Ninety – Claire Christian

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.

If, by the glorious grace of grey skull, I live to be in my nineties then right now I am one-third through my life. Done. Dusted. Gone. Tick.

I feel like somewhere around my thirtieth birthday hard and fast revelations started flying at my face. Revelations that have led me to believe, and at the same time practically apply, a few things so that future Claire can be a purple rinsed Nanna who is fucking stoked at her ninety innings.

They sound a little something like this…

For goodness sake, just do it and stop talking, thinking, pondering, wondering about it. Cut your hair. Wear the frock.  Kiss them. Make the thing. Write the thing. Say the thing. Tell the thing you love the thing. Have sex with the thing. Quit the thing that makes you miserable. Tattoo the thing on your person.

Stop trying to problem solve problems that don’t exist yet, and instead start trying to find ways to navigate the problems that do.

Stop apologising. For yourself, your thoughts, your opinions, your waistline, your rants, your pictures of your children and your breakfast. Just stop. Because apologising is just another way of justifying your worth and your value. According to the young people I work with the only time you should apologise is if you hurt someone’s feelings. Or if you fart in their presence. I think this is sound advice. Be considerate and don’t be a dick. Because, you are worthy. You are valuable. You are more than enough exactly as you are in this very moment right now. That’s a fact.

Move. Move your body, your mind and whole mountains to make sure the people you think are superb know that you think they’re superb.

Tell your stories. They’re our most glorious currency. Your stories matter. Even the one about the time you got a perm or about the boy who lived in Nundah. They matter. You matter.

The lovely bald barista who makes my soy chai latte’s has a ’50 summers left’ list, because as a man in his fifties he figures he at best has fifty summers left. Fifty years feels like a whole lifetime, but, fifty summers feels like too few. I find it a grand tragedy that so few of us are really living, because we’re most definitely dying.

Right now. We’re dying. We. Are. Dying. Fact.

In the grand scheme of the whole planet, of the years that have existed before us and will exist after us, we are but a temporary blip. So why on glorious earth, do I worry so gosh darn much about the size of my skirt, about what that birch in grade eleven said, or about any allusive notion of what I make having to be perfect? I don’t need to be perfect and it doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to happen. Immediately. To seek out the pleasure, say yes, create action, go with the flow and stop giving a shit about the shitty things and start giving a shit about the other better shit. The me shit.

I owe it to future Claire to give a shit.

So that she can glance back at the ninety years before her and praise me for taking my own advice, showing up and making the best kind of glittery shit happen.

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