Once, a pint in my hand, I asked my dad, “How do you know so much?” To which, a pint in his hand, he replied, “It’s not about knowing, but about knowing how to talk.” That, he said to someone who never really thought had anything to bring to the table, and the few she knew she didn’t know how to talk about. That was five years ago.

My dad read everything. Often Irish writers. He had roots in Ireland. Me too, I guess, but I never cared that much, the same way I never cared that much for those Irish writers. That is, until I moved to Ireland. By that point in my life, I had heard enough about the country to feel that I had to go for a while. Try to learn about Ireland’s writers from Ireland.

Before moving there, I knew the basics. Joyce, Yeats, Beckett, and their existence. I knew “The Lake Isle of Innisfree." That was the extent of my knowledge. I felt bad about it, but isn’t it normal to not know something and not take the time to learn about it? “I cannot know everything..." I sometimes think, knowing is it just something I tell myself to keep me from thinking that I am not “good enough." Anyway, to sum up, before moving to Ireland, I didn’t know Jack. Which was great: it meant I had a lot to learn. But moving also meant quitting my job, and I knew that a gap in my resume would hurt my career: even if what I was doing then was not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, quitting to move to Ireland was not, as I was told, a wise decision.

In Ireland, I followed literature classes. The lecturer was good. I cannot remember his name, but I wish I could. Just for the fun of it, I’d like to try giving a short story of Irish literature. A short essay, you might say. A pre-explanation of why it influenced my short-life experience so far. I’ll make it quick.

Irish literature is the oldest literature in the world after the Latin and the Greek’s, dating from at least the 7th century CE. Skipping a few generations (I told you it would be short), the 17th century is remembered as being both a period of colonisation and of independence. This brought issues such as identity, language, and landscape. The 19th century was the time of the Gaelic revival. Ireland’s literati had a new scene to play on, which focused on the preservation of the Gaelic language. At the same time, and going on until the early 20th century, the Irish literary revival started.

Blossoming talents were making names for themselves: James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, Lady Gregory, and many others. A century later, contemporary voices appeared: Seamus Heaney was born the year Yeats died, Samuel Beckett wrote our known and beloved play “Waiting for Godot," Edna O'Brien's novel “The Country Girls,” published in 1960, provoked quite the kerfuffle, Roddy Doyle’s “The Commitment” was published... Alright, that’s enough.

Irish literature after the 1960s is what taught me the most. This new (not so new) generation made me wonder: where else writers have challenged their country with so much resonance? How is it that the Irish writing scene is so prolific? Younger, I would always say, “Well, with the famine and all, they probably had a lot of time to write.” The sad thing is that it made people laugh, so I kept saying it for a while. You know, outside Ireland. It’s easy to fall into mediocrity. Of course, the reason is that the shifts in Ireland had provoked a new wave of inspiring writers who wrote about social issues and Ireland’s repressive past: poverty, abuse, abortion, etc. In a bold and poetic way. Writers were teaching us why writers are here for—writers who had an impact.

I remember Edna O’Brien for her provocative trilogy “The Country Girls” (1960), which opened a discussion around the role of women under Roman Catholicism. Her novel was banned, and she left the country but continued bringing attention to social issues in her following books. I found that daring. Another book that stuck with me is “The Commitments” by Roddy Doyle, about working-class Dublin in the 80s. A quick-witted, audacious book. Fiction relaying reality, again challenging society.

“I could list so many other books," the wannabe writer would say, but I would not find it very useful here to do so. I still want to mention “Punishment” though, by Seamus Heaney, but I cannot talk about such an important poem in such a short piece.

So far, and that was quite the surprise for me, I had learnt or relearnt three things browsing through the pages of these authors. The first was that I was not regretting my decision to quit. The second was that I had a sense of nostalgia, or perhaps more belonging, that I didn’t know existed: I did have Irish roots after all. The third thing was how impactful writing could be if you were brave enough and if you knew how to speak, why you spoke, and who your audience was. I am not saying writers everywhere do not do that; they do. I’m just talking about what I know.

I read “My Father’s Wake” by Kevin Toolis that year, a beautiful memoir that meant a lot to me, as I had lost my father by that time. Toolis, born in Scotland to parents from County Mayo, taught me a lot about Ireland. I continued reading him with “Rebel Hearts: Journeys Within the IRA’s Soul.”.

Surprisingly, it was that book that was an eye opener for me that year: the one journalistic book I read during my time in Ireland. There it was: writing to make an impact, but in another style entirely than any used in all the books I had read during the year. I knew what I wanted to do then. The childhood dream I had buried years ago. Unfortunately, that was journalism.

That is just the story of how trying to combat my fear of not being good enough, risking a lot to learn about something new, turned into me knowing “what I wanted to do when I grew up”: someone who knew and knew how to talk. It is easy to want to follow a set path out of fear of following another path putting you in danger. But as I sit here writing, I am reminded that sometimes you owe it to yourself to believe in you and in what life has in store for you.