Epic!

Feeling inspired tonight, so bear with me....

Yes, I am odd.  I am awkward in new social settings.  And I often say the wrong thing at the wrong time, and embarrass friends, family, lovers, co-workers, and people who don’t even know my name.  And yes I have damage, and I cry more than is comfortable for others to witness.  I have been battle bruised and scarred almost from birth; but haven’t we all?  And haven’t we all come through it to this point?  Life is a terminal condition, but it hasn’t gotten us yet!  We have survived everything she has thrown at us, and will continue to do so until life removes our variable from the equation.  And at that point, it ceases to be our problem to solve, our burden to bear; but what if we can circumvent that step?!  What if we can cast off those shackles of guilt, and shame, and heartbreak, and embarrassment, and utter despair preemptively?  What if we can say to the void that we will not accept the bullshit any longer?  What if we can claim our own lives for ourselves?  What if we decide that from this moment on we will laugh with no regard for image, and love with every ferocious fiber we possess, and cry when we are sad, but pick ourselves up and move on?!  What if we refuse the dogma and stigma and the social norms and mores which would pigeon hole us into thinking that we are limited and broken and hopeless?!  That is my challenge, for myself, to myself, from myself!  And it WILL be epic!

THERAPY

            Behavior is purposeful. That’s what my last shrink told me.  Over and over again she would recite that mantra.  It was meant to help me to see that my thoughts and actions pertaining to my PTSD had a root[1] somewhere.  It wasn’t until later that I learned what a root even was, or that it was pertinent to find them, weed them out, exhume them, and then to be able to move on.  P!nk says “We’re not broken, just bent.”  I like that one equally well.  It has hope.  It says that whatever the circumstance, whatever the mental blockage or stuck point (again from my therapist), we can move on.  We can mend.  We can move beyond and heal.  My mother recently sent me a meme from Facebook that sparked my thought process on healing.  All of these things, all of these people have led me to one grand epiphany, and that is that life, in all its ups and down, heartbreaks and soaring moments of triumph, IS therapy.  The people that we interact with and listen, really listen to, are our therapists.  This is not to discount the value of actual therapy, the kind where you meet with someone qualified by years of training to help you move past things, but to give merit to the people we meet and the experiences we have with them.

            Roots.  Those little bastards that have buried themselves down so deep into your psyche that it takes damn near a miracle to pull them up, well, they’re everywhere.  At least they are for me.  The first earth shattering root that I discovered and dug out wore the same face that I did at five years old.  She was blonde haired, with torn blue jeans, and you could see the absolute terror in those tiny hazel eyes of hers.  If you looked deep enough, long enough, you could see the events which transpired which firmly planted her into my sub-conscious.  I’ve written about them so much in the process of my therapy that they almost seem a cliché to me now.  She was hurt, several times, and by several people, and it won’t help to dig any further into that so I’ll move on.  The point of that root is that it opened a kind of Pandora’s Box of other roots for me.  When I pulled her out, and gave her a voice, she was no longer attached to every other root; no longer did she color every experience I had with another human being.  I had had no idea that for thirty years this one root had been the lens through which I would view my interactions and relationship with every other human being.  Completely in my sub-conscious, she was there, telling me to be careful, to keep my distance because everyone would end up hurting me eventually.  She was incessant with her assertion that I had been a bad person, which was why bad things happened to me.  Her terror led her to believe that any kind of perceived weakness or vulnerability would serve as a beacon to the very worst in people, and that they WOULD take advantage of that. 

            Vulnerability is quite an interesting word.  Depending on one’s lens, it can mean so many different things.  For me it meant not just the opportunity to be hurt, but the absolute guarantee that I would undergo agonizingly painful experiences if I let it show.  Judging the world around me through this lens, I spent decades assuming the very worst, and physically and emotionally distancing myself from, well, everyone.  We’ve all heard the adage that “misery loves company”, but in the case of fear of everyone and everything, my misery demanded absolute solitude.  So I lived my life apart, alone, unable to truly connect with anyone, unable to settle down or to have any kind of home base.  In one of my very favorite books, Antoine de Saint Exupery wrote “[S]o I lived alone, without anyone that I could really talk to…”[2] , and that certainly held true for me.  Now, I don’t mean to portray my life as tragic, or lacking in love or friendship.  I had all of these things.  I was just unable and unwilling to truly let anyone in, or to truly seek out to know anyone else. 

