How do I break through my certainty that I'll fail

A: You’re asking, I think, how do I stand beside myself and be my own champion?

How do I let my small, imperfect and clumsy contribution to the world be worthy of my ongoing attention and persistence? How do I maintain the commitment to fumble along, to get waylaid, to come back? How do I keep on listening to my own tune and dancing as if nobody is watching when there are memories all around me of others laughing, accusing, patronising. ‘You’re doing it so wrong.’ ‘You’ll never be able to do that properly.’ ‘You won’t win.’ ‘Oh for goodness sake, you’re making a mess. Forget it, I’ll do it.’

And well, how you might do it is one teeny tiny step at a time.

First begin. Feel the energy of that beautiful idea, let’s imagine it’s a book, a novel. See your story unfolding in front of you, shiny and tantalising, beckoning and calling. Feel the promise of ‘Oh yes, this is mine and I can do this.’ And sit down to write. Going great guns, hours pass in glorious words. Then it’s time to stop and eat, have a rest. Come back the next day and go for it, you’re on a roll. The story wants to be written.

Then, bit by bit, moment by moment, it starts to look different to what you saw. It’s clunky. You’re writing around in circles, losing the thread, can’t quite find the words. There’s notes and scribblings and scratchings-out littering your desk. You don’t like it and you really don’t know how to claw it back.

The old familiar voices start chatting away in your head – your Mum’s impatience, your older siblings’ superiority, the school teacher’s red pen, ticks and crosses declaring right or wrong. You look again at your beautiful idea, but  now you’re seeing it through their eyes. You apply their estimations of your ability and you start to shrink, getting smaller and younger by the minute. You’re back there, reliving all those moments when you were wrong, not good enough for them, when they did it better, when you didn’t know and nobody showed you, when you got lost. You hid your not-knowing and shrugged it all off. ‘Who cares anyway? It doesn’t even matter.’ You walk away and do something else.

Step two: Stop.

Step three: Light a candle. Or burn some incense. Or put a flower in a vase.

Breathe. Keep breathing till you can feel your big adult’s feet on the ground, the ground that you live on now.

Imagine you’re a time traveller, and go back to visit that child who’s lost, bravely shrugging off their embarrassment, their disappointment and their failure. Hold their crushed up project in your hands with tenderness. See what they were beginning to make, tell them you see it. Show them how well they’ve begun. Tell them it’s good enough for you. That they are good enough for you. That it matters enough, for you. That they matter to you.

Hold the child while they pick up their project and have a go at the next bit. Chat about the nature of delivering new ideas into the world. Explain how there are always transition points, times when it’s not what you thought, it’s going all screwy, it’s not working. The words get muddled, the threads tangled, the plot gets lost. Tell them that this is the time to hang in there. Stand up, turn around, make some tea, then come back and keep going. Because goodness grows and becomes and disappears and returns and gets good enough and dies and is reborn. It is never a steady onwards and upwards thing. Stay. Notice all the voices telling you it’s all your fault and it’s because you’re not good enough and you’ll never … and notice when you’re skulking away and shrugging it off.

Repeat steps two and three.

Do this as many times as you need to.

Soon you might notice that your project is growing. That it’s trying out different shapes and threads, and it’s taking longer than you thought it would and it looks different to the shiny idea. But it’s real and it’s becoming, and it doesn’t matter for now whether it’s good enough because, well you’re doing it, and somehow, that matters. So really, possibly, just maybe, that might mean you can be free. No expectations. No need to succeed, or to pull it off, or to be good enough. Just to be. Held in that quiet acceptance of your grown-up self, their feet on the ground of now, good enough for now. Writing whatever the hell you like. Whatever feels true.

Then you might begin to see a funky, clunky shape start to emerge in your creation. Let that shine and tantalise and be a shiny possibility. Then when it too turns all skewy, out of shape and not at all how you thought it was, repeat steps two and three. Repeat steps to three, as many times as necessary.

There’s only one rule to this process. That is, when it feels like it’s all turning to shit and who cares and why bother and it’s never going to work out anyway, that you stop. You turn towards that little you. Hold them in your acknowledgement and your good-enough-for-me acceptance. Love them up.

And this is not a rule, but a pondering of context: None of us works in a vacuum. We are pickling in a culture that tells us what success is, what good-enough should look like. It’s changed since your little person learned those lessons in the family. Good enough in today’s terms is measured by online hearts, claps, likes and followers. Delivering your idea into the world must be big, ‘out there,’ exciting. Full of life, a shiny public profile, the promises of publishers, book tours, the works.

Yet some of us are quiet. It’s not in our nature to be out there, to promote ourselves brazenly, to sell, monetise, create a brand, be a thought leader, a podcaster, to tenaciously build subscribers, understand and manipulate algorithms, create and uphold video live-streams. So, when you read your story, quietly, to yourself, does it feel true? True to you? When your answer is close enough to ‘Yes,’ then it’s good enough.

Then it’s wonderful.