Nat’s What I Reckon — Bringing Mental Health Conversations to the Forefront

Using his platform for awareness, Australian comedian and content creator Nat, of Nat’s What I Reckon, brings mental health conversations to the forefront with his signature blend of humor and raw honesty. Known for his satirical cooking videos and candid takes on life’s absurdities, Nat has cultivated a unique space where laughter and vulnerability coexist. Beyond the screen, Nat channels his personal experiences into advocacy, serving as an ambassador for Beyond Blue, one of Australia’s leading mental health organizations. Through initiatives like the Big Blue Table—a campaign encouraging open dialogues about mental health over shared meals—he exemplifies how creativity and compassion can break down stigmas and foster genuine connections.

ABILITY Magazine’s Jennifer Woodall met with Nat in a virtual interview where he talks about the healing power of comedy, his lifelong relationship with music, how he accidentally became a cooking icon during lockdown and how his long-time partner Jules plays a vital role behind the scenes with her quick wit and vibrant laugh–often heard in the background of his cooking videos. He also speaks candidly about the realities of living with anxiety and depression, the importance of accessible mental health care, and why having a laugh—especially at your own expense—can be one of the most powerful tools for survival.

Woodall: Let’s start with music.

Nat: I’m obsessed, I love it. It’s my happy place. I love being able I create music. I love creating shit, and music is one of the best things ever because it’s endless. It’s like any art I suppose. I thankfully–as someone who doesn’t tend to focus for very long–really got into music at such a young age that I’ve been playing for over 30 years now. Guitar is my big love. That was my first thing, and then drums shortly after, and bass I ended up playing by default. I’m not going to get into the whole bass politics (laughs), but I play enough bass to get me through. Most days I’m actually down in the studio that I’ve thrown moving blankets up against the wall of just making as much music as I can. I love it. When I was younger, I went to India with my dad for about a month or something like that. Dad wanted to take me to India, and I’ve always been into, I suppose what you call “world music” if you were to go to the compact disk shop. I wanted to learn sitar, so I went over and learned a bit of sitar for a while. I’ve got a sitar there somewhere which I play like shit (laughs) but just any music stuff. I love programming things–I love performing. It’s just pure getaway for me. It’s just an easy getaway. I don’t mind what the instrument is. I’m shit at a lot of them, but the big three, the guitar, drums, and bass, I can hang out and create stuff anytime.

Woodall: You said “world music”. Is that what you like to listen to?

Nat: It’s a funny one because I present very much like a metalhead–which I am–but probably most of the music I listen to is either jazz or in quotes, “world music”. I’m big into 70s Nigerian funk at the moment and Ethiopian jazz, like Mulatu Astatke and Ebo Taylor and stuff like that. I like a really old country. I don’t mind Hank Williams–old Country. Not huge into modern country stuff. I love fucken pretty much everything, just about everything, but the majority of the music I listen to is the community radio in my bathroom, probably. I have it set to this one station. It’s called Eastside FM. Just turn that on and it’s just reliable. I love in the background, there’s always good tunes going. On community radio, there’s heaps of not polished rock and roll all the time, and it’s not just jazz, they play all the stuff. I don’t mind some pop stuff. I think thanks to my dad who’s a massive music fan–and mom, of course–but dad’s really into the types of music that I’m into. Dad was in to Nirvana when I was a kid, which is pretty fucken cool, and salt and pepper and hip hop. I just love so much stuff.

Woodall: When did you start to get into the stand-up comedy? Or just comedy in general?

