It's amazing to me that I got into this business. The hen night life modelling. On Monday, Kobi told me that he particularly liked the way I'd rebuilt my own life after the car accident. Everything had come crashing down and I'd fixed it myself. He also appreciated the fact that I'm volunteering at Crew 2000. I've been helping to promote a cause that I believed in.
It's tempting to think that way. To flatter myself and run with the self-promotion. But there was a lot more to it than that. If I hadn't moved back in with my parents and had them take care of the immediate problems - food, shelter and basic survival - I would have kept sinking. If I hadn't had help from the Cyrenians, I wouldn't have found my flat. If I hadn't had help from Number 6, I wouldn't have had something to occupy my time and would have still been pretty ignorant about the realities of autism, or would have been stumbling around from one misleading website to another.
And if my mum hadn't loaned me the subscription fee to the RAM website, I wouldn't have started working as a life model. Which means I wouldn't have proven myself to be capable of sourcing venues, running classes, ordering sketchpads, recruiting staff and a couple of other little details. So I wouldn't have been offered the business.
I could go either way on that one. I had definitely demonstrated capabilities, but there wasn't exactly any competition this far north. I was the only person around.
I've never understood quite where the fine line is between being arrogant and smug about my achievements if I give myself too much credit, or demonstrating a low self-image if I don't give myself enough. Personally, I think my self-image is pretty good, but I do still like to acknowledge other things that have contributed towards my successes. This is particularly apt, considering the Scottish school system back in the '70s and '80s were full of teachers who were only too keen to "take you down a peg or two" if they thought you were being too complacent. And they had a pretty relaxed definition of terms like "complacency" or "arrogance" or any term at all that implied that we students were even remotely pleased with our achievements. So, some of us learned to demonstrate humility, before we had it thrust upon us.
Anyway, it definitely helps to emphasise that I was in the right place at the right time, so sometimes there's just no substitute for sheer, dumb luck. Especially since - much more literally - earlier that same year I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that car crash, as usual, was the catalyst that led to this position.
So, I found myself in a tough situation, I went back to basics, found an interesting variation on an old theme, ran with that for a while, was offered a good break, grabbed it and started to move on. A lot of that definitely is down to my own efforts and innovations. But those efforts would have been useless if I hadn't ever been given the opportunity to use them.
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