Today’s shared story comes from talented photographer Nicola Taylor.
For me, doing what you love begins with consciousness. What do I mean by that? I mean that sometimes we just have so many options available to us that it’s hard to know what we’d love to do. We don’t know which is the right thing for us and we expect that, when we find it, we’ll hear angels singing the Hallelujah chorus and a beam of light will shine down from the heavens, illuminating that one thing that will make it all complete. I don’t know about you, but that hasn’t been my experience. I spent a long time doing something that wasn’t what I loved and it took me a good couple of years of hard work just to clear the decks and figure out what to do next.
To take you back to the beginning of my story, two years ago I was working as a stockbroker in the City of London. I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing and, to be honest, I had no idea how I had got there. I think I had just stopped looking at the big picture and started focusing only on the choices in front of me. I did that job for seven years and I think I was happy for two of them. The rest were just wasted in stress and worry and fear that I couldn’t actually do anything else.
I think we all want the transitions to be smooth and easy but the truth is I couldn’t have known at that point that I wanted to be a photographer. I couldn’t see it from there. It’s kind of like being in a valley. You need to get to a higher vantage point in order to be able to see further afield. Sometimes, when all you can see are the mountains in your way, the first step is just trying to get to higher ground.
The moment of truth came for me on a January morning when I was meeting with my boss to allocate the many stressful and lonely business trips we had to take throughout the year. I remarked on how busy we were going to be and he turned to me and said “It’ll be November before you know it.” NOVEMBER. Almost 52 weeks gone… just like that. And the implications of that comment hit me between the eyes like a sledgehammer. As long as I was in that environment where a year went by in a blink of an eye, I would never have the space or the perspective to decide what I wanted to do next. I would never get a smooth transition. There was nothing else to be done. I would have to leave and face the discomfort.
I gave my notice a month later with no idea what I was going to do. I was fortunate in that my career had been very well paid and my unconscious had been protecting me by forcing me to be frugal for the past few years, so I had some savings and I decided to take a year off, a kind of sabbatical. I’m not the kind of person who can just wander aimlessly so I set myself things to do throughout the year, things that would keep me on track. A yoga teacher training in Bali, a writing retreat in the Scottish Highlands, an art retreat in New Hampshire and a nine month photography course at the London College of Communication.
And, although I didn’t know it at the time, everything was unfolding in just the right sequence. The yoga training was like a reset button for my life and gave me back my connection to my gut instinct. The writing retreat allowed me time for reflection on my life and the things I wanted. The art retreat gave me a tremendous sense of community and the bravery to try something with no idea whether I‘d be any good at it or not. And then, when it came to the photography course, I was ready. Everything that was inside of me was primed and ready to be expressed. And it was a little like the Hallelujah Chorus. But the angels could never have found me sitting on my butt in that cubicle. I had to take the first steps myself.
My big dream now is to continue exploring my own newly discovered creativity and, in time, to help others find theirs. I had written myself off as not being a creative person and that couldn’t have been further from the truth. In reality, I was paralysed by my own expectations of what an artist is and the judgments of my school art teachers. Not that they were wrong (I could show you a clay sculpture of a seal I made that would make you pee your pants laughing) but what they forgot is that creativity is so much more than technical artistic ability. We are all innately creative and we all have access to a medium that works for us, a medium that allows us to express ourselves with joy. I’m making it my mission in life is to convince people of the first and to help them find the second.
[All images courtesy of Nicola Taylor.]
Find more of her gorgeous photography here or connect on Facebook or Twitter.
Image: Cover of ‘Kodansha Bilingual Encyclopedia of Japan’