It took eight solid months (of what was supposed to be a 12 week program) before I could begin to see vulnerability as more than a weakness and beacon for disaster.  It took more than a year after that before I could finally let all of my barriers down and be completely open and honest with someone.  The first person I was able to do that with, as sappy as it may sound, was me.  It was indeed, just as I had anticipated, agonizingly painful, even torturous, for quite some time, until one day it wasn’t anymore.  Eventually I came to an emotional breakthrough, and this complete self honesty was finally liberating, and comforting, and amazingly, well, amazing.  The second person I was able to experience this kind of total emotional, wall-shattering interaction with will probably be my best friend for the rest of my life.  If nothing else, I will always treasure her for honoring me and my vulnerable and sometimes (we could even say often at this juncture) uncomfortable full disclosure of self.  That I could make that kind of connection with another person, and that this person did not violate this trust, was monumental in my trek to get beyond the emotional peak of the mountain. 

Having stated that it took an exorbitant amount of time to get through my therapy program, it should be stated that there were several factors at play.  The first of these factors was that I lacked severely in the most basic of coping skills.  At thirty years old I had to re-learn how to process nearly everything.  Having shed that hazel-eyed lens I was now at a juncture where I simply did not know how to process my own emotions and experiences.  I was void, vacuous, without the ability to even verbalize what I was feeling, and this was worse even than simply expecting the worst of everyone.  I felt constantly out of control, unable to realize what I was feeling, and so every emotion turned into anger for me.  The thing that I think most people don’t realize about anger, and people they would describe as angry, is that it is a very defensive emotion.  You see, the image of an angry person does not invite face-to-face scrutiny.  It repels people.  The best offense being a good defense, it was my way of keeping the world at large, at bay.  Whenever anything happened which triggered an emotional response, my brain responded with the muscle memory which I had given it, and turned it to anger.  This was true of positive emotion as well as negative.  Finally I began to see that even my children expected an angry response from me, even in the best of circumstances.  This was, of course, with the help of my therapist.

Stopping midway through my therapy program, we backtracked, and began what I came to know as Skills Training.  Months of writing about every instance which elicited an emotional response, and going through prescribed steps and worksheets eventually paid off, and allowed me to be able to assess each and every situation based upon its own merit and particular circumstance, until finally I was able to stave off the anger, and just feel the emotion as it came and eventually went.  Doc compared the process of acknowledging and processing emotion with watching a wave come in and go out, without trying to hold it to the shoreline.  I still use that metaphor whenever strong negative emotions arise.  (Visualizations became huge for me as well)  The key to the wave metaphor is that one MUST accept that the emotion is there for a reason, and that it is futile to try to fight it off, or to hold onto it.  The best thing is to watch it as it comes in, to appreciate it for the merit that it has, and then to let it go, watch it disappear into the horizon.  The key here is that our, my emotional responses to things have merit, they are there for a reason, and to acknowledge that is to allow, to find that root, and to dig it out.  It is impossible to see and understand the distant winds over the water, while you are standing in the water, being bowled over by the crashing tides.  What skills training did for me was to give me a tower, a lighthouse, to watch the tides come in and go out, to experience their beauty and ferocity, without being crushed by them.  It was an integral part in the ability I have today to live and love my life.

---

[1] Johnson, Kasey.  2013.  She gifted me this word, along with the help to find and deal with many a long-buried root.

