exit story 8: threshold

I remember the moment when it all came crashing down, and I realized I didn’t believe it. I went into work that day, and opened up the Internet. I went to NOM to check real quickly for anything new before settling into work. And I realized I didn’t fit there. All of the sudden, NOM was too faithful for me, too “in” the church. In that one moment, I realized I was a Foyerite. I was “out.” I panicked. I practically hyperventilated, and I couldn’t concentrate on work. I had to write. I wrote an email, marking my change, and sent it only to myself. I had to mark the moment.

The subject line was “threshold.”

“I think I've crossed a threshold. Foyer is more home
to me than NOM. It scares the crap out of me. As I'm
giving up hope, I think there must still be hope there
somewhere, somewhere, I just have to find it. Like I
have to give it a chance. Like a month isn't enough.
Like I can't leave when I've never even been anywhere
else.

I used to be drowning in shallow water.

Now I'm suffocating in thin air.”

Still, though I was “out” is so many ways, I desperately clung to the hope that I was wrong. That somehow, I could salvage everything. That although I was standing in the middle of a pile of ruins of my old paradigm, if I just closed my eyes tight enough, I could pretend that everything was perfectly normal.

As I sat there hyperventilating at work, I didn't fall back on my old way of praying for comfort. I snuck away into an empty room and stood in the tree pose (of yoga) to pull myself together. It helped.