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…?