© 2024 Sue Shanahan
“Greet the darkness, shake his hand, & pour a cup of light.” - Amber Fossie, Zoomies a Tarot by ZeppelinMoon
Amber Fossey was on maternity leave the first time we connected. She was wrestling with leaving her career as a forensic psychiatrist and putting her energy into her online presence as an artist. She was quite committed to helping those who struggle with mental illness but was beginning to see that her illustrated poetry healed in a different way. She was looking for signs that she should take the leap. I turned out to be one of them.
I had come across an illustrated poem on her ZeppelinMoon Instagram account that so closely described an incident in my childhood I felt like it was made for me. I immediately bought the original from her Etsy Store. As soon as it came from across the pond I reached out to her:
©2024 ZeppelinMoon
7/2/2019
Amber, I just returned from vacation to find the manatee original I purchased from you. I can’t express what it means to me. You see when I was a girl, to my mother’s horror, I was large. She made a habit of shaming me by saying that because of my size she was afraid I was going to drop dead of a heart attack. I am still recovering from the effects of her parenting. Somehow I think your watercolor is a part of my healing. Right from the Universe, through you to me. I will treasure it always. xo Sue
7/2/2019
Oh Sue! your message gave me shivers down the spine! what an awful thing to say to a child. im so sorry you had to go through that. im so touched to be of any tiny help, really. i am looking for signs about what to do with my career so your message also helps me, and a little bit of magic comes full circle. big love to you, say hello to manatee from me.
Amber grew up in a working-class town in the United Kingdom. Her path to her life as ZeppelinMoon can be traced back to her girlhood. She remembers always loving poetry. “I’ve written poems since I could write. I would make little books out of scraps of paper stapled together to give to my friends at school.”
When she entered school, her parents were told that Amber had the potential to really do something with herself. They began saving money to help with her higher education. Amber confesses to being a “good girl.” “I was really academic. I wasn't cool or very good at socializing. Art wasn't my strong point either. Poems were my thing, but I thought mine were rubbish. I used to enter poetry competitions, but I never ever got anything published or won anything.”
Then it was onto university. There, Amber put her poetry behind her and set her sights on becoming a veterinarian. She found a job working at a zoo near her home. It didn’t take long for her to decide that she would make a greater impact on people’s lives than animals. She shifted her focus to becoming a doctor, specializing in forensic psychiatry. “I wanted to help people with mental illness, especially the most rejected. On one of the first days of my training as a junior doctor I said to the consultant there, ‘Oh I just want to set everybody free.’ And he looked at me like I was an idiot. He was like, ‘Yeah, well that's not going to happen.’”
She qualified to be a doctor and realized her dream of working with the mentally ill when she was 26. For Amber there's no health without mental health. “That was why I went into it. Also coming from my background, there's mental illness in my family, so I had direct experience which feeds into what you end up doing.”
Amber worked in high security hospitals and prisons. She loved trying to understand the workings of the minds of her patients, but became disillusioned with the restrictive practices and compulsory medication. Today she says her goal to alleviate their suffering was quite naïve.
“I got pretty burnt out from it all. I don't necessarily agree with the system of taking people’s liberty away, by restricting them pharmacologically. I used to work in prisons in London, and oh, Sue, the things I’ve seen. And so, in the end, I didn't feel like I was really helping people much. It’s quite a disheartening profession.”
Amber’s career was all consuming and left her little time to express herself creatively. She began experimenting with drawing and painting while on maternity leave with her first born, Teddy. She found creating art very cathartic. She was able to release her experiences of people’s suffering into her sarcastic humor and musings.
“It was like opening a window and letting light in or something. I started doodling cartoons to process the dark but tender world of working in mental health.”
She began channeling her love of animals into her paintings. “I never know what the animal will look like until it’s done. The weirder they are the more fun they are to draw. I think my paintings are all gifts from somewhere else in the ether, just popping over for a jaunty hello and a hug.”
The next steps for Amber were to post her creations on Instagram and sell them as prints on Etsy. She called herself ZeppelinMoon. She wanted to remain anonymous to keep her coworkers from knowing she was moonlighting. “Since Teddy, whose middle name is Zeppelin, gave me the chance to create, I thought I would name my venture after him. The moon is a symbol of renewal and second chances.”
As time went on, Amber learned to navigate her creative process. Sometimes she struggled to express herself. She can remember coming home from her shift as a doctor, sitting in her car crying. She was trying to find the words to go along with the image in her mind’s eye.
©2024 ZeppelinMoon
“I could see what I wanted to draw. I cried because it reminded me of the problems I’d had with body image. After the words came through I posted it. I got hundreds of people saying, ‘This moves me! Made me cry! It made me accept who I am.’ And I was like, ‘Well, it made me feel the same way.’ It’s like the words were a gift from the Universe and for me as well.”
She and her husband celebrated the birth of their daughter Beau when Teddy was three. Amber worked part-time as a forensic consultant during her maternity leave. All that time away from her patients helped convince her that she couldn’t do it anymore. She didn’t want to go back.
“I'm quite happy staying at home with my baby, thanks very much. You know what I mean? I didn't really want to go back into that prison where they're all shouting, swearing, spitting and throwing cups of wee at me, you know? I’d built up my Instagram following to a point where I felt like I might actually be able to make a career of it.”
Her search for direction lead Amber to an intuitive healer. She was told that her career would still be in mental health, but it would look different. The intuitive’s words seemed to echo what Amber knew deep inside. Her art heals hearts.
The thought of leaving her job as a forensic psychiatrist made Amber uneasy. To those around her leaving a respectable profession, with a decent salary seemed crazy.“I felt like a big disappointment, but I still had to follow my heart.”
Amber’s Instagram account had grown such a huge following (358 K to date) that she found representation with a literary agent. She quickly landed Amber a book deal with Harper Collins. Her family was overjoyed for her. Her sister Carrie-Anne messaged her, "Oh Ambie, I'm so glad for you! Your light is shining brightly."
“No one has ever said anything like that to me before. I was just brought to tears. That's such a moving thing to say, but now I realize that everybody has light. We all are made of stardust and everyone has a light to shine. When people's light isn't shining it breaks my heart, because it means that they're suffering in some way.”
The response to her book Be Wild Be Free has given Amber a new appreciation of her gifts. “I get some of the most beautiful messages from people saying that they've had a huge loss or trauma and they've found real solace in my book. It blows my mind. In a weird way, I feel like I am reaching and helping more people doing art than I ever did on a day to day level in a hospital.”
Having the courage to follow the directives of her soul is what brought Amber to where she is today. Not only has honoring her intuition help make bright the light of others, it has done the same for her. And oh how she doth shine.
“Greet the darkness, shake his hand, & pour a cup of light.” - Amber Fossie, Zoomies a Tarot by ZeppelinMoon
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Text and artwork © Sue Shanahan
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