Page 9 of Who’s Playing You (In The Nick of Time #1)

SCOTTIE ANDERSON

M y days consisted of… not much.

Pathetic.

I felt like my life had no point. No purpose. Not when I sat in my thoughts and really dissected my life and its trajectory.

I mean, what was I doing?

I was living like the most boring vanilla and lonely existence. Ever. Cue the world’s smallest violin because I needed it. Perhaps have it be accompanied by the world’s smallest piano too.

Oh, hum.

As I sat in the window seat in my apartment and looked down over Main Street and out past the Catskill Mountains, I pulled my oversized T-shirt further over my thighs, feeling the need to cover myself because yet again I had that feeling.

But I was in my own home… Alone .

I might need to talk to someone about this. They say the first thing to go is the mind…

I let out a cleansing breath.

I leaned down and grabbed my journal off the floor and opened it to a new page. It was time to stop being pathetic. Time to come up with a plan. Time to woman up.

I flipped through the pages and briefly stopped here and there to look at my scribbles, notes, passages, random words, and sketches that I’d added here and there through the years.

My eye caught on one of my figure drawings and a note to myself: Get a model and study the human figure so that you can finally master it! Stop procrastinating and making excuses, Scottie.

Message to self received.

But I remember how I’d wanted to master the human figure, something that I’d always struggled with. It was that and drawing horses. Horses were really difficult to draw and get right.

Maybe this was my sign from the Universe to finally stop moping around and reinvigorate myself.

I flipped through some more pages and came to a more recent entry: Create an artists’ immersed in nature retreat. You have a signup already. You have interest and people asking you for it after the last couple of retreats you organized. Grow a backbone and do it, Scottie!

Man oh man, I was really strong-handed in this journal. And I saw the glimpses of my true self here. Someone I obviously had lost contact with these last few years.

Surprisingly.

Shockingly.

I had been so strong and driven, that’s why it was all the more shocking - really. That said, why had I let myself fall down the “oh poor me” rabbit hole. Why had I deviated from what my heart and soul were telling me to do? Why had I made myself less? I was better than this, dammit!

Well, I guess this was the swift kick in the ass, the reminder that I desperately needed, because no more.

No more making myself smaller.

No more hesitating on my dreams or desires.

No more diminishing my drive and ambition.

No more dimming my creative light.

Feeling invigorated and decidedly dropping my “woe is me” act, I mean, it was time to do so. Truly.

Enough was enough. No one else was going to do anything about it. I had to pull myself up by my bootstraps and do something. It was that or just keep wallowing and flailing around in this middle space, doing nothing. Accomplishing nothing. Being no one. Just barely existing.

Art had always been my first love.

Creating had been my reason for living.

Somehow through the years, I’d recognized that I’d lost that focus. I didn’t necessarily blame Earl, but at the same time, I allowed him to steal my thunder and minimize my goals and ambitions. He dimmed my light. That was on me because I allowed him to do all of that.

In hindsight and being blatantly honest with myself, I was baffled that I allowed that to happen.

But I guess when you think you love someone and want to make them happy, making yourself smaller seems like a fitting thing - at times. Albeit it was all incremental so you don’t realize the damage that you do as each day passes. Not always at least.

Incremental change can truly be a death sentence in those instances.

Gag me! Those are all awful thoughts.

Women hadn’t fought for equal rights and to be treated equally in all facets for decades for someone as independent as me to have thoughts like that. I should be ashamed of myself, and I was. I was ashamed that I allowed my light to be dimmed and that I’d made myself even a millimeter smaller.

For a man .

So again, it was time to take a good hard look in the mirror and clean myself up.

No more wallowing. No more woe is me. No more blaming anyone but me.

The only person stopping me from doing anything was me !

And I was done.

I was done getting in my own way.

Thank you past self for the swift kick in the ass that I needed. Those notes and reminders were exactly what I had needed on this morning because I had let myself go. I’d let myself lose track of what was truly important.

I did have a gift. I knew that. And it was my duty to share that gift with the world in any and all ways that I could.

With that said, I could easily put together a local artists’ retreat in a relatively short time - that would be for the greater good.

I had stopped doing them some time ago, and never had the drive to start them up again.

Sadly, because I loved them so much. And people had been asking me for almost two years now when I was going to host them again.

So while I could easily organize a retreat, which was in the name of the greater good, I could also do something that was more purely for me. This would be to find a model that was willing to sit for me while I finally tried to master the human form.

Of course I could draw from pictures and whatever else the internet could provide. Laugh all you want, but pornos actually proved to be helpful when you paused a video in a certain pose that you were after. Some even had decent lighting. Shocking, I know.

However, nothing compared to having a model right in front of you that you could move into just the right pose and adjust the lighting to your liking or your own position in relation to the model.

Worst case scenarios, if I didn’t find a willing participant, I could always go back to the pornos. Pornhub always had new content. And it was the only action I was getting lately anyway.

Again, sad, sad existence.

But that part was more self-inflicted because I hadn’t even gone out on one date since Earl and I signed the divorce papers. I just hadn’t had any interest in putting myself out there again, or yet.

Dating seemed daunting.

Putting my “best self” forward had seemed so off putting since the divorce. I was also still trying to find my best self.

Hence the reason that my trusty Clio vibrator and Pornhub had become my fallbacks in recent months. I mean, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

I got up and walked over to the coffee table to grab my laptop and plopped down cross-legged with it balancing on my legs.

I pulled up my file with my artists’ retreat notes and contact list for folks who’d asked me about it and shown interest since the last workshop I’d hosted. Looks like I’d already done all of the leg work on this the last time I organized an event.

Hmm, I could pull this off with a short turn-around based on the way I had envisioned running this next one. That’s to say if I got enough people to buy in for the dates I could make it work within the next couple of weeks.

With that mindset, I put together the details and created the curriculum. By mid-morning I had, what I thought, was a pretty damn good schedule and curriculum with a supplies list with hotel recommendations as well as pinpointing the various locations that I thought might work.

I opened a new tab and pulled up my Gmail account and drafted the email, then added the email addresses of all of the interested parties, including the link to the signup form.

And send.

Next I emailed the gallery representing me and shared with them the retreat and link, in case they’d like to share with their client list, because they sometimes collaborated with their artists on things like this. It was mutually beneficial for visibility, marketing and PR. Or so I was told.

I then popped over to the school’s art department portal and copy / pasted the content to the “news” bulletin board and clicked “post”.

There!

Look at me go.

Next up was how I was going to advertise for a model… hmm. That was a little more tricky.

The models that the art department usually used weren’t available right now since it wasn’t the fall or spring semester. We didn’t offer any figure drawing classes over the summer.

I could reach out to Jim and ask him if he had any names handy or suggestions. Jim was our figure drawing professor and was in charge of models. But he was away until the mid-August and I’d hate to disrupt him when he was away with his family.

Maybe I could just put up some flyers around town, like on the Caffeinated Cock’s bulletin board, as well as post to the art department’s portal.

I could start there and if nothing came of it, maybe I could start asking around.

With that decided, I closed my laptop before the battery died, and put it on the coffee table. Standing, I stretched my arms up towards the ceiling and smiled.

Rest of my life, here we go!