[2] The Little Prince

Puzzled

Texting with a friend this morning, and really over numerous conversations, with numerous people, it occurred to me that I didn’t have the customary attraction to sneaking around authority figures as a kid that most do.  Upon some reflection this morning I have come to some realizations.  The first, is that being one of six children it is fairly easy to get lost in the crowd.  This made me question my self-proclaimed loathe of attention and recognition.  So I decided to dig a little deeper.  I then found myself feeling like what I was after was to be seen.  This is not in the look at me look at me sense though.  I think that I spent most of my childhood and adolescence hiding from myself even.  I’ve always known, well at least since I recognized what it was, that I was attracted to women.  Being raised as I was, surrounded by well-intentioned religious stigma regarding homosexuality, coupled with homophobic jokes and comments from family and friends alike, this deep dark secret was devastating to me.  I would never be normal, right, righteous, or acceptable, even to myself.  This then led me (see how ADD works with the feeble minded???) to think about what a melancholy kid I often was.  I had a lot of pain that I was dealing with, and didn’t even have the vocabulary to process it all.  So I developed a very tough image that I portrayed.  The best defense being a good offense (that’s how the saying goes right?), I became a very hard and angry person.  I believed that if I was mean enough, hard enough, strong enough, that I couldn’t be hurt again.  But the truth of the matter was that I was still hurting.  Every day, and especially at night, I hurt, and I was petrified, of everything.  The real problem with hiding under the guise of strength, if you get good enough at it, is that it doesn’t occur to those around you that you are not capable, not able to process and/or handle difficult situations that come up.  The thought process develops in the minds of those around you that you are a truly strong person, and that you can handle anything and everything that comes your way.  The real kick in the gut is that you have nobody to blame but yourself, as you have put every effort into projecting yourself as that person who CAN and WILL handle, deal, survive, thrive even.  I believe there is a terrible price to pay for dishonesty with oneself.  It comes in a packaged deal with guilt, self-loathing, anger, depression, and loneliness.  And once you’ve slid so far down the rabbit hole that you truly believe you can’t find your way out, then maybe, just maybe you start to realize that you are not in fact as tough and as strong as you think that you need to be.  Maybe then you realize that a connection with another human being is what you’ve needed and craved all along.  Distancing yourself from everyone and everything in an effort to become strong has really only weakened you.  This is how it was for me at any rate.  In letting go, and allowing myself to acknowledge my own nature, that I DO long for that connection, that space to be vulnerable and trusting with another person, I’ve found a kind of new and empowering strength.  I’ve discovered that I revel in conversation, communication, connection.  It’s how I best learn and grow, and how I’m best able to see myself.  It’s possible that this is what I’ve needed all along, to be able to see myself.  I’ve needed to get out of my box, out of my bunker to see myself and the world at large from other perspectives to be able to piece the puzzle, my puzzle, together.

  

Climb On!!

For years now I’ve tried everything I could think of to get Julie into some kind of activity.  I searched for anything that would keep her moving, active, healthy.  I heard once that young girls who have low activity levels can start menstruating earlier, and thus my frantic search began.  We’ve tried soccer, t-ball, swimming, skating, cycling, literally everything I could possibly think of.  I had exhausted every avenue I knew of, until one day I went indoor rock climbing with a friend.  Now, I had done this before, and quite enjoyed it, but never before like I did this time.  I’ve been on a bit of a climbing kick now, and last week I decided to try Julie out at it, just see if she could even hold herself to the wall without getting all worked up about the height etc.  Good grief was I amazed at what that kid is capable of!  The first day we went I had her on the kid’s bouldering wall.  She kept climbing over and over again, looking for different routes and trying to beat her previous time.  The next day we went back and I put a harness and rope on her to see what she could do with a 30 foot wall…. And I’ll be damned if she didn’t shimmy herself up the entire thing.  She paused only once, to ask if she could keep going.  SO, after years of trying, and millions of tears shed over soccer and t-ball fields, and blood knees and elbows from the skating, I do believe we have found Julie’s sport/activity.  My girl is every bit the crazy monkey that her mother is…. And it makes me pretty damned proud J

One Hell of a Ride

DISCLAIMER:  IF YOU'RE SQUEAMISH ABOUT MY LIFESTYLE OR THINK YOU MIGHT NOT WANT TO KNOW THAT PART OF MY LIFE EVEN EXISTS, YOU MAY WANT TO STOP READING RIGHT NOW.

