Tipping Point by Angel Young

I’ve been looking at fear - trying to look at it straight on, without flinching. God knows it’s scary stuff. After all I tried to bury it in chocolate, new clothes, books, for years just so I didn’t have to see it.

But now I’m here, facing it, letting the feelings surface. After all what scares one person is a no brainer for another - right?

My fears, it seems, are a jumble of social expectation versus desire, of seemingly inevitable failure, of financial insecurity. I look at them again, and the concerns don’t ring true, because in the heart of these fears are assumptions I made in my early twenties about how the world was made and what was possible. Those assumptions, we’ll call them hype, said I had to have a sensible job, and art, writing, healing could not fall into this category. Firstly hype said it’s impossible to make a living at these things, and when I said, ahh but what about Amy Arnold, Barbara Hepworth, Annie Leibovitz, Louise Hay, hype says, oh but it’s very competitive (ie you will not be good enough - don’t try). Fear and hype work together like that - they pull at your heart strings until you find yourself sitting at a desk in a sensible job.

But the world has changed.

Today I look about the world and I see that others are succeeding by following their dreams, that the world has made more space for dreams and dreamers. That I can write and heal and make art and photographs that people love, care about, cherish. Because it turns out these are my gifts, and there are loads of people who are really good at maybe, accounting, so I don’t need to be. It turns out that I don’t have to choose between a sensible life and any one of my passions, but they can all flood through my life.

So I’m updating my world view, and dissolving my fears in the process. I say to hype, you know what, there’s too much evidence against you now! I see the trailed blazed by others, and I’m seeing other people succeeding - and if they can do it, I know I can too. And that’s enough to tip the scales.

Angel lives in the UK and is having fun bringing more of the things she loves into her life.