First off, the answer is yes.

Yeh, you are. You are good enough for that which you are brave enough to try. If the idea is in your head, if the urge to do it, attempt it, become it, is there – then you are good enough.

Somewhere along the way, I learned that if I am not immediately able to do something, then I must be shit at it, ergo, I must give up. If, as a child, adults reeled off that old mantra to me “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” I just wanted to tell them to fuck off, even when I was about four.

I’ve half-heartedly said the same words to one of my sons; I’ve noticed he has the same problem as me, stopping his play or his drawing if things get too tricky. It feels false, and as an invigorating phrase, it simply doesn’t work. As to what does – well, I’ll tell you when he’s a grown up. I’m well aware much of it is about setting an example in my own life, that much (if not all) of what children learn is simply modelled to them by their parents or caregivers.

Well, now I’m writing a book, and I’m just at the part where I want to give up because it’s too difficult. I offered a sliver of it up for criticism at my poetry class last night and – wow! I’m kind of glad I did because it taught me, in one brutal, quick, excruciating instant, how far I have to go. In writing (that’s a given, it’s a first draft) but more importantly, in how I accept criticism.

I am not good at accepting criticism. It was pretty comical last night when I was trying to accept all my criticism. First, I was quite perky and able to catch people’s eyes. Then, I grabbed my pen and dutifully started to scrawl down some snatched phrases (my brain was already packing up to go, literally shouting at my body: come on! Let’s get the hell out of here – like, yesterday!). I looked at the verse I submitted later; there were words littered all over it like ‘Would you really add a swirl of pink to red?’ or ‘There’s problems with ‘we’ who are ‘we’ or ‘Is there supposed to be no voice in this piece?’ (That was my personal favourite. No, there is not supposed to be no voice in this piece. Why would I write a character with no voice?). The third phase was reassuringly predictable, if you knew me: I burst out into hysterical tears.

But then – evidence of my evolution as a human being – instead of sprinting out of the room, I stayed there, stifling sobs, sniveling, wiping snot away with my arm, making everybody feel very uncomfortable indeed. I told them all to carry on with another poem, someone else’s obviously, then sat there like a broken glass of water, shards strewn everywhere.

Now, after wrestling with a particularly vile inner critic for so many years, why on earth would I have put myself into this situation? I’m not sure, nope, no idea.

Criticism is great, constructive criticism is a necessity, I know that. This next day, I have emerged unscathed. I think I have. I feel really wobbly. But I still think that what I am creating is good. It is good enough, because the idea is there, I have the urge to do it, I am attempting it. I am becoming a person who follows their creative urge, right to the very end. I’m following its lead into the dark, allowing myself to unfurl the fear of juxtaposing the wild, untamed imagination with reality and form.

On paper. Yes, in a book.

Poems are everywhere, they are all around you, said the poet Enda Wyley to me and a bunch of other word fiends the other day. Instantly I saw words swimming around me in the air, ready to be plucked down and arranged prettily on the page.

Prettily, and with meaning, I hope. Now, in mid-life, I’ve waded into poetry fearlessly, having previously only paddled in it like a wary toddler. Frankly, I was scared of it. I’ve always had some favourites, poems that were ‘easy’ to understand, by writers like Mary Oliver or E.E. Cummings, but I steered clear of many others; I don’t know – because I was scared, I guess. Not my idea of fun to discover, stumbling around words strung artfully on a page, that I might be, as I suspected all along, a bit stupid.

Oh but what a shame! No human is stupid! We all feel, and that is all we need to ‘get’ poetry. Last week, I also saw a young girl, maybe 16 or so, reading out a poem she’d written, and I was less enthralled by the words than by the way she was speaking them – mainly with passion and conviction that what she had to say mattered. Of course it did – it mattered to her.