It’s funny how beginnings and ends can be so intricately woven together, that with the blink of an eye you’ve made the transition from one to the other.  And your head is left spinning, and your heart is left weeping… and rejoicing at the ups and downs of the roller coaster that you just stepped off of.  And you’ve found yourself in this strange limbo of wishing to god that you were still on the ride, and just being immensely grateful that you got to ride at all, and hopeful that the next ride will come along soon.  I feel like I’ve just stepped off of my very first roller coaster.  My head is still spinning, and I feel a little nauseated at both the ride and this anxious fear that the next one is far away.  But it was one hell of a ride.  I got to experience the sensation of sleeping next to and holding someone I cared about, and whom I wanted to be sleeping next to.  I got to be amazed by the feelings and sensations of being with a woman.  I got to experience intimacy for the first time.  I was given so many firsts, including my first heartbreak.  My first tears shed over feelings and emotions that I’m still not capable of fully wrapping my head around.  I can’t define it, and I can’t seem to find a way to articulate it in a way that makes any sense to me.  And still... it was one hell of a ride!  

Cost vs. Value

This one is definitely more random, and if it would help, I'd give the whole back story to it's genesis, but I think that would only serve to complicate things more.  Suffice it to say, I was in a weird, Marxist kind of mood when I wrote it:

When I was eight years old I made an astonishing discovery.  My parents kept the allowance cups for all six of their children just behind the kitchen sink.  It was all too easy to reach up and move money from any of my siblings’ cups to my own, and in fact I did on several occasions.  At the time this amounted to just slightly more than a dollar, a paltry amount by most standards, but later in life, as I make preparations to pay an allowance to my own children, and having studied some in the field of economics, I have come to a realization about this money which nobody ever noticed was missing. 

            In studying the writings of Karl Marx I was struck by his theory of Use-Value.  This theory relates the value of a thing to its utility, and states that “Use-values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth.”  What struck me especially about this is that these commodities only take on value when they are used or consumed.  By this reasoning, to have something, to simply be in possession of it holds no inherent value in and of itself.  Having grown up in a culture where doomsday preparations are a main priority this theory presented an interesting dilemma; that dilemma being that Marx’s theory rang true somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind, but it also negated a large part of my life-long mental conditioning. 

            Frugality was yet another value that was instilled in me from a very young age, not only from my parents but from the culture which enveloped my small reality.  The prospect of purchasing something for less than the original price held immense value in my belief system.  Thus, whether an item was needed with any immediacy was not even a topic of discussion.  That the world would inevitably come crashing down around us and cause us to need all of these preparations was not just a possibility, nor was it a probability, it was as strongly held a belief as many have that the sun will continue to shine with each new morning. 

            With both of these strongly held “truths” in hand, that one must be in possession of large quantities of commodities, and that to acquire something for less than it was suggested to retail for represented a blessing, I began a feverish study of Marx and his Use-Value principle.  After several months of study I found myself at a completely different understanding of the inherent value of finite objects.  This new found understanding centered in the actual usefulness of an object verses the cost, both monetary and spatial, of maintaining its existence.  Both of these aspects are completely separate from the initial cost of acquiring the object, which I now believe has no merit beyond what one is capable of spending to acquire the object initially.  The conclusion which I came to was that if an object is not currently, or in the very near and real future in use, and needed, its value is diminished materially.  If said object also creates a spatial or monetary cost to maintain, it then takes on a negative value, draining both the family coffers and the space in which the family must live and function.

