Letter to My Teenage Self

by Grace Halphen

  I remember everyone around me was getting interested in the opposite sex, me not so much, I knew I liked boys but was so ashamed and confused. I am happy to tell you by the time you are just 10 years older, times will have changed and being gay, although still not a picnic while at school, is a lot more accepted and even celebrated. I know you get teased but so do most kids about all sorts of things. Kids will always find something to pick on as they need to help their own self-esteem; you just need one great friend.

  Appreciate support at home to get through those school years. I promise you by 18 you are happy and have heaps of great friends. You will find your way, it just took a little longer than planned. While you are not on everyone’s party list at school, trust me when I say your name becomes a loved household brand and you’re invited to more things that you care to go to.

  Peter Doherty was born in 1940 in Brisbane. After attending veterinary school at the University of Queensland and completing his PhD at the University of Ediburgh, he took up a post-doctoral position with the John Curtin School of Medicine Research. He made a breakthrough in discovering the role of T cells in the immune system, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Medicine and was named Australian of the Year.

  The thought of writing to my 13-year-old self takes me back to 1953, the year I finished 8th grade in a Queensland state primary school and, a few months later, joined the first intake at Indooroopilly High School.

  That meant catching the commuter steam train, then walking to this brand-new school on the hill. Back then, two things I would not have to tell that freckled, skinny kid would be ‘Don’t touch drugs’ and ‘Be careful of social media, it can waste your life!’ Neither was on the horizon.

  A regret is that I didn’t talk more with the WWII refugee kids who were still flooding into Australia. The expectation was that they should become like us, not that we could learn from them. In fact, that’s the main suggestion I’d make to my high school self today: interact with a much greater diversity of people and get a better understanding of different lives. Talking helps with your own choices. Life improves when we are less ‘self’ and more ‘other’ focused. With the really big issues like climate change, ‘think globally, act locally’.

  Raised by financially stretched parents (‘frugals’ who suffered the 1930s Depression) I didn’t need a whole lot of advice about application and self-discipline. My imperative was to ‘get the hell out of Dodge City’, in this case a working-class outer suburb of Brisbane. Cheap paperbacks by (predominantly) European intellectuals and committed high-school teachers specialised in the sciences, arts and mathematics showed a way forward. That left me convinced that our socially diverse, immigrant country will only achieve its potential if all can access a quality education. That needn’t include luxuries like overseas trips, but it does require great, well-paid and respected teachers.

  If that 13-year-old were starting out today, I’d point to the advice I attribute to Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, who lived a full life to age 103: do everything the hard way, walk don’t ride, take the stairs not the lift. Being happy is good, but we all experience unhappiness and, in fact, learn more from painful failure than from easy success. Just accept that as reality. Disneyland is fantasy, not life! Don’t agonise, and forget any ‘blame game’. That gets you nowhere.

  At 13, we’ve got just about everything ahead of us. If I’d had better advice and more sophisticated parents, even older kids at high school to talk to, I would probably have done something quite different with my life, maybe in the area of writing or language. The consequence is, though, that I would not have won a Nobel Prize and I would now be a very different person. And, the absence of a senior group at school may (together with an early exposure to Protestant non-conformism) be why I’ve never had any problem in either ignoring peer pressure or in identifying authoritarians and bullies for who they are. Don’t accept mindless conformism: do your own thing, look at the evidence and think for yourself. And when you get to that age, exercise your precious right to vote.

  A couple of thoughts from Hamlet: ‘Above all to thine own self be true’ and ‘We know what we are but know not what we may become’. Add to that: ‘Showing up is half the battle.’ Hang in there, learn as much as you can and seize opportunities when they’re offered. Providing you make the effort and avoid doing major harm to yourself and to others, there’s a good possibility that your experiences (both positive and negative) at age 13 and in the school years that follow will point to an interesting way forward. If that doesn’t work, then any decent university offers a whole range of new and exciting options. Life is for the long haul. Delight in challenges, keep your mind open, and don’t expect anything worthwhile to be easy!

  Peter C Doherty,

  University of Melbourne, 7 February 2016

  Peter Gilmore, born and bred in Sydney, is the executive chef of Quay Restaurant in Sydney. Since 2001, Peter’s creative and original cuisine has seen the restaurant receive an unprecedented number of Australian and international awards, and establish itself at the forefront of Australia’s food scene.

  Dear Peter,

  I am writing to you as I know you have recently started high school.

  School has always been a challenge on two fronts. One, having dyslexia has made it difficult, especially at this time when there is not a lot known about the condition. You puzzle your teachers, as you are able to comprehend concepts and express yourself verbally very well. When it comes to writing things down you are frustrated because you can’t spell the words you want to write. As it turns out you will end up publishing two cookbooks with the aid of a thing called ‘spell check’ and a wife who happens to be very good at writing and patient enough to be your scribe.

