When Breakfast presenter Jenny-May Clarkson was a kid, she felt as though life was “anything I wanted it to be”.
Speaking to the Ask Me Anything with Paula Bennett podcast, Clarkson said she wanted to be a Silver Fern, and was determined to get it, while not thinking too much about any potential barriers.
“I didn’t have a care in the world, there were no barriers to anything. Life was anything I wanted it to be.”
But, as it turns out, Clarkson said this feeling didn’t last as she grew older.
“Then of course, you get smashed a few times in life, and that whole up and down journey of ‘am I good enough?’ all of those sort of things, I didn’t think about that. As we don’t when we’re young.”
She said when she see’s a photo of her younger, more confident self, she will sometimes think “where is that girl? I want her back”.
“I have moments of being her, and then other moments of ‘this is hard’.”
Clarkson said some of those moments included losing her brothers, the early struggles of motherhood, and being dropped by the Silver Ferns.
“I had put everything into doing that, and to be rejected, was the hardest part. Then you stand back and you reflected on it and you go ‘oh OK, nobody else actually gave a sh*t’.
“It also taught me there’s other parts of me I need to reflect on, and it’s not just me the netballer – I had thrown all my eggs in one basket – and I forgot about all of the other parts, so it was a good reminder.”
Clarkson said on the podcast another pivotal moment was when someone had said to her “you look good”, and in her head, she said that it felt like it meant “I could look better”.
She added while she was sometimes training twice a day, she would only eat a fruit salad, tuna and crackers and a piece of chicken with a “handful of broccoli” in a day.
“It took a long time for it to take its toll, but when it did it was around selection time. I was running on empty, and it was my fault.”
When first working in television, Clarkson told Bennett she had the feeling of knowing “you’re going to be scrutinised”, but nowadays, she tries to not pay attention to criticism.
“Everything you do, everything you say, what your hair looks like – in the early days, I was very conscious of that, and would kind of try to be what I thought people wanted me to be, and nowadays I care less.”
However, she added she is “up and down in terms of confidence and you know, there’s not often a time where I don’t come out of an interview and go ‘why did I say that, why did I ask that question’ – but now it’s trying about me trying to be better.
“I’m not saying it doesn’t hit me from time to time, but [it is] less now.”