My Two Cents on it All (war)

It is the people in a war that make it real.  There is an enormous gulf between singing a cadence about killing commies and being faced with a young child, his arms reaching out to you because he knows that there is a chance that you will throw him some scraps from your lunch.  The people I met were not faceless terrorists, their only desire to end my life.  They were mothers, fathers and children, all just trying to survive in a place where either side of an armed conflict could shatter your world in an instant, and never give a second thought.  The people of Uzbekistan and Iraq welcomed us into their countries as we came to overthrow their governments.  They trusted us with a mission that would destroy their lives as they knew them.  They cheered our convoys as we made our way to their capital.  How could they have possibly known that we wouldn’t just liberate them; that we would stay and become a magnet for groups of militants who would further terrorize their cities and level their homes?  These people changed the war for me.  Instead of a random enemy they became faces and stories I cannot forget.

Oh Brother...

I text my brother well past the hours of socially acceptable telecommunications; asking “You still awake brother”?  You see I have just experienced Sarah Kay’s poem “Brother”, and am inspired.  My brother too was “never meant to fill my shadow”.  I find myself inspired by the force that is my younger brother.  He is good and kind and will serve his fellow man with all that he is until the day he dies; and I want to be him when I grow up.  He was always thus.  Back when I was obsessed with playing soldier and acting out destruction, in our conservative, thoroughly American home he was a pacifist, and not afraid to say so…. Despite the merciless mocking and tormenting of his older sister.  He saw the value of life from the start, and I had to learn it the hard way.  So I tell my brother, my hero that I would dedicate the work to him were it my own, and he is flattered.  And I tell him that he should be, that I hold few in as high esteem as him, and he replies that he loves me too, and my insides warm as I bask in his ambient goodness.  He would probably be embarrassed by something so praising of him, that’s his way, and it makes him even more…..

And I'm a Woman

AND I’M A WOMAN!!¹

28 January 2013

            I’ve spent most of my life trying to convince myself of certain things.  Among these are that I am, in fact, female, a girl, a chick, and eventually a woman.  For the vast majority of my life I truly believed that inseparable from this was a strict adherence to heterosexuality.  And so I put a great deal of effort into trying to mold, pound, force myself into a role that I was never meant to fill.  I made a very conscious effort to slip hetero sentiments into conversations, with everyone that I knew.  In fact, I got quite adept at these comments which were almost all centered on the attractive nature of the male form or heterosexual sex.  Of course these were all lies.  I’ve never in my life felt compelled of my own accord, and for myself only, to ogle any of the male sex, but I am by my very nature a student of life and a people watcher.  With these tools in my box I made an extensive study of heterosexual women and their comments and hoped beyond hope that if I imitated enough, I would one day become a real girl, a real woman.  The real crux of the matter in all of this is that after awhile it became something so far back in the recesses of my conscious mind that I didn’t even notice I was doing it anymore.  It had become mental muscle memory, simply repeating over and over again what I had trained it to do. 

            My world of dissolution came crashing down around me several years ago when I had reached a mental breaking point, and could no longer deny, at least to myself, that I am not in fact heterosexual.  One small, three lettered word, would end my fragile existence that I had spent decades building.  GAY.  Oh my god, can this really be?!  It was earth shattering, mind blowing, unthinkable, disgusting, sinful, and wrong….. wasn’t it?  Well of course it HAD to be.  It made me something that I hated most of all, a liar, and a hypocrite.  Or that’s how I felt at the time.  I refused to believe that from birth I was inundated with homophobic rants and slurs from nearly everyone whom I held in high esteem, and that those years of brainwashing could have anything to do with the self-loathing that I was now experiencing.  Hadn’t I prayed hard enough?!  Hadn’t I read my scriptures religiously and with fervor, doing everything “right”.  Hadn’t I married in the “right place” and to the “right” gender?  Hadn’t I done everything that I knew to make this horrific thing just go away?! 

