Anyone who works in a creative field – designer, illustrator, writer – is most likely familiar with the complicated relationship one can have with a Moleskine notebook. The leather-bound little books, featuring blank or grid paper inside, are typically available in the kinds of retail stores offering handmade paper too lovely to touch (and most definitely off-limits for those of us with 2-year-olds).

It’s hard to resist them, even at about $15 a pop. Devastatingly simple — bold black cover contrasted by pristine off-white pages — the Moleskine provides the coolest blank canvas ever for all those stunning ideas and revelations that are going to pop up when we’re away from our computers. I bought mine when I was first starting to freelance full-time, and as I handed over my Visa card I imagined the brilliant ideas for articles and books I would get while talking to friends or walking in the park, the visual inspiration that would strike me for print and Web designs, the song lyric or overheard snippet of conversation that could spark an idea for an entire novel.

Of course, the reality, at least for me, is that I often forget to take the Moleskine with me. I have a larger notebook I use for business meetings and conversations, and the Moleskine typically stays behind. Or I can’t find it. Or it’s at the bottom of the other bag. When I do remember it, the Moleskine has come in handy for two things: grocery lists and an emergency coloring book for my daughter. If you look at my Moleskine today, you’ll find notes about neighborhoods we looked at in Portland during our visit in July, a few names of Italian trattorias (probably from our trip to Florence, but I can’t remember), a couple of notes about writer’s lists that someone told me about, and lots and lots of Crayola drawings of puppy dogs, trees, cats and free-form scribbles by my child.

When I was in Chicago in August at the Creative Freelancer Conference, my friend Alisa and I made a couple of new friends, two fun, sweet and amazingly creative women, a designer and a copywriter. We headed out to a cool wine and cheese bar for dinner, and when the bill came we (the creative kids who hated math) had a difficult time splitting up the bill — some of us had had wine and some not, one had ordered a la carte cheese, another just a salad. Even with our four iPhone calculators we were having trouble. So, knowing that an old-fashioned pen and paper can work wonders, I whipped out my Moleskine.

Our new friends were horrified. “Oh my god, we couldn’t possibly use your Moleskine for that,” they said.

I grinned and proudly opened the notebook to show them the contents. Every precious page defiled by ugly, waxy crayon scribbles and badly drawn animal pictures, all attempts to keep Maddie entertained during some dining experience. My new friends were shocked. I shrugged, and Alisa agreed that as parents, you do what you have to do.

But later, I thought how this experience had changed me. All my life, as an aspiring writer, I’ve been buying beautiful, cloth-bound blank books as an attempt to really dig in and write. But I never did write in those books. They were always too beautiful, clean, perfect. My writing would never be good enough to grace those pages. What if I messed up? What if my writing was stinky? I’ve always had a shelf full of these blank books, most of which have two or three pages of a story at the beginning of them and nothing more.

I’ve always approached creative writing projects the same way — stopping before things get too messy.

The past two years, though, things have changed. Life has gotten messy. I have a child now. Things are never perfect. They’re fun, happy, silly, crazy, rewarding, touching, but never perfect. Always messy. I’ve come to terms with that.

And now that I’m back to being a full-time writer, I’m having to get messy every day. There’s no way to churn out the amount of work I’m up against for so many different clients without getting messy. I’m learning the fine art of just sitting down getting the paint on the page, in a wild, wet, smeary mess. The beauty of writing is that I can go back and fix it all later. There’s not as much pressure that way.

Defiling my Moleskine was a good experience for me. I still don’t have brilliant inspiration written in my Moleskine, though a couple of pages have been used legitimately for what I intended — ideas that might morph into something big someday. Now I write on top of the brown Crayola dog and the purple squiggle, instead of hunting for the perfect blank page. Ideas are crazy, unstructured and out of control by their very nature. Learning to let go and follow their lead, without pressure to make them structured and clean, is the only way to eventually understand and corral them.