what i would tell my younger claire

November 15, 2023

With age comes experience, and hindsight is a beautiful thing… so they say. There are times when we are young when we may have a negative or less desirable outcome and wish we had taken a different path. You may even wish that your older self could have offered you some advice. The thing is, I don’t think I would tell younger Claire anything. She had it all figured out back then. Sure, she was, at times, a bit of a hot mess, she broke her finger jumping a guardrail on Las Vegas Boulevard, and she nearly got kidnapped in Paris, but she was fun and you couldn’t tell her anything. She made a decision and she forged ahead without hesitation. But as you journey through life, there are situations and people that shake your confidence and make you second guess things that you had known to be true for years.
With the experience of living for 35 years (because now I’m so old and wise), I may have a thing or two to tell young Claire, but equally, there are things that young Claire could remind me of. So I have three tips from younger Claire to give to current day Claire, and then three tips from me now to younger Claire.

tips from young claire to old claire

1. negative people feel worse about themselves than they do about you

When I was a teenager, my head was so far up my ass (in a good way) that other people’s opinions of me didn’t really matter to me. You couldn’t tell me anything. There was a girl in my friendship group who would comment on a pair of white denim shorts I would wear to school sometimes. She would often say “Claire, I really love those shorts”, or “You’re wearing my favourite shorts again”, and at the time, I thought she was complimenting me. During my teens I played competitive field hockey, and trained and played up to 10 times a week, so I was in pretty good shape. She was a bully and she was jealous, and her comments were designed to make me feel bad about myself. But because my belief in what I did and who I was was so strong, it was literally 15 years later that I realised that her comments were meant to be jibes. The biggest point of this is that people who are negative towards you, are the unhappiest of people.
In my late twenties, there was a woman I knew, who I now recognise would likely be clinically diagnosed as a narcissist, who would constantly belittle her friends behind their backs, call them alcoholics, losers, sluts, and yet her life was not going as smoothly as she would like people to believe. There were a couple of occasions where she turned her sights on me and blamed me for everything from a neighbour slamming their door at 7am, through to her inability to break up with her boyfriend. She would criticise me about spending too much time at home, spending too much time out, going to the gym, where I grew up, my personal hygiene, anything she could think that could possibly hurt my feelings. At the time, i took a lot of these comments to heart, making me question and criticise activities that I really enjoyed. When really, all she was doing was using me as a mirror to criticise herself. But because of her narcissism, any negativity she felt had to be the responsibility of someone else, generally whoever was in front of her time at the time.
Having the insight to understand this is something that comes with time, but knowing who you are and being confident in that can help you deflect some of that external noise. Sometimes we need to be our own hype-woman and fake it until you make it. And being delusional about how amazing we are isn’t always a bad thing, as long as we’re not dulling someone else’s shine.

2. most things don’t need a pros and cons list – if you want to do something, just do it

If younger Claire wanted to do something, she just went and did it. If shee wanted to live in New York for a week, she did. If she wanted to do brazilian jiu jitsu, she googled the closest studio and turned up. My life does have a few more responsibilities now, but everything is figure-outable. I live in Sydney, and I’m very lucky that most things I could ever imagine doing are available not too far from where I live. Sydney is also a city of resources, so the help I would need to get them done would also be only a click away. After the COVID-19 lockdowns, I did become very comfortable in just staying at home and not exploring too far, which I think has lead me to feel a bit bored and stale. I hadn’t travelled in a few years, and I kept making excuses to myself as to why I couldn’t go. “I have a dog now”, “I am busy with work and volunteering”. Those things are barriers, but they’re easily overcome. You can find a dog sitter, and you have leave entitlements that you can plan to use.
There are, of course, some decisions that do need some more consideration (we’ll talk about this later), but when it comes to starting a new hobby or going on a holiday, a little less consideration, a little more action please.

This is an interesting thing for my younger self to tell current-day Me, but I think there are times nowadays when I need a kick in the pants. In my twenties, I worked really hard at everything I did. I worked incredibly long hours, my schedule was always full, and I felt really inspired. It seemed the more I worked, the harder I wanted to work. But a week after my 30th birthday, it all fell apart. At the time I was working long hours at my day job, studying full time at uni, I did a bit of acting on the side, worked out at the gym most days, kept a bustling social life, and was moving house. Of the 168 hours we have in a week, I had scheduled all but 10 of them. I was always going somewhere, there was always something due, I didn’t have any downtime. And then I hurt my back… I tore a disk in my lower back doing a burpee/pull up combo at the gym (as you do), and I was forced to do nothing for three weeks. I couldn’t sit upright, I couldn’t walk for very long without pain. All I could do was lie in bed and watch TV. It forced me to stop, and in the stopping, I realised how burnt out I was. So I did stop. But since stopping, I’ve found it hard to get started again. I don’t think I ever really recovered from the burn out. We can’t be all things to all people at all times. Just pick a couple of things to work really hard towards, and leave the others for another time. So maybe I could take a little bit of inspiration from my younger self, to get started, but to take a tip from my older self, to take a break when needed. Combo tip!