            My resolve was then doubled that I would stay the course.  I had CHOSEN to marry a man, and to have children.  I had known my options; hadn’t I?  I had made conscious choices about the kind of life that I wanted to live, and the end result of exaltation that I wanted with my “eternal family”.  That had to be the end of the internal discussion I was agonizing over…. But the problem with this new conviction is that my brain is inherently intractable.  I lack the basic ability to cling to ideas and not be swayed by a good argument and supporting evidence.  Perhaps even more significant is the fact that with as much of a scholar as I am, and with as much reason as I labor to employ, I am just as much moved by my gut, my feelings, my conscience, my…whatever it is that you choose to call it.  Intuition perhaps is an adequate form.  As much as my head was convinced that I could overcome my nature, my gut was not completely swayed. 

            It was at this impasse that my brain and intuition came to rest for several more years.  It should perhaps be noted that I was not terribly happy with the conscious choices that I had made so many years ago.  My marriage had never been a happy or healthy one.  I had married a man whose nature was so contrary to my own that we could never come to a peace on anything.  To his credit, he had no clue what my nature was.  I had hidden it so well from everyone, myself included.  After years of combat, both in the army and in my own perverse psyche, I had come to believe that I was just an angry person.  This moniker was something that I wore like a badge of courage, something that I had earned in the war.  Once the PTSD label was added it all seemed to finally make sense, or so I thought.  I was crazy.  What a simple explanation to a lifetime of inner struggle! 

            Counseling was the beginning of the end of this life for me.  God, what a cliché!  “I found myself in counseling”.  Well, this was only partly true.  What I found was a very scared little girl who had never forgiven herself for things far beyond her control or capacity to understand, and who had never allowed herself to move from the tiny corner where she had huddled for twenty plus years.  For the first time in longer than I could remember, I was learning to own that word.  “Scared”.  In that instance I was no longer angry.  In that instance I realized that I had been living my entire life out of petrifying fear.  I was afraid.  I was scared.  I was terrified.  And all of those things were perfectly acceptable emotions!  Acceptance, this was another word that I learned to use, and to love.  I didn’t have to hold on, or fight off anymore.  I could simply accept that things had happened beyond my own control, and that I had continually made decisions that served to propagate this vicious cycle that had become my prison.  I didn’t have to regret these decisions.  I didn’t have to be angry anymore, at people, at my life.  After all, it was MY LIFE!  I didn’t owe anything to anyone, and nobody owed me anything either.  In these realizations I found a freedom and redemption that came without a single string or covenant attached. 

            After an immense upheaval and chain of events that included a divorce and a major move with my children, I found myself at a crossroads.  Once again, I could choose to stay the course, find another good Mormon man and marry and hope for the best, or I could finally shed the last remnant of shame that I had been carrying and finally admit to myself and to everyone else that I was never made for the standard mold, that I was gay.  The first time that I committed that word to paper in my long-neglected journal it was genuinely painful; agonizing even.  The first time that I said it aloud was even worse.  So with my newfound self awareness in hand, I constrained myself to writing it again, and then to saying it again.  Once I had done this enough to finally find some amount of comfort with it, I made myself tell others.  I mumbled my way through this process several times, dozens of times, before I could say it with a sense of pride and ownership. It wasn’t long before I could say it with fervor, unapologetically, and joyfully. 

            Perhaps most surprising to me in this whole journey was the vast outpouring of love and support that I received from friends and family.  This was not everyone’s reaction of course, but even those with the most ardent objections have begun to come around and see that I am no longer going through the motions of life, miserable but steadfast in my resolve to stick it out.   Even my harshest critics have begun to see merit in that.  It was very recently that my dear sister mentioned to me that I appear to be much more feminine than I ever had before, and upon reflection I realized that she was right.  I was finally FEELING like a woman.  I wasn’t just a mechanic, a mom, a hard worker, a good NCO.  I can finally happily own that I am all of these things, AND I’M A WOMAN!

1. Johnson, Kasey.  I stole this title.  No regrets because now I've cited my source and in academia that makes everything ok.

