ways they didn’t choose either.
I crossed my first meaningful threshold in 1997 when I left the generational family farm to take a job at a factory. On paper it looked like a straightforward career move, while in reality it was much larger than that. I was walking away from a system of expectations, obligations, and identity that had structured my life since I was a child and had structured the lives of the men in my family for generations before me. I was choosing autonomy over inheritance. I was choosing to build my own schedule rather than to remain available for whatever the farm demanded. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was crossing a threshold that would eventually make several other threshold crossings possible. My nervous system, for months and probably years after the move, didn’t know what to do with the fact that I was now responsible for my own time, my own decisions, and my own direction. The freedom felt more like a vacuum than a gift. I had crossed into a country whose language I didn’t speak yet, and I had to learn it slowly, one word at a time.
The second meaningful threshold came a couple of decades later when I walked away from the church community I had been part of for years. That story I have already told in earlier weeks of this series. What matters for this piece is that the crossing produced the same nervous system disorientation as the farm-to-factory move, even though the two departures were separated by many years and were about completely different systems. The specific system doesn’t matter. What matters is that a system had been providing certainty, and the certainty had been providing regulation, and the regulation had been freeing me to function without having to work as hard as I suddenly had to work.
If you feel like a fish on the shore, or a traveler in a foreign city, or like your nervous system has been placed in a room whose walls it can’t yet find, you are actually crossing. The disorientation is the crossing. The exposure is the crossing. The bare, unprotected, uncomfortable feeling is what happens when the shelter of certainty has been left behind and the shelter of your own emerging authority hasn’t been built yet. There is a period in between where the old shelter is gone and the new shelter is not yet available, and that period is what you are experiencing.
That period lasts longer than you would like. It’s often measured in months and sometimes in years. Nobody who has done this work will tell you it moves quickly. What I can tell you is that the disorientation you are feeling is the natural response of a nervous system that had been outsourcing some of its regulation to a system that no longer holds you. Your nervous system will eventually build the internal capacity to do what the outsourcing used to do, but that building happens slowly, in small increments, through practices that you will have to find on your own. In the meantime, you may feel like you are drowning in air, that every simple decision now requires deliberation where before it was reflex, or that your former community members are going about their certain lives while you have made a mistake by leaving. You have crossed a threshold, and the threshold is doing exactly what thresholds do.
If you find yourself in this territory now, I want you to know something that took me years to understand. The unprotected feeling is the beginning of a different kind of protection, one that has to be built from the inside rather than borrowed from a group. That kind of protection takes longer to develop and looks different once it is in place. Instead of automatic answers, it gives you a settled relationship with yourself that no external group can take away. You become your own reference point, your own compass, your own place of return.
For now, if you are in the disorientation, you are exactly where you are supposed to be. The fish will not become a land animal, and the traveler will not stop being a traveler. But over time the fish learns to notice which shore has water nearby, and the traveler learns to read the signs in the new language, and both of them slowly develop the capacity to live in a place they never intended to enter and didn’t choose. That capacity is what you are building, whether or not you can feel it right now. The building is happening even while you feel most lost, because your body is doing the work of adapting to a territory it had never planned to inhabit. Trust the process, trust the crossing, and trust that the disorientation is a part of the passage rather than a failure of your choice.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: Meeting the Shadow Without Becoming It
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
