12. Wearing the uniform

“I feel like I don’t know who I am.”

That line was one of the most common recurring themes in the responses to my survey, and it captures something that goes deeper than most people realise.

Inside the organisation, identity was not something you discovered, it was something you were issued. There was a template: what a good Witness looks like, how they speak, what they value, how they spend their time, what they aspire to, what they suppress. Your job was to conform to the template. Deviation was not just discouraged, it was dangerous.

For people who converted as adults, this meant setting aside parts of themselves that did not fit. Ambitions were shelved. Friendships were dropped. Innocent interests that were deemed “worldly” were quietly buried. Over time, the template became so familiar that it felt like the real thing, and you forgot what was underneath.

For people who were born in, the situation is different and, in some ways, more disorienting. Because there was no “underneath.” Identity formation, the normal developmental process where a young person experiments, tries and fails, discovers what they like and who they are, was interrupted before it began.

A child reaches the stage where they should be exploring autonomy, testing boundaries, developing preferences. Instead, they learn that these impulses signal spiritual weakness. So they suppress. By adulthood, the template is not a costume they put on over a real self. It is the self, or at least it feels that way.

This is why, when you leave, you might experience a particular kind of blankness. Someone asks you what you want, what you enjoy, what you believe, and the honest answer is: I do not know. Not because you are empty or shallow, but because the question was never permitted and therefore never answered before now. The system went deeper than restricting your behaviour, it prevented the formation of the internal compass that would have told you who you are.

That blankness is not emptiness though, it’s suppression, and there is a big difference between the two. Emptiness means nothing is there. Suppression means something is there but it was buried so long ago, and so thoroughly, that you can’t feel it clearly - if at all. The fact that you feel the blankness, that you notice the absence, is itself evidence that something underneath is trying to surface.

I’m not going to pretend that finding it is quick or simple. It isn’t, and we will get to that work later in this series. For now, what matters is naming what happened: the organisation replaced the question “who am I?” with the instruction “this is who you will be.” And the disorientation you feel now is not a sign that something is wrong with you, it is the natural consequence of having your identity prescribed rather than discovered.

The uniform is off now, the identity and rules that you used to live by no longer apply, and discovering and embodying your true self is the great task of your life - of all our lives.