Page 15 of Who's Playing You
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 Iallowedhim 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 aman.
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 wasme!
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.