Fierce Fireworks, and Stuff

Sometimes you just need a good cry.  I have been told this by numerous friends over the years, friends whom I valued, and whose opinions I trusted.  This did not stop me from having serious doubts about this assertion anyway.  Don't get me wrong, I have certainly had my fair share of moments when life seemed beyond cruel and it was all I could do to just keep breathing.  In fact, I've had far more of these moments than I care to remember or admit to.  I have been so far down at the bottom of my emotional well that even the thought of suicide provided no relief.  Even at these times, I knew that I had two options.  The first was to just swallow any and all emotion, and put every conceivable energy into suppressing them.  The second was to just let go (at least as much as I was capable of at the time) and cry.  Inevitably in those moments when I've chosen to cry, I have only felt worse after my tear duct pyrotechnics took center stage.  It not served to make me feel vulnerable on top of everything else.
Given all of this, it was with great anxiety that I found myself slipping further and further down the rabbit hole not long ago.  The reality of my third move in eight months, once again doing it nearly entirely on my own and dragging my kids along with me, was setting in.  The Niagra Falls of other emotions crashing down the back door as the Move  assaulted from the North was only serving to add to the avalanche that I could feel coming any moment.  And then it happened.  As I sat on my bed, rolling coins, of all things, I came across my ring.  This ring that I picked out, that represented me better than any physical manifestation I've found before or since, came rolling out of a jar of coins and almost into my lap.  And that was the proverbial straw that broke this camels back.  The flood gates opened, and my body heaved as everything that I've been clinging on to and forcing down for dear life came streaming down my face. Suddenly months of anxiety, and fear, and regret, and anticipation, and suppressed emotion and repression were suddenly gone.  I knew that they had not left completely, and that I still had things I needed to work through, the weigh of them came crashing to the floor like the shards of a shattered mirror.    I that moment I had no choice but to laugh, and for the first time ever, I felt, and I felt better.
I never doubted my dear friends when they said how much better they felt after crying, I just didn't think it was possible for ME.  I didn't think that this opening of soul, this allowance of vulnerability and weakness could have any other outcome than shame and pain, not for me.  How wrong I was.  The question now is.....what the hell do I do with that?!

Learning to Live Again

Ah the joys of starting all over again.  I pretty much constantly have the Garth Brooks song Learning to Live Again playing either in the fore or background of my mind these days.  “Heaven knows how long it’s been, since I’ve felt so out of place, wondering if I’ll fit in… but I’m gonna smile my best smile, and I’m gonna laugh like it’s going out of style, look into her eyes and pray that she don’t see, that learning to live again is killing me.”  Such a grand description for this iteration, this process of going out, of putting myself out there, again and again, in so many respects.  I’ve got a job interview in just a couple of days for which I am painfully unprepared.  I haven’t the clothes, or shoes, or the just plain old experience to even know what to expect.  So I do what I do best, research.  I ask all of Facebook to chime in on the dress code question, and get more than one answer, which is to be expected, but just serves to further confuse my very simple brain.  In Jamie’s Utopian aspirations there are very few reasons to wear much more than jeans, with a button up shirt and perhaps a vest thrown in for more fancy occasions.  I’m certain there’s a way to be able to don clothing that falls into the “Business Professional” genre without feeling like a complete monkey….. I just haven’t a clue how, yet.  And this is but one tiny aspect of “this learning to live again”.  I’ve basically shed my previous life en masse.  There are small remnants, but none of the structural nature.  I’m learning day by day just how much I’ve never learned.  I don’t know how to date.  I don’t know how to not look to the future and plan from the very beginning.  I don’t know how to handle this barrage of feelings and emotions that seem to be crashing past every barrier that I’ve labored to build.  I don’t know how to hold back the geyser that resides within me that I never knew existed.  There are moments when I feel like it’s going to explode and incinerate me in the process.  But there are also moments when I have felt more at peace and more comfortable in my own skin than I ever have before.  Perhaps a boomerang would be a good visual explanation for my emotional and mental goings on.  It is flung with incredible force out into the expanses of who knows where, and flies unfettered until, maybe even against its will, it begins to turn, and then return to its origin.  And my god the ride is exhilarating!  And my god it’s exhausting, and terrifying!  And, when is the next ride…?