3. good things don’t come without hard work, but there is a limit

tips from old claire to young claire

4. don’t date guys you’re not into

Let’s just say I’ve dated a lot of guys way longer than I needed to. If you’re not into someone, you shouldn’t date them. Makes total sense, right? Then why did I date so many guys I was only so so about? They were perfectly nice people, nothing really wrong with them, I just wasn’t excited about them. But every time I would talk myself up to end the relationship, I would look in their puppy-dog eyes and chicken out, like I was doing them a favour by staying with them. I wasn’t miserable, so I could hold on for another week, another month. But what favour was I paying them? The pleasure of staying in a relationship with someone who was indifferent to whether they responded to their text messages? In my years, I have come to discover that I am very much a people pleaser. By ending a relationship, you are prone to looking like the bad guy, especially if the dumpee hasn’t really don’t anything wrong. And the longer you leave it, the less acceptable it is to break up with someone because you were just ‘seeing how it goes’.
I came to this realisation when I had one of these guys tell me about how he could see the relationship really going somewhere, and how I was the one he had been searching for. This is something that if you’re in a healthy relationship, you would be thrilled to hear. But I was dreading this. It was a bit of an ego boost to hear that someone felt so strongly about me, but it made me feel empty. It was only when he said “Alright, this is it, speak now or forever hold your peace” that I said that I wasn’t really ‘feeling it’. There had been times when I would tell myself ‘In the next relationship I will be more assertive’, but what if there wasn’t another relationship and this one didn’t end? A lifetime is a long time to be mediocre. So from that point, I decided that if I uttered ‘If I have to spend another evening with this guy, I will jump out the window’, that’s a good indication that I should end it. And while there have been a lot of first dates, and I have been single for a while, it’s better to be happy alone than being unhappy with someone else.

5. impulse shopping is a bad idea, especially when it comes to property and pets

This sounds like a pretty obvious piece of advice, but I have impulse purchased both of these. We were talking earlier about not needing a pros and cons list for everything, but property and pets are two things you probably should, at the very least, do a pros and cons list for.
One morning after running in Sydney’s famous City2Surf fun run, I was scrolling through Instagram and saw that Margot Robbie had a new puppy. And if Margot Robbie has a new puppy, shouldn’t I get a new puppy? So I jumped onto GumTree and found a very cute dachshund puppy at a reasonable price, called the seller, and put down the deposit. A week later, I was in the possession of a 10 week sausage dog, who, while incredibly cute, was unlike anything I had ever experienced. Having a family dog growing up, I thought I knew what I was in for. But I didn’t know anything. It was a lot. It was the closest thing to parenting I had ever encountered and I was in no way prepared for it. I was resentful of this amazing, gorgeous, little hellion, even though he had no part in my decision making process. I love my dog immensely, and if anyone harmed a hair on his head I would hunt them down and inflict the wrath of 1,000 Norse Gods on them, but when people ask me if they should get a dog, I am honest. It took a good six months to get into the groove of having a dog. Toilet training, separation anxiety, leash reactivity, these things are real. Something worth considering.
As for buying property, I had stumbled across an online ad for a new apartment complex in Perth. I clicked on the website and had a look, without a huge amount of thought afterwards. A few days later, that same ad popped up again, so I clicked on it again. And then a few days later, the ad popped up again. I thought it was a sign from the universe telling me that I needed to buy into this incredible, new apartment complex. Later I found out that it wasn’t such a sign from the universe as it was that my internet cookies were enabled. But I bought the apartment, moved to Sydney a year later, and never actually got to live in it.
While both situations turned out ok, my advice would be to write that pros and cons list for dogs and houses, and other decisions of that magnitude.

6. not everyone deserves your politeness

Growing up, we’re always taught to be polite, to take the higher road if someone is mean to you. And don’t get me wrong, this isn’t always bad advice. But there are times when being polite isn’t what everyone deserves. People can mistake your grace for weakness and take advantage of you. This sounds really ominous, but I promise it turns out ok.
I had landed at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris after travelling from Seoul, and all I wanted to do was get some food and go to bed. But first I needed some cash. I was approached by a young man who asked me whether I needed a cab, and I let him know that I needed to find an ATM. He said he had a cab and he could take me to an ATM on the way to my hotel. Being a reasonably experienced traveller, one of the most common pieces of advice is to not accept rides from strangers and to only take taxis from official taxi banks at airports. But not wanting to be rude, I accepted his offer. Almost as soon as we started walking to the car, I felt I had made a mistake, when two large men started walking alongside the young man and I. I got into the car, the doors were locked, and we started driving. The young man was on the phone, and I noticed he was talking to the the two men from the airport, who happened to be driving in cars either side of us. I was then taken to an ATM in an industrial part of Paris and asked to withdraw all the money I had in my bank account. I only had about $700 in that account so I gave them the money, got back in the cab and went to the hotel. Even at that point, when the young man asked me if I wanted a massage, I still was polite enough to say “No thankyou”. If I had trusted my gut and not worried about whether a stranger cared whether I was polite or not, I would not have lost $700, or potentially, my life. Your personal safety should always be your highest priority, not some random persons feelings.