Nat: Well, to comedy in general, I’ve always been a take the piss kind of guy. It was always a way to lighten the mood a bit. I think that comes for a lot of comedians or people who are into comedy. It’s like, well, that’s the whole point, right? So, from a young age, I was always cracking jokes all the time. They’re all shit and everyone thought I was very unfunny–some people still do, and that’s fair as well–but I think it came, at least in terms of a creative sense, when I started making videos. I started filming bits and pieces of things and turning them into comedy videos, and then the stand-up came from that. I’ve always wanted to do that shit. I’ve been on stage a bunch playing music and shit, but comedy is another level. Like doing stand-up is–like you just mentioned–it’s incredibly vulnerable. You could watch any footage of someone trying to make someone laugh and it’s like someone missing a high five that’s not there. It’s awkward to watch and everyone feels it. In a live setting, that is enormous because if you bomb or something’s not going well, that silence is just fucken the loudest thing you’ve ever heard. But I wanted to try it, and I had a mate who just was like, “I’ve got a thing on. You should do it. I really reckon you should get into it.” He’s a really lovely artist, and he just booked me for this thing. It was a 15 minute spot and I loved it. All the people were there were really lovely. It was like an art crowd and very supportive so it was great. From there, I fell in love with it. I absolutely love it, but it’s hard work. It is really emotionally hard work. I don’t think a lot of people quite understand that. Regardless of what level of comedian you are. I boast being a pretty fucken bad one (laughs) because I drift off and I go on all sorts of tangents and shit. Jules has a mic behind the sound desk and runs visual stuff with me. I’m like, “Jules, just grab the mic and be like, “This bit.”” I’m not the polished type, I’m not like a tidied room kind of comic, but when you do make people laugh, it’s just such a nice feeling. You feel like, “Fuck, yeah. That’s what I want too. I want us to all just have a laugh and get through this shit a bit.” It’s been almost 10 years now I’ve been doing stand-up, but only really the last five or four seriously. I was more just doing it occasionally at the pub and stuff, and now it’s my job. Well, it’s a big part of my job.

Woodall: Can you talk about what it’s like to prepare for a show?

Nat: I treat it a bit like I treated homework when I was a kid. I just don’t do it. (laughs) In the run-ups to shows, if it’s a new whole hour, I will run through the hours over and over, for days on end with my partner–who’s the best–Jules, who’s really into it and she’s fucken hilarious. That’s my only real prep stuff. More recently, I’ve stopped relying on preparation too much because I’ll get in my head too much stuff, and I think I’m better at being spontaneous. What I used to do, is I used to have a stack of fucken notes on stage that I painstakingly try and hide so that someone couldn’t read the note or it wouldn’t be out of context. For example, some of the notes I’d have would be these nasty comments that people have left me. I did a thing where I turned a bunch of horrible shit that people said to me or just bizarre things into a song, but those were notes, so there’s lyrics that I tape to a speaker wedge, and I’m like, what if you read those notes and you didn’t have the context for that? I get in my head about the person being like, “What a fucken dickhead is this guy?” I would have all this prep done and then just not be able to read any of it. I would spend so much time trying to read this shit that now I’m just like, “Fuck it. I’ll just go out on stage and just trust that I’m going to be okay.” I know what I want to talk about because you do it so often, you crack these jokes. A lot of them are stories, too, because you have so much shit go on that your life’s a bit of a joke. I can speak about so much shit. But yeah, the prep now is really just hang out with Jules backstage and have a beer or something. It’s probably not the way you’re supposed to do it, but that’s the way I do it. I just try and chill out. I’ll jump up and down a little bit before I get on stage. My head’s trying to jam me out of it. Sometimes I think the hardest times are when you’re just fucken crushingly depressed and you have to go and perform, but that’s the same for a lot of comics. I think we’re all fucken going through it. That’s harder to prepare for because you’ve got to deal with that shit. I do talk about that stuff on stage, too. I talk about mental health stuff heaps on stage, but if you’re not feeling like it, you don’t have a choice. I mean, you do, you could not go on–I think it’s important to be able to have a fucken mental health day boundary on that–but it can be quite catastrophic if there’s 600 people there. I know people have gone through that stuff. I think it’s important that there is that option, but you’ve got to push yourself out on the stage sometimes. I still do, but I perform at pubs heaps still, and I actually love that shit.

Woodall: I often use comedy and darker jokes to cope with and help understand the mental health things that I deal with. Do you feel like that that’s something that you do as someone who experiences that?

Nat: Yeah. It’s almost probably the point of why I do it. I think it’s what has brought me here is that, fuck, if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry, which is also fine. I mean, a cry is fine. On stage, I’ve done that, too. I’ve cried on stage. Twice the last year. I mean, what’s a day look like without a laugh? Without something making you laugh? What a weird day. There’s a lot of people that have that day. They’re going through some fucken horrible shit, but I think it’s just such a grounding thing to have a laugh. It depends on different things to make different people laugh, like you’re saying, dark comedy and stuff. I don’t mind a brutal joke if it’s punching the right direction, if that makes sense. As long as it’s not at the expense of someone or degrading and it’s not at someone’s expense in an unkind way, but having a laugh about yourself, I think is really healthy to a point. Not dismissing yourself, but it’s hugely powerful. It’s hugely hugely powerful using comedy. I’ve said sometimes to mates, everyone loves the blooper reels. I really love bloopers at the end of movies, and there are some shows that I could just go and watch the bloopers. You’re just in stitches. It’s fucken great. Then for a sec, it gives you what meditation does, which is just quieting the fucken busy in your brain down a bit and just focus on the one “ha ha” for a minute. It’s like, I fucken needed that. It’s like a dip in the ocean and you come out and think “I’ve got a sec. I’ve got a few more meters ahead of me before I have to deal with whatever it is.”

