A Liminal Space

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote. But what happens when those shared stories—our collective narratives—become barriers to the very connection they promise to create? This question has been haunting me, and it’s led me on a journey from seeking safety in shared stories to finding authentic connection through uncomfortable truths.

I started thinking today about the collective narratives we hear from so many different people. What exactly is a collective narrative? It’s a shared story or interpretation that a group develops to make sense of their common experiences, identity, and values. Think of it as the agreed-upon version of “what happened to us” and “who we are” that helps bind a community, organization, or society together.

What fascinates me is how these stories shape what we can and cannot hear from each other. Pain is mostly what makes stories difficult to hear—pain concerning things we can’t fathom happening to us, pain we don’t want to look at because it feels unbearable, pain we fear might happen to us.

Why We Cling to Shared Stories

Headlines these days promote so much fear: fear of things happening outside our control, fear of things we never want to imagine happening to us. Yet we read those headlines, and even though the stories are unbearable, we still consume them. Maybe because the story is “out there” and not up close and personal. Maybe because it hits home somehow and we’re looking for relief.

But here’s what I think is really happening: maybe we read through the lens of our own collective understanding so we can identify the problem and make ourselves feel better because we believe we have the solution. This last reason makes the most sense for why collective narratives exist—to help us deal with what feels unbearable.

Think about your own family’s stories. Every family has them: the explanations for why things happened the way they did, who was to blame, what went wrong. These stories help us make sense of chaos, but they also limit what truths we’re willing to face.

Growing Up with Overloaded Apple Carts

I’ve been writing stories to escape since I was a teenager. Let me paint you a picture of why. I spent a lot of time in my room alone with parents who had little family support. My mother turned to television preachers for answers. My father blamed others for abandoning him when he lost his prominent position in the community due to his drinking and nervous breakdown. Things hadn’t worked out at all like my parents hoped during their lives. Our American dream was short-lived because the pressures to maintain it were too much.

Here’s what I learned about my parents’ pain: My mother lost her mother when she was a little girl. My father’s father used drugs in front of him as a child. I suspect there are many stories I’ll never hear from my parents since they passed away several years ago, but I can honestly say I understand better as a middle-aged woman why they adopted narratives to make sense of all that was lost.

When they bought that three-story house in an upscale neighborhood, I imagine they thought they’d overcome their parents’ shortcomings. But the reality was they’d just covered them up. I don’t say this as judgment—I say it based on living with them and experiencing how difficult it was to have honest conversations for fear I might upset what I came to think of as the fragile apple cart.

Picture this: My parents’ lives were like apple carts filled to absolute capacity. Any unexpected bump in the road—a difficult conversation, a financial setback, an uncomfortable truth—would send apples flying everywhere, bruised and crushed. I was all too aware of how easy it was to upset that overloaded cart. One problem could send everything rolling. So I learned to stay out of the way of their cart and manage my own.

Here’s the thing about being young: when we’re younger and our wagons aren’t overloaded, we have much more capacity to handle difficulties. We can still hold space for hopes and dreams, and when disappointments come, we don’t let them stop us from moving forward—we have room for more apples. It’s easy to believe our parents just believed the wrong things or made wrong choices, so we turn away from their way of living to find our own.

This realization led me to examine my own relationship with collective narratives.

Finding Safety in the Church Narrative

The first collective narrative I embraced was that if we lived the way the church said we should, we could avoid many troubles that others encountered. We supported one another in our beliefs and found community in our shared understanding of what the problems were, what the solutions were, who was to blame, and where our hope lay.

Being part of this collective offered me something I’d never had before: belonging, support, and community. It also gave me something to blame and what I thought was a way to safeguard myself from ending up like my father, who’d suffered a nervous breakdown. I blamed his sin and lostness. He blamed his family. It took all the pressure off myself.

