I wish I had any good advice other than just "do it". Next time you need to make a meme, open GIMP first, and each time you get stuck trying to do something that you cannot figure out among the million submenus available, search online for how it is done. Most of the time, someone else has already posted on StackOverflow or something asking how to do that very same thing. Eventually, you will rely on outside help less and less.
EDIT: Just looking up "make meme with gimp" seems to come up with some good basic tutorials, though some are quite old and outdated. The one thing that I do not agree with in any that I had checked is their various methods for adding an outline to text. I like to use the Drop Shadow filter to do so. Select your text layer > click Filters (in the menu bar at the top of the window) > Light and Shadow > Drop Shadow. In the dialog window that appears, set the following values:
X: 0
Y: 0
Blur radius: 1.00
Grow radius: 10
Opacity: 1.000 (or whatever the maximum value is in your version of GIMP)
Depending on the font size of your text, play around with the blur radius and grow radius until it looks good to you.
"just do it" is probably the best advice, honestly. I remember starting a video about GIMP sometime last year, but I turned it off after I realized that I wasn't retaining most of it. I'm very much a "start and look it up as I hit snags" type of learner, which seems like what you're describing too.
I started going down the Gimp rabbit hole after they released 3.0 a few weeks ago. I attempted it years ago (before there was a one-window mode) and never stuck with it long enough. I'm getting adept slowly