Woodall: Blooper reels are great! I’ll watch them every time. You mentioned mediation. Can you talk about what type are you doing?

Nat: Music at the moment. I have done the ‘let’s go meditate,’ and guided meditation stuff is good for me. I don’t like the ‘sit and just let your mind go’ because that fucken scares the shit out of me, but I have done meditation courses and stuff like that. I think the ideal thing for me was to do 10 minutes here or 20 minutes here and then 20 minutes later on in the day It’s great, but like any self-care thing, a lot of people get down on themselves if they don’t do it properly. I’m not doing it enough, and it’s part of a routine. I’m shit at routine. I think while it’s fantastic and incredibly powerful shit, you can very easily give yourself a hard time for not doing it properly or not having the right space. At least that’s how I get about it. I just feel like, “Oh, fuck, I’m not meditating right.” I remember seeing a sleep psychologist and we’re talking about things that are good before bed. The doctor told me to stay away from meditation before bed because that’s what I was doing thinking like “Oh, meditation will calm me down before bed.” but all it was doing was just me on the stair master in my head going “Don’t think about fucken stupid shit. Just go to bed.” and it would just stress me out. So, I think it just depends on the person and the place and whatever you’re fucken up for. It’s like exercise. Great–if you can do it, it’s unreal, but you’ve got to find your way with it, otherwise you’ll just end up making it the bad guy.

Woodall: I really enjoy hearing your partner Jules laughing in the background of your cooking videos. I was reading somewhere that she will help design your merch, is that right?

Nat: Yeah, Jules has designed heaps of our merchandise. Earlier on, Jules was doing all the merch. She was designing absolutely everything. Yeah, she designed our old let’s say–Ninja Turtles-esque–logo. She was a senior graphic designer, so she’s worked for lots of big magazines and some really cool shit. She helps me just make things look very grown up and she’s got an amazing eye for where things should go. Jules will do all the thumbnails for the YouTube clips. You may be able to spot in there the ones that I’ve done because they fucken look shit. (laughs) I think probably the most incredible thing that Jules does in terms of what we’re doing is she gets it. She gets what’s going on. She gets the mission. She gets the laughs. She’s got fucken rock solid politics. She’s fucken hilarious. She’s just sunshine and fucken takes no shit and kind and fucken just the best and has my back. She’ll help me work a joke out. If I’m like, “Fuck, what am I trying to…” Jules will crack a funnier joke than me so many times. I’m like, “Well fuck, I’ll steal your joke if that’s right.” (laughs) Having that laugh in the background (of the cooking videos) just blows my mind that anyone wouldn’t just love it and love her. It’s the most generous thing in the world. I feel so lucky to just be around that laugh and that person. We get into it on the YouTube channel sometimes where people will be looking to say shit because they’re pricks about Jules, and you just watch it police itself in the comments. There’s a bit of a “protect Jules at all costs” thing (in the comments). Why wouldn’t you love that? It’s the best. I think you develop a nice community online if you put positive shit out there–respectful shit. It translates to moments like that in the comments. I do worry sometimes because it’s a really big spot to put yourself–to be online and particularly putting your face to stuff. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t, but I do worry how that’s going to affect Jules, reading those comments. She goes through mine so often or helps me navigate the comment section sometimes if we need to. She understands just how empty that nonsense is, but it still does affect people, heaps. There’s just a point which you do need to turn the comments off in your brain, just don’t fucken read them. But yeah, it’s just all love for Jules pretty much most of the time.

Woodall: On the topic of cooking videos, how did you get into that?

Nat: It came from necessity in the respect that the content I was making before that, for years before that, was more just trying to give myself the shits and go and wander around events and stuff and just social commentary, I suppose. So pretty much the pandemic thing began to flap its wings a bit, and then it’s like, “Shit, we’re probably going to be inside for a while.” Jules and I went away for the weekend just to an Airbnb somewhere, and people started to do the panic buy thing–like go buy all the fucken toilet roll. That was a big one because toilet roll is delicious and we’ll keep you alive, apparently.