Here’s what I learned about childhood survival: survivors of childhood abuse often blame themselves for what happens when they grow up, because blaming ourselves feels like the only way to have control. As children, what other control do we have? Our nervous systems constantly search for ways to keep us safe. We look for whatever we can change to prevent harm from coming again—sometimes we hide, sometimes we fight back, sometimes we become exactly what our parents need us to be. As children caught between a rock and a hard place with no power to change our circumstances, we take control however we can.

The fallout is that we grow up learning how to survive but not how to thrive and grow. Many of us stay caught in coping patterns we learned growing up, which means our own apple carts become full to capacity too.

Religion felt like it removed some of those heavy apples by providing someone to blame besides myself—sin, the devil, or that it was just part of God’s plan. But it worked until it didn’t. Looking back, I realize I was really just swapping out one apple for another and even adding additional expectations to the load. But community and belonging helped me manage the load better than my family did, so I held onto the collective narratives because it was better than going it alone.

But here’s where things got complicated.

When Protective Stories Become Prisons

I discovered something crucial about church narratives: they have breaking points. That breaking point comes when circumstances happen that don’t fit the collective narrative, leaving people scrambling to force square pegs into round holes. I learned quickly that religious communities will do anything to protect their collective narrative, even if it means changing facts to make them more palatable.

They will blame the devil, sin, and people “outside God’s plan” without examining the reality of a closed-minded system that keeps people repeating false narratives.

This became personal when the pastor who abused me revealed himself to be well-practiced in his predatory pattern. He played his manipulation like a seasoned musician, and I fell into his trap because I believed the narrative that I was a weak female who needed male leaders to guide me. It was a collective narrative that made sense, provided clear direction, and offered a clear explanation for my pain: My father hadn’t led his family the way God called him to, he’d fallen into sin, and sin led people to do terrible things. To safeguard myself, I needed to follow a male leader who was following God.

Here’s where collective narratives become dangerous. When my abuse came to light, many stories circulated around town—gossip that brought shame on the church. How did the church community deal with this shameful narrative threatening their worldview? They created one that made sense to church members: sin, the devil, God’s mysterious plan—without allowing me to have a voice.

The letter I wrote describing what happened and how it was abusive was edited to fit the narrative they wanted to believe. They crafted a story that made others comfortable about what happened, a narrative they could all agree on.

Every time I’ve sought understanding from people in evangelical circles since then, they’ve offered me similar explanations about sin, the devil, and God’s plan. People who don’t even know me will listen to my story and tell me what they think happened before they even hear it. Why? Because they don’t know how to listen to my story or sit with me in my uncomfortable reality—it makes them too uncomfortable.

I understand this response because that’s the same reason I joined the church: to make my unmanageable life more manageable. But here’s what I’ve learned: manageable doesn’t equal meaningful.

Breaking Free from Comfortable Lies

There’s only so much I can stand of the monotony of making everything make sense to fit the collective narrative. Because here’s the catch: what holds a collective narrative together is the same thing that prevents transformation.

I heard Michael Meade say recently that religion brings comfort but often falls short. What does it fall short of? I’m learning it falls short of the actual connection it promises to create. Brené Brown said that vulnerability creates connection, but to be truly vulnerable we need safety—the kind that comes with being able to be seen and heard. This requires being able to listen to others with an open mind.

Though that sounds simple, it’s far from it—especially if we’ve never learned how, because our parents didn’t know how either. I’m realizing how much we perpetuate problems as we age because we’re unable to hold space for pain we don’t understand.

This understanding led me to see Jesus differently.

Seeing Jesus as Example, Not Escape

This insight made what I learned about the Bible in church finally click into place. When Jesus asked God to forgive because people don’t know what they’re doing, I realize it’s entirely true. In church I learned that Jesus came to save us—he suffered and died so that through believing in him we could be rescued from our sinful selves.

But these days I’m wondering if Jesus wasn’t actually showing us how we’re supposed to live rather than providing an escape from living. The truth isn’t comfortable at all, I’m realizing. The messiness of our lives and our attempts to fix stories by shifting blame and adopting comfortable collective narratives is actually the problem that keeps us from seeing real issues.

