For Evil users, when you “escape” from Insert state, you may prefer to enter Symex state rather than Normal state while in Lisp buffers.
Please See Symex and Rigpa for the recommended way of achieving this.
If you’re not using Rigpa, you could still write one-off keybindings to achieve this, for instance, see this recipe by @tommy-mor.
Also See Easy Entry Into Symex Mode for another option.