  On the second count you have always been a bit chubby. It’s hard fighting genetics. You will conquer it in your twenties but by your forties you will find yourself still fighting the battle. As a young child this made you a target at school, and it wasn’t just the bullies. Kids can discriminate easily. Without life experience their reactions can be very superficial and quite hurtful. In a lot of ways these experiences, though hurtful, have made you quite resilient and through this a strong belief in yourself has prevailed.

  What it has taught you is a deep empathy for people’s differences and a certain level of humility that will keep you grounded. In future the sort of success you will have professionally may have made you arrogant but some of the challenging experiences you have had at this age will help you keep things in perspective and will allow you to remain humble and appreciative.

  I feel that creativity needs to come from a place of quiet confidence and humility, as it is a ‘gift’. You will feel very lucky that you are able to express yourself creatively through your work.

  I would also like to tell you that the only friends worth having at high school are the ones that accept you for who you are. I know you have recently moved house and have started at a high school where you know no one. As it turns out, you are not the only one in that situation and you soon make a couple of good friends.

  Friendship is about give and take, and it is worth finding people who are genuine. This is something you will always seek.

  To finish, I want you to know that although life is full of ups and downs and challenges, I have found that remaining positive and truly believing in yourself is the best way forward. Find your passion and live that passion to the best of your ability.

  You will enjoy yourself along the way,

  Peter

  Rachael Maza is an Australian actress, narrator and director. She has acted in the film Radiance and on stage in The Sapphires, and worked as a TV presenter on ABC’s Message Stick and SBS’s ICAM. She is currently working as part of The Black Arm Band. In 2007, she and her sister began co-writing an autobiographically inspired theatre show Sisters of Gelam.

  Hi Rachael,

  I know this will sound really odd, but I’m writing to you because I am actually you, but a lot older – in fact I’m
now 50 … I can hardly remember being you. 13? I know I was in year 8 in Dover Heights High School, an all-girls school in the eastern suburbs of Sydney whose claim to fame was that Ita Buttrose and Renée Geyer went there. I remember my best friends: Renee, the Jewish redhead with braces, and Naomi, who lived in the same street – Stafford St Paddington – and was your handball/tomboy buddy. And her house was always riddled with mangy cats! I know you quite enjoy school. You’re actually quite good at most subjects including Maths, Science and Music.

  Although you have a couple of good friends, you’re really quite shy … You won’t always be shy! And if it’s any consolation, those bloody big buck front teeth of yours (one with the big white mark) won’t always be the bane of your existence – in fact, even though you never get braces they sort of sort themselves out. Also you finally get the white one capped and eventually you never even think about your teeth at all … in fact, you even get compliments about how good your teeth are. How funny is that!

  I laugh when I think about that time some girls threatened to bash you up – inviting you to meet them at the basketball court after school – but they didn’t show. I admire that about you: you really were strong in your principles, and always quick to defend others who were being treated unfairly. This didn’t go unnoticed. Many years later a woman came up to me. She introduced herself to me saying we went to school together. I looked hard and thought maybe I recognised her, but really I didn’t. She said, ‘I remember you because you were one of the only ones who talked to me even though I was fat.’ So I guess your sense of fairness and equality made some people’s lives along the way a little easier.

  One thing I would like to say to you, though, is, ‘I know you think of yourself as indistinct, even invisible, but trust me – you’re not!’ I look back at photos of you and you’re such a beautiful young woman, maybe a little gangly, but with a beautiful smile and heart, and I wish you could know that now, back then … I wish you could enjoy your beauty, your warmth, your generosity, your humanity, and know how you inspire this in others. In fact I wish you could sit with me now and look back at all these photos and laugh with me … and see the absurdity of it all. I could tell you of all the wonderful adventures you will have, how you will have little tastes of love, little tastes of a career, but actually you will always be the same you that even 40 years later is not looking for the end goal, not aiming for this thing called success.

  In fact you will continue to take life as it comes, each adventure as it unfolds, always open to what comes next, never staying in any one thing for too long … (That’s not entirely true – this last job has lasted over seven years, which, let me tell you, is a world record!) But you will mostly always be happy!

  One thing to note, though – the secret to your happiness is keeping healthy and being in and amongst people. Your hardest times will be when you let your health go down and lose touch with the people who matter to you. But I guess you can only learn this for yourself and maybe even that was a valuable lesson you will need to have.

  Anyway, have a great life, I know you will. The biggest thing for you to remember is to love the you that you are at any given moment. This will take you a long time to learn, but maybe you can get there a little quicker than I did … Because at the end of the day – it’s all codswallop anyway – life is what you are living right now and nothing else, so enjoy it now!

  Also, I just want you to know how much I love you.

  Big hugs,

  Rachael

  Rafael Epstein is a journalist who has worked in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Timor, Indonesia, Europe and the Middle East. He has also worked at the Investigative Unit at the Age. Rafael currently hosts the Drive program on 774 ABC Melbourne. His first book, Prisoner X, was published in March 2014.

