I Don't Believe Potential Has An Expiration Date. (part one)

Hi. I don't know if I have ever made a proper introduction.

My name is Stephanie, or Mink if you like it. (I like it.)

I am 31 years OLD!  I'm a high-school drop-out, but I have my G.E.D. (in which I scored within the top 3%).  I have never gone to college, but would really like to before I turn 40.  I have dabbled in art throughout my life and would love to pursue it as a career.

I kind of had a late start in life....

Here's part one of my story:
I grew up in Madrid, Maine, a town that isn't a town anymore...it has dis-incorporated. That means that it was too tiny and poor to sustain itself.  My parents were from New Jersey.  My father was so sick of people that he moved my mom and sister to the side of Saddleback Mountain in way-rural Maine in 1979.  I was born in 1980 to a 40-year-old mother and a forty-three year old dad.  My father built our home with no electricity, locally milled lumber, and sheer will.  We got electricity when I was two.

Dad was an improvisational genius, but nearly illiterate and terribly ill-tempered.  He was the son of two German immigrants who came to America before WWII.  My dad went to kindergarten in the country that his parents hailed from, but he and his mother fled back to the states right before the war started (we are not Jewish, but sometimes I wish we were).  He went to first grade in America, not able to speak English.  He drew Swastikas on his paper airplanes because it was all he knew.  He was tormented in school because they said he was a Nazi.  His house was raided many times because of his heritage, the government thought his parents were spies. 

Mom was born to two deaf parents and has been an interpreter since she was three.  She could read and write well at age four.  She went to a catholic school where the nuns did not answer any of her questions about why God allowed suffering.  She questioned the fairness of Hell, she thought Heaven would be boring.  Yet she has always been deeply religious. She met my father at age fifteen, a friend of a friend.  She was pregnant with my brother at age sixteen, and had to drop out of her catholic high-school (it's just what was done).  Her and my father were married before my oldest brother was born.

Mom had aspirations of being an artist before she married Dad, she had won awards for her paintings in high-school, not for her technical skill, but for her vision.  Mom had the ability to make people think and feel through her art.  Sadly, like many women of that era, daily life got in the way of pursuing her artistic side.

I am afraid that will be my outcome, and though I fight it every day, I feel as though I am losing ground.  My husband sees how I feel and encourages me to go to school.  I am scared though....I am afraid of being a financial burden, of being peers with people quite younger than myself, of finding out that I am not really an artist.

 how does one get through the fear and move on to success?