Heal – Laugh – Live

Never let anyone or anything keep you from your dreams

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Clare L Campbell is a published author, writer, and advocate with decades of experience working across government, policy, and community services. Her professional expertise sits alongside a deeply personal journey that includes surviving domestic violence, navigating serious health challenges, rebuilding after trauma, and rediscovering herself as a woman, mother, and partner and then soon to be divorcee in midlife.
Her writing blends warmth, humour, and historical context with a trauma-informed lens, allowing her to speak to complex issues in ways that are deeply relatable and accessible. Clare brings an authentic voice to the page – one that acknowledges life’s hardest truths while pointing toward resilience, healing, and hope.
This is not her first book. But this memoir/self help guide is written for midlife women facing the challenges that this period brings and supports and guides the reader through the journey of learning the art of ‘Putting Me First’.
‘Putting Me First – The Reckoning, The Reconciling and Rebirthing will also resonate with readers who enjoy memoirs that offer both honesty and uplift. It bridges self-help and memoir, offering practical strategies without sacrificing story, warmth, or humour.
We are in the middle of a cultural shift. Women are no longer willing to disappear quietly as they reach midlife. Conversations about perimenopause, menopause, mental health, trauma, and the reinvention of self are gaining momentum, but there is still a gap for books that combine lived experience with compassion, insight, and practical tools.
Putting Me First fills that space. It acknowledges the pain, the exhaustion, and the invisible labour carried by so many women, while providing hope, laughter, and strategies for beginning again. It is timely, necessary, and deeply human.
Written with warmth, humour, and a trauma-informed lens, the book blends personal narrative with psychological insight, cultural context, and practical reflection exercises. It speaks directly to women in their thirties, forties, fifties and beyond who are ready to stop living as an afterthought in their own lives and start putting themselves first as they navigate, empty nest, lost love, perimenopause, menopause and the promise that they could have it all was hollow and left an entire generation of women feeling unfulfilled and unsatisfied.
At its heart, the book is about resilience and renewal. It acknowledges the chaos and pain of lived experience, while celebrating the possibility of rebirth – of living boldly and unapologetically in midlife and beyond.

The future awaits…

The Departure

And so after a long road of health battles, hurt and healing tonight I step fully and wholeheartedly into my new life with a passion, excitement and enthusiasm for life I have never experienced before.

All my hopes, dreams, aspirations and desires lie on the other end of this flight as I open myself up to everything beautiful manifestation the universe has in store from me, completely free to live life on my terms, make decisions that work for me and let life unfold in whatever way is meant for me and I absolutely know it is all incredible.

So farewell and goodbye to everything I’m determinedly leaving behind at the departure gate in Melbourne, as it has no place in this new beginning. 

Only joy, happiness, peace, contentment and love live here now..

Pure Putting Me First energy from here on. 

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