  Dear teenage Raf,

  What you should know is that you will grow up into a magnificent young man. That’s the good news. The bad news is it doesn’t happen overnight. It will take a long time, longer than you have been on this little planet. It doesn’t happen easily because becoming a man is not some natural process that you intuitively grow into.

  Have you noticed that you are not growing into your body right now? That so many of the other teenagers around you are bigger and have bodies that look like they will grow into a man? Well that will happen to you, even though the pace seems, right now, like it is more than glacial. The bad news is that growing into becoming a man is even tougher. In fact it is the hardest thing that you will do.

  You will find someone who loves you just as fiercely, even more spectacularly than the heat you feel inside you right now, for some of the girls that float in and out of your life. And in fact you already have most of what you need to find a job and an identity in the outside world. Your profession is waiting for you. It will fit you like a man’s hand fits perfectly inside a beautifully tailored leather glove. You know how you don’t know what you want to be when you grow up? Don’t worry. Actually, you do know what you want to be. It will come with much hard work and some searching and some dithering along the way. But it is far from your toughest task.

  What will come close to breaking you, what will threaten to tear you to pieces, what will give you the greatest succour and joy, even as it gives you the most anxious moments of your life, will be the very making of you. Becoming a man is about finding out who you really are. How you live, how you connect, how you rise to anger, how you give up your own needs, wants and desires for those you truly love. How you learn to foster your character, channel your passions, carve out your identity and enjoy the essence of being you; that is what it means to become a man.

  How you think of sex, what you do when you dream of it, how you physically respond to a lover’s demands, to be sure these are a core aspect of what it means to be a man. They can be a foundation but they are nowhere near a complete picture of what it means to tell the difference between desire and true engagement, between loving and taking. It takes time to feel your way into the visceral difference between strength and anger, between providing the solid soil that can allow true love to grow, and simply being strong like the rock that love merely flows over. This is the toughest part of your life. You will need to take a close look at the fibres of your soul, and the toughest reaches of your emotions. But this is the most rewarding part of being alive. So remember to breathe and revel in your hedonism, for they are the simplest of pleasures, but you will even more greatly relish that which you work so hard to understand.

  Copyright TJ Garvie

  Richard Joseph Frankland is a playwright, scriptwriter and musician. He is an Aboriginal Australian of Gunditjmara origin from Victoria. He has worked as a soldier and a fisherman, and as a field officer to the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

  Dear Richard,

  Hey, it’s me, or you and me. You’re a teenager and I’m 51 now.

  I’ve seen war, investigated deaths in custody, had typhoid, had bands, been a soldier, buried more family than I care to mention, fallen in love, out of love, laughed, danced, fallen over, got back up, cried big tears and sobbed hard. I’ve been a hero and I’ve failed. I’ve saved lives and changed lives. I’ve written books, albums, plays, films, poems some for the public and some secret ones.

  I’ve had children.

  They are beautiful. So beautiful that sometimes I cry just thinking of them.

  What should I tell you?

  Your brother Shane, you’ll never stop missing him. Same with your sister Linda, you’ll never stop missing both of them. You’ll never get over the grief. But it’s OK, ’cause later on you’ll learn that grief is love.

  You’ll get your heart broken, a few times, and it will hurt. But you’ll learn from it, and believe me you learn to love again.

  Our dad said to have a good sense of right and wrong, and even though he died when we were six, we must have remembered it from somewhere. Maybe when he was holding us when we were young. You’re going to help a lot of people. Some you’ll never kno
w that you’ve helped. It will happen with your films, your speeches, your actions.

  One day you’ll learn that it’s okay to be involved in so many people’s lives. To have so many people depend on you. Just remember, when life slaps you down, get up and slap the bastard back. Hard. Never give up. But know when to be graceful in defeat.

  I love this poem: you’ll write it when you’re dead broke, and feeling lonely, and it will make you strong.

  Singing to the World

  Richard J Frankland

  If I were to look back at this life of mine

  At times of folly, foolishness

  At times of joy and conquest

  At times of sadness, times of repenting

  Times of great victories and times of smaller ones

  Both of equal importance and equal meaning

  At times when the world had crashed and the scars on my soul

  Were unequalled in pain and sorrow

  I would smile at my silliness

  Be embarrassed at my joy, my ego, my loves and losses

  Celebrate my victories and my times of losing

  rejoice in my recognition of the equality of a smile and the meaning of a gift and the beauty of a soul

  I would shed tears at my times of sadness

  And chase bittersweet memories across the dreamscape of the memories of my life

  And finally I would lay exhausted with my heart laying rent open upon the hearth of my home

  And I would sift through it searching for diamond drops of memories

  And if one would see me in such a state

  they would be prone to ask, ‘What would you change?’

  Nothing, not one thing, I would say

  Then, after a contemplative moment

  Except I would say whilst challenging myself

  Whilst drawing a sword of courage and casting aside a shield of shame