I’ve started reading poems to my kids, and if you find the right one for them, you can see a light switching on inside them, which is joyous. Nonsense things (like Shel Silverstein’s Hat: Teddy said it was a hat/So I put it on./Now Dad is saying,/”Where the heck’s the toilet plunger gone?”) delight them but it’s the rhythm that gets them, it is innate in little ones to respond to rhythm. These are probably all really obvious things to state – but they weren’t obvious to me!

So poems are all around you, in motion, words dancing and fizzing – queuing up and jostling each other to try to get on to a page near you. If you have the urge to write one, then do. I’m going to try to capture more myself.

I tried something different the other day and went to a mosaic class. It’s an art form that had never been on my radar before; or so I thought. Now I see that I’m always looking at pretty patterns and tiles, and so have been appreciating mosaics all along.

Anyway – another lesson on creativity for me. I have never touched a tile before, never mind created a work of art out of it. Most others in the class were in the same position and had a fairly relaxed attitude about the endeavor. Just pick a few colours they like, formulate a vague pattern and get going!

Not me. Mine had to be a masterpiece. It had to be the greatest piece of mosaic-making ever conceived by a complete beginner in the history of mosaic art. The colours would be blistering and precise, the pattern would be startling in its wild but uniform beauty. Like the others, I got going too. But I can’t say I was relaxed about it, I was taking it far too seriously for that. Hours passed. People finished, laughing and delighted with their work, heading on into the night, perhaps to sip a glass of wine, go watch a movie, or go to bed, their minds soothed after such a colourfully creative break.

I got myself into a terrible muddle. What I’d had in my head did not translate onto my mosaic. I caught myself thinking: God, I am shit at this.

Now can you imagine? Here it is, the death of creativity, right there. HOW can you be shit at something that you have never done before? It has been the same with my writing all these years, I have not allowed myself the leeway of experimentation. Stuff has come pouring out and because it hasn’t been perfect, a masterpiece from the get-go, I have dashed it aside, slapping it with the forlorn and deathly label of failure. This is simply not how creativity works, it does not, can not, will never work like this.

Look at a three year old painting with his fingers, or schlepping in the mud or building a sandcastle. That’s how creativity works. Or rather, doesn’t work. It’s play.

When I was in my twenties and early thirties I put a lot of pressure on every relationship I had. Through the fogginess of dodgy mental health and a sense of direction that twisted to the rhythm of whims which came thick and fast, often with no sense and a bewildering plurality of intent (neuroscientist, poet, teacher, furniture-maker, midwife, minister, gardener, editor, chef), I was always steadfast about two things. I wanted to be a mother, and I wanted to write.

Since I was tiny, I loved babies; I wanted to hold them and help care for them. I remember once, when I was around six, an auntie was coming to visit, and she was bringing her newborn with her. I figured that if I sat on my sofa for hours, holding my doll, God (this man in the sky who decided how stuff went down) would see me, note how talented I was at holding babies, and then give me a chance to hold the real thing. When my auntie arrived, I was allowed to cuddle her baby – only to drop him immediately, to vigorous tears both on my part and his, as all the adults yelled, and he no doubt wondered at this brief slip in security so early in his life.

So every man I met was sized up as a potential father, I couldn’t help it, and I also couldn’t hide that I was desperate to be a mother. I wanted babies in my twenties. Obviously most men ran a mile, pretty quickly. The ones who didn’t, I was suspicious of: why on earth would they want to stick with someone like me? There must be something wrong with them – and so it went, until I met the father of my children, who is a stalwart sort and somehow saw beneath all the mental high jinks to the person underneath.

Anyway, last night, I lay thinking, as the heavy rain fell with luscious drops on the roof of the mobile home where we are spending this Irish summer. I am doing exactly the same now with the book I am writing. I am putting too much pressure on it. I want it to be something it is not right now, which is a first draft. I want it to be The One. The One that gets finished, the one that is a masterpiece, the one that gets me an agent. I’m killing the relationship before it has even started, because what the story needs is space. By that, I don’t mean I have to down tools and let the words languish: I mean I need to give them a break. They’ll be ok. It’ll work out. It is the same with any creation, in any sphere: over-crowding it, over-analysing it, will be the death of it. These wispy ideas that come to us must be offered succour, and treated with gentle respect when they do dare to tap us on the shoulder. You can’t let them wander up and then coldly hit them over the head with a hammer, killing them stone dead before they have had a chance to grow.