Consider the discomfort of things that don’t make sense at all—those things Jesus sat with so intensely that he sweat tears of blood while his friends slept. The reality of the cross where he cried out asking God why he had been forsaken. It’s a question I know intimately: Why do people who care about us abandon us when things get too hard?

The answer is simple and painful: because it becomes hard for them too.

Learning the Courage of Honesty

Someone recently started telling me details of a horror story they’d lived through. It felt so heavy and hopeless that I had to ask them to stop because I was getting too upset. But rather than trying to fix their narrative with comfortable explanations, I told them the truth: “This is too hard for me to hear right now.” Though I felt bad about it, they understood. We switched gears and talked about something else.

This taught me something crucial: some of us simply don’t know how to deal with difficult conversations. Rather than admitting we don’t understand or that something is too difficult to hear, we attempt to fix the other person’s narrative in a way that shuts down their hurt and pain so we don’t have to feel uncomfortable anymore. As a result, the hurting person is left to either agree with our fixes or sit with their pain alone.

But here’s what I’ve discovered: if we could just be honest with one another, we really could work through so much more. This is where I connect with Jesus again when he talked about truth setting us free—even though it can come at a heavy price. Jesus didn’t live very long in a place where people preferred believing collective narratives over hearing uncomfortable truths.

The turning point for me came when I started paying attention to something specific.

Listening for Something Different

These days I’m learning to pay attention whenever I hear identical words coming from different people’s mouths. Rather than figuring out what collective narrative I need to adopt so I can find my tribe and feel safe, I’m actually starting to look for something different—something that might be uncomfortable to hear because it doesn’t provide quick answers but actually requires me to sit with the discomfort of not knowing.

I’m drawn to conflicting information that may never make complete sense, because life rarely does.

The only thing that really makes sense to me now is being honest with myself and others about what doesn’t make sense. When I find another person willing to sit with me in this honesty, I might just have found a lifelong friend. Our connection is built on something deeper than shared agreements—it’s built on shared hopes and dreams and fears that may never be resolved. That’s the truth, and it’s real, and it’s deeper than narratives that tempt us with promises of kingdoms and power if we’ll just bow down to them.

We’ve found what feels like living water—the kind that requires us to dig deep into ourselves and find a true source of life that nourishes our souls even when we walk through what feels like an endless desert.

Finding Common Ground Beyond Comfortable Stories

I don’t know if any of this makes sense to anyone besides me, but if it rings true, please reach out and tell me. It’s always a comfort to know others are traveling this path with me.

What prompted me to write this whole piece was someone sharing how discouraged they felt when they told their story of church hurt to someone who seemed compassionate. But that person completely missed the opportunity to connect when they immediately asked what denomination the hurt person had belonged to. It was clear they were looking for an explanation of what had gone wrong because they wanted assurance it wouldn’t happen to them.

This interaction made me wonder: How can we find ways to connect with one another outside of the collective narratives that make us feel safe but often fall short of the depth we need? I wonder sometimes if it’s even possible. Look at what happened to Jesus, after all.

But we’re still here. Maybe we’re transforming in all this messiness into something better.

That’s as much as I’ll assume, because anything else feels like I’m imposing on the mystery of the future. I’m learning that my part is simply to honor what I know is true, sit with what I’m able to handle, and offer the perspective I’ve gained through my own journey.

I believe we have far more in common than we have differences. If we can recognize this and find genuine common ground—not just shared agreements but shared humanity—we might actually meet our needs in healthy ways and make this world better. That’s the hope I hold onto, because as I’m honest with myself, that’s what I see as I dig deeper into things I’ve tried to avoid for too long.

Here’s what I know for certain: the truth doesn’t ever disappear. Tuck it away in a dark corner, press it down with comfortable collective narratives—it always surfaces through us, because our bodies indeed keep the score. The question isn’t whether the truth will emerge, but whether we’ll have the courage to face it together.