Are you just going to wipe your ass until the fucken pandemic is done? What’s the plan there? Well, the same shit was happening with all the instant food–which makes at least more sense in some respects, because at least you can fucken consume that–but heaps of it. I went down to this local shop near the place we were staying for the weekend. Of course, dunny roll? Gone. Frozen pizzas–all the frozen shit? Gone. The fucken jar sauce aisle? Looking very fucken sparse. Then I go to the fresh food, and it’s like this perfect photo finish of untouched food. What the fuck? We’re all going to be stuck inside, let’s fucken cook some shit! One of these jars that were left was this fucken basil garlic tomato sauce–pasta sauce. The price of it, I could have fucken made enough for half the supermarket–maybe not quite that much–so we went back to this place we were staying, and I was like, “Fuck, let’s just film a thing.” I was so pissed off that this fucken stuff was winning, that this jar sauce shit was winning, that I just was like, “Fucken let’s take the piss out of it.” and then I posted the video and it fucken went bananas. It just went absolutely off its fucken gut. Then things got much more serious. It was lockdown time. I moved into a share house, I was living out of our bags in thinking we’re going back to the States, in a friend’s bedroom, and then bang! The lockdown hit and I was like, “Fuck, this video is out of control. I’d be a dickhead not to make another one.” I love cooking. It’s like my shit. It’s one of my fucken big joys is cooking and cooking for people. So, I’m like, “Well, fuck, let’s make another one.” Then I made a Bolognese video and I fucken put milk in my Bolognese, and then that went even more bananas. Things were hitting over 10 million views. My phone started to ring and I was getting offers to do all sorts of wild shit. People wanting me to sign contracts, exclusivity deals, and I was just always like, “No, I don’t want to fucken take money from anywhere,” but it got so full on, I was like, “I think I’m a cooking video guy now for a while because this is working.” It’s not what I thought I’d be doing. I never became a chef or went down that road, but I love doing this. I don’t want to turn it into my job, but you can’t argue with people who are into it, and that’s the point of comedy, if people are laughing and you want to do that, then there you go. Initially, I was like, “I fucken hate this cooking video shit. I just don’t want to do it. I’m not a chef. I don’t feel like I belong here.” but the response was so phenomenal. Jules says this to me all the time that I don’t understand what impact it had. Because people thank me and shit all the time. I still have people coming and thanking me at the shop. I understand that I gave you a laugh and maybe helped show you how to make something, but it just was doing this thing that I couldn’t quite understand and that I didn’t like, but I loved it and I needed it. It’s still complicated and I still fucken don’t get it. I’m still kind of in a bind of whether I want to do it or do the cooking thing as a performance, but yeah, it’s just a phenomenal thing to have happened. I feel very lucky that I found a thing. The cooking thing helped me like it apparently helped some other people. It was just lucky because I’ve been pushing so much shit out and stuff was working and it was going pretty good, but now it’s my job, it’s fucken quite serious. It’s my income. It’s full-time.

Woodall: I think your video content does a great job.

Nat: Yeah, cool, thanks. I don’t have time for fucken all the details and shit, let’s just take the nonsense out of it, and the pretension. It’s fucken food. It’s for everyone. You’re lucky to have food, but it doesn’t need to be this fucken difficult. These things don’t matter. It’s such helpful shit. I think it’s just like, “Who cares how you cut that shit up? It doesn’t matter.” Well, that’s how I’ve learned. I’ve liked the very simple “it’s like this, it goes like that.” I love Italian food and I love Japanese food, stuff like that, because it’s so whole food and simple. It’s beautiful because it is, and it’s a win. Cooking is a fucken win when you nail it, particularly if you’ve got people around, you can share that with them. It’s like, “Oh, isn’t this cool?” Fuck, what a big dose of joy. Self-sustainable joy.

Woodall: What do you think the quintessential kitchen tool is?

Nat: A sharp knife all day. Sharp knife. However, you get there, fucken who cares? But it just fucken makes such the difference, in my opinion. People say shit like a sharp knife’s a safer knife and all that. It’s true, but whatever. Because you don’t want to be forcing a blunt fucken thing and slip. I think that’s the point of that one, but it just makes everything so much nicer. Even if the pan’s a piece of fucken cooked on shit, you got this knife. Preparing your ingredients with a blunt knife is fucken shit. It sucks. So yeah, that’s my pick.

Woodall: Okay, so if you were stranded on a deserted island, you can only bring five ingredients. Salt and pepper and dried herbs don’t count as ingredients, but fresh herbs do. What do you bring?

Nat: Oh, garlic. I don’t know if there is a ceiling for the amount of garlic you can put in certain things, but I’ve been trying to find it. Can I stick three whole