Cheesy Street: Road Trip! (Part 3): Reflections on Home -- Kansas City & Omaha

After a couple months into my cheese internship and away from the law firm, a friend of mine who had left the firm four months before me asked if I felt like I was back to my normal self. Had I shaken the law firm off me? I more or less understood what he meant by that vague query. It’s the type of question that anyone who has wasted years in a dehumanizing, dead-end venture would understand: law firm, telemarketing, corporate drudgery,…heroin, prostitution, what-have-you. It had been about six months since he had left the firm and was glowing in his assertion that he finally felt like himself again. Only two months out, I was less certain.

How will I know when I’ve fully regained my confidence, assertiveness, inquisitiveness, social charms, or hell even my basic desire to socialize, which had been slowly whittled away? At what point am I my whole self again? Most importantly, what does it take to get back there? For my friend it simply took time and fully immersing himself in his one passion, music….and to a lesser extent, copious amounts of PBR.

The time component is a given, and mostly out of my control. Sure, one of my passions is cheese, and immersing myself in that dream and other worthwhile endeavors will do the trick too. My first foray into the world of cheese on the east coast most definitely helped revive my spirits. When I visited DC, it was a common refrain to hear old friends from work say how happy, refreshed, or “good” I looked. But I was really anticipating this road trip to the west coast to finish the job in restoring my psyche.

Another friend of mine once pontificated that something about a road trip is especially therapeutic after a trying time in your life. It’s that sense of letting the distance of the journey put all the worry behind you, venturing into new and exciting adventures and letting your car sift out the dirty wounds and memories to the pavement with each passing mile.

After leaving Detroit, his theory starts to make more sense to me, perhaps simply because there are so many miles of nothing on the interstate that self-reflection is required to pass the time. As I got farther away and started entering new areas of the country previously unseen to me, I started to remember less of what I had left behind in DC and grew more curious of what lay ahead.

Another thing happened as I entered the Midwest, the mid-way point and, more importantly, my home. I stopped in Kansas City to attend a good friend’s wedding and Omaha to visit my parents (secretly hoping my dad would refill the gas in my car). I didn’t do any of the typical road trip activities I did elsewhere while I was in Omaha and Kansas City, even though there was a lot I hadn’t seen: the Jazz Museum, the World War I Memorial etc. Instead, I simply visited places where I could surround myself with people who knew me when…when I was really me, that is. I was near family, sleeping in my old bedroom decorated in 1990's-era X-games posters. I was near friends who are practically like family—friends who have known me for anywhere between 13 and 5 years and likely have many embarrassing stories to tell, which I would proudly let them share. For some people going home is suffocating and reminds them of the person they've been trying all these years to shed. For me, it’s hard not to feel like yourself when you’re around the people who know and love you best.

…Oh and eating a Z-man at Oklahoma Joe’s helps too.

(A representation, by no means all-inclusive, of people who help me feel normal again. To those not pictured, you're still a part of this post.)