Jen Cloher is a singer–songwriter currently based in Melbourne. Originally from Adelaide, Cloher moved to Sydney to pursue a degree at NIDA. In 2006 she released her debut album Dead Wood Falls as Jen Cloher & The Endless Sea, garnering an ARIA nomination for Best Female Artist. Her third album, In Blood Memory, was nominated for the Australian Music Prize in 2013.

Dear Twelve-Year-Old Me,

It’s 1986, in Adelaide. An only child, you’ve spent most of your life at Loreto Ladies Convent, a rather stuffy Catholic girls’ school. Your look would best be described as ‘androgynous’. When not dressed in school uniform, you frequently get mistaken for a boy. In fact, you have a pinball-playing alter ego who passes at the local takeaway as John – until your mum walks in one day and yells, ‘Jennifer! Come home at once!’

You’re a colourful, creative individual, drawn to the arts like a magnet. You even get to play the lead role of Jesus in the end-of-year drama production. Desperate to fit in, you’re a student representative for your class, head of the debating team and a consistent B-grade student. From the outside, things look okay.

But secretly you hate it there. There in the prison of scary old nuns, academic achievement and regulation blue underwear.

Don’t worry – in a year’s time everything will have changed. You’ll have been expelled from Loreto, smoked your first bucket bong, and changed from ra-ra skirts and Duran Duran to twelve-hole Doc Martens and The Dead Kennedys. But, for now, let’s address your current situation.

You are in love. Absolutely, positively besotted with Caroline Clark – a bronzed goddess with piercing blue eyes and perfect caramel curls that cascade effortlessly down her back. Caroline is the definition of ‘natural beauty’. She’s a country boarder at Loreto with exceptional athletic ability. Over the course of year eight you strike up a friendship, and when mid-term holidays arrive you spend them at her farm in Mildura. Here you learn how to drive a car, go to your first bush dance, sleep out in a caravan and smoke Escort Reds. You long to kiss Caroline but know that such a move would be unwise – humiliating, even. And so you set in motion many years of unrequited crushes – your secret heart.

1986 is the year of Halley’s Comet. The year, like the comet, is a bit of a fizzer. It’s the year Farnsy releases his career-defining album Whispering Jack. But you’re listening to The Boys Next Door. The girl responsible for this change in your musical palate is Danielle Henderson, a mousy, quiet, unassuming soul. She arrives at Loreto in a shroud of mystery. Rumours fly that she was expelled from her last school, although no one seems to know why. You are immediately drawn to her.

1986 is the year Richard Lowenstein releases Dogs in Space starring Michael Hutchence. But it’s the soundtrack to the film that captivates you. This is your first life-changing long player and you listen to it every night. For the first time you hear Nick Cave singing Roland S Howard’s timeless heartbreaker ‘Shivers’. You also love Iggy Pop’s ‘The Endless Sea’. You think he’s singing ‘The Embassy’ in reference to a secret spy agency, but he’s actually talking about shooting smack. You’ll use the song title to name your band eighteen years later. That’s Jen Cloher & The Endless Sea, not The Embassy. Cheers, Iggy!

Danielle Henderson is just a friend. There’s no chemistry. She’s like the gateway drug to your teen rebellion and she opens the door to a brand new world. You meet her gothic pals, drink goon in Rundle Mall, listen to The Birthday Party and dream of somehow escaping the drab confines of your Catholic girls’ school.

Thirteen is fast approaching and year nine will bring with it a whirlwind of change. You’ll get into a lot of trouble at school and start a secret life your parents never really find out about.

It’s scary now, looking back at the kind of danger you’re about to put yourself in. At the same time, I thank you for breaking free, for being an individual, for not fitting in. That spirit will cause you a lot of problems in life but also keep you moving forward and taking risks.

I recently found out that your year eight crush, Caroline Clark, committed suicide last year, just weeks before she was to be married. It made me feel very sad. I wonder how she really felt at twelve years old? And what of Danielle Henderson, the inspiration to your teen rebellion? She’s now a qualified nurse, married with two beautiful boys and living in Adelaide. I still see her from time to time for a cuppa and everything seems just fine.

In fact, Twelve-Year-Old Me, that’s the main thing I want to tell you: don’t worry, life will work itself out, you will fit in one day. Sure, it’ll take another eighteen years of feeling like a square peg in a round hole, but you’ll figure it out. Writing to you twenty-four years on, I wish I could somehow reach into your little heart, as a whisper from the future, and give you the confidence to put yourself out there. To pursue the ones you love rather than shrinking away in fear. To be a colourful creative and to trust you will make a living from it. I’d like to let you know you are already enough, that you don’t have to be anything more for anyone else. That you are beautiful, even though you can’t yet see it.

But if I wasn’t you then, I wouldn’t be me now. And that’s all that matters: now.