"How Does It Feel?"
There is a particular kind of grief that doesn’t arrive on time.
It waits.
It stays quiet.
It watches you survive.
When you leave a fundamentalist cult—especially when you leave as an adult—you don’t immediately feel free. You feel functional. You feel relieved, maybe. You feel like you escaped something on fire and managed not to look back. Survival requires momentum, and momentum doesn’t leave much room for feeling.
So you move on. You build a life. You learn the language of the outside world. You tell yourself you’re fine.
And then—years later—when you finally feel safe, your body exhales.
That’s when the grief shows up.
Not clean grief. Not poetic grief. But anger. Confusion. Numbness. A strange sense of emotional illiteracy, like everyone else got a manual you were never given.
That’s where the lyrics to Blue Monday by Orgy finds me.
How does it feel?
Tell me how do I feel?
How does it feel to treat me like you do?
In a cult, you are never asked how you feel.
You are told.
You are told what joy looks like.
What sorrow is allowed.
What anger means (sinful).
What doubt proves (weakness).
Your internal world is outsourced to authority. Leaders don’t just tell you what to believe—they tell you how to experience reality. Your emotions are managed, corrected, spiritualized, or erased.
So when you leave, you don’t immediately ask, How do I feel?
You ask, What am I allowed to feel?
Years later, when that structure is gone and the danger has passed, the question becomes more honest—and more terrifying:
How do I feel… now that no one is answering for me?
There is something haunting about asking that into the void.
Orgy’s version of Blue Monday isn’t gentle. It doesn’t soothe. It confronts. It pulses with industrial tension, distorted guitars, and a sense of restrained fury—like something mechanical finally overheating.
That’s what delayed grief sounds like.
Not tears at an altar.
Not quiet acceptance.
But pressure finding an outlet.
And then there’s the other question buried in the song, the one we’re not supposed to ask:
How does it feel to treat me like you do?
Because once the shock wears off, anger arrives with receipts.
You begin to wonder if they ever questioned themselves.
If they noticed the damage.
If the control felt holy—or just powerful.
You want to know how it felt to tell children who they were allowed to become.
To call obedience love.
To call psychological control “guidance.”
And you know you may never get an answer.
That’s where punk and metal step in—not as rebellion for rebellion’s sake, but as a controlled burn.
Loud music becomes a ritual when there is no altar.
A place to grieve without permission.
A way to tell the truth without a savior standing between you and yourself.
In high-control religion, anger is dangerous. In punk and metal, it’s data.
The distortion, the volume, the relentless rhythm—they don’t create rage; they give it somewhere to go. They let the body finish sentences the mouth was never allowed to start.
This music is anti-authoritarian by design.
No infallible leaders.
No sacred hierarchy.
No demand for purity or submission.
Just noise, honesty, and the radical idea that you belong to yourself.
For those of us who grew up in fundamentalist systems, identity doesn’t shatter when we leave—it stalls. Emotional development gets frozen at the age where autonomy was interrupted. So later, when safety finally arrives, we find ourselves catching up. Learning how to feel in real time. Learning that confusion doesn’t mean failure. That anger doesn’t mean corruption. That numbness doesn’t mean you’re broken.
It means you’re thawing.
Listening to Blue Monday at full volume isn’t nostalgia for me. It’s not aesthetic. It’s somatic. It’s my nervous system realizing it no longer has to be quiet to be safe.
It’s me asking:
How do I feel—now that no one is telling me?
I am not trying to stay angry. I am trying to let the anger speak so it does not harden into something worse.
And somewhere between the noise and the quiet that follows, something begins to feel like freedom.