This is what I am doing with my ideas at the moment, as I did with relationships all those years ago. That critic’s voice is so powerful, and it has felled me before, to the point of just stopping creativity altogether –  a state which I think is non-human, and seriously detrimental to your mental health. If you are not creating, you are dead, because to create is to live.

I was talking to my sister last night. We were both voracious readers as children, my sister to the point she used to rob books from the library. She’s shaking her head now as I tell her I’m writing this – why would she steal books from a library? We can’t remember. She feels terrible about it. This is how good a person she is.

There was a period of about five or six years – it ended recently – where I stopped reading fiction. I don’t know why, it wasn’t a conscious decision. I was being pregnant and having children for a lot of this time; I could only read in snatches. I’d always choose some dastardly health book about how not to die. Now I think about it, one of them was actually called How Not To Die. I also read some shocking unputdownable memoirs; I particularly favoured the medical sort, as is in fashion now. I read quite a few books about dying, about dying patients and end-of-life care. Possibly a delayed reaction to seeing my father die. He wasn’t ready and it wasn’t peaceful for him. I’d read the odd poem, usually by Mary Oliver or Walt Whitman. And lots of cookery books; I’d gaze at recipes and think how great life would be if I cooked like that, or if I could somehow magically have all the ingredients in my cupboard without having to go to the supermarket.

Mentally, I was living in a kind of a nightmare world, I think. I see that now my brain is being soothed by reading fiction again. It is so much more nourishing, to me, than the other stuff I was reading. The towering Maya Angelou said: ‘When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.’ Wow. Doesn’t that say so much? The life-giving power of literature. Yes! It resurrects you, it gives you life! If you recognise something about yourself in a great work of art, if you learn something about yourself; if you discover that you are not alone. If you just let your ear and heart fall around the words, let them wash over you like a cool shower, leaving you forever changed in some way. It’s glorious. Reading is glorious and I’ve rediscovered how much I used to love it, how I used to fall into it, how it made me glad to be alive.

What on earth was I doing not reading stories when, growing up, they were my lifeblood? And yes, as Maya Angelou says, it helps you gain a sense of yourself in the world. It helps you understand the world and your place in it. I do have a lot of information in my head now about what causes high cholesterol, or what to eat to offset dementia, or what the gut microbiome actually is – but hell! None of it is as useful or memorable as learning as a young child about death and renewal, and how precious life is, from E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, or the power of the mind to be first flattened, then galvanised into overcoming any obstacle, as I found out in Francis Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. On deep and passionate friendship, neglect, death, security and the pure, redemptive love of a guardian – Goodnight Mr Tom by Michelle Magorian had a profound effect on me as a child and has remained in my consciousness ever since. Or finding out as a teenager that Holden Caulfield found things equally as shit as I did, and for that matter, Hamlet did too; and that the pedestrian minutiae of life and relationships could be both comic and wholly revealing about human nature, as Jane Austen taught me. Charlotte Bronte, who put such poetry to isolation and depression in Jane Eyre, and let us soar up again as Jane found love. The breathless delight, the sheer chutzpah, the utter fun that is Dodie Smith’s I Capture The Castle.

These are some of the books I read as a child, each becoming part of who I am, each parenting me in some way, too. In childhood, I could not be dragged away from books. Now as I plough deeper into adulthood, into middle age – as I sail closer to that unknown horizon, where life morphs into something else, I think: I just want to read, read, read. There is so much to learn. I am at 0.000000000001% of what I want to learn about humans on earth, and it’s all there to be revealed, in words, in stories, inside books.