Honor Eastly is a writer, artist, podcaster and mental health worker who has made a career of talking about the stuff most of us really don’t want to talk about. Her podcasts Being Honest With My Ex and Starving Artist explored love, heartbreak, rejection, anger, cash, creativity, and class.

Last year she teamed up with the ABC to create No Feeling Is Final, that traced her own mental health story. Like all her work it dealt with money, heartbreak, depression, and suicide. Alongside the strange, mundane, day-to-day realities of sometimes wanting to die.

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To be clear, we’re not talking simply drinking a million beers and staying up late. For musician and writer Andrew W.K, partying is a way to overcome dread and terror to find peace and pleasure. This message, alongside his very good music, has seen him emerge as an unlikely motivational and self-help figure; standing in stark contrast to the crystal-gripping types who usually hold those titles.

Despite being the poster boy for having a good time, his experience with mental health has been more complex than you’d assume. Feeling overwhelmed by his own smallness and “realising the impermanence of everything is so overwhelmingly bleak,” he didn’t succumb to nihilism. But rather embraced the little control we do have—to be happy, to be loved, to get loose.

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Musician Mojo Juju was born to an Indigenous mother and FIlipino father. Like many second generation kids, her parents faced pressure to assimilate, abandon languages, and distance themselves from their own cultures. Growing up, their choice created a gulf in her own identity that left her feeling “displaced and otherised...I was always different”.

She wasn’t alone in these feelings. In the latest episode of the Anxiety Hour, she explains how her parents’ own experiences of race, identity, and history in Australia have created a sense of hereditary disconnection that binds them together. And how she uses her music to populate this post-colonial space to reconnect with her own past.

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