Clare Bowditch has an alarming number of arrows in her quiver. She’s an award-winning musician, an actor, a memoirist, radio host and, perhaps most surprisingly, an accredited life coach.
Those skills have coalesced in her latest project, an upbeat but frequently deeply personal podcast – made for Audible Originals – called Tame Your Inner Critic.
This year, spent working on projects to make everyone else feel better, has been particularly difficult for Bowditch. Even by 2020 standards.
Over the phone from her home in Melbourne, the accomplished slashy and naysay-banisher told us about three items that have been helping her get by.
Large vases
Like many people in the first days of lockdown in March, I decided the way to stay sane was to declutter my house. In the process I found many, many large vases and wondered “What are these even for?” So I put them out on to the front porch with the intention of giving them away.
Later that month, my mother’s pancreatic cancer worsened – it’s a robber of an illness. Due to Covid-19 restrictions, all visits to palliative care were banned: an untenable situation, to say the least. Fortunately, my siblings and I were able to bring Mum home to spend her last precious month in our care.
The weeks following her death were by far the loneliest of my life. Restrictions meant that we couldn’t grieve with our community, couldn’t have visitors or receive comfort in the ways you usually would following a major death. Our friends expressed their love in the only ways allowed: cards, meals and enormous bunches of flowers.
Those large vases came in from the front porch and became proxy vessels for all the love that poured into our home. Our lounge room transformed into a botanical garden. Of course, that’s what the big vases are for! They’re for momentous occasions. For deaths, for births, for weddings. The flowers are all dying now, which sucks, but I will hang on to those big vases and hopefully next time they come out, it’ll be in celebration.
My audiobook app
This one is a little self-serving I know, since I’ve just made an audiobook, but I have an absolute passion for being read to. I’ve always adored listening to stories on the radio and, in the 90s, I had a fabulous collection of books on cassette and CD – stories and sometimes lessons that helped me understand the world and my place in it.
My love affair with modern-style audiobooks that you could download on an app started with Harry Potter and the ease and pleasure of having “Uncle Stephen Fry” reading my kids to sleep with all those great voices and emotions a talented actor can bring to a reading, as he does. When my children were little, and my voice was tired and I didn’t have the energy to read another book out loud, there was nothing I loved more than snuggling up and pressing “play” on an audiobook. Heaven!
I think more than anything, I love the quick company radio and audiobooks offer. Especially now, when we’re barely leaving the house, they’re a way to bring the world in, a way to learn and expand your thinking, and, best of all, they leave your hands free for other wild pursuits, like housework and knitting.
Circular knitting needles
Most nights these days, you will find my hands filled with a pair of large circular knitting needles (needles with a piece of wire connecting them). I am not a good knitter. I went into the shop and asked for the easiest needles and patterns available. It turns out I wasn’t the only one with this idea – at one point Australia seemed to completely run out of wool! I had to do the ridiculous thing of ordering my wool – grown in Australia, mind you – to be send over from England.
My daughter graduates high school this year, and it seems terribly unfair that the rituals associated with finishing school can’t happen for her. So, to mark this occasion, I’ve decided to knit her a massive blanket (which hardly makes up for Schoolies I know, but I had to do something). She asked for silver (which turned out more grey than expected), and now the wool has finally arrived I’m making good progress. Knitting is as much for me as it is for her. Whether it’s songs or books or blankets, I find the repetitive act of taking my feelings and making something out of them ... deeply comforting.
Tame Your Inner Critic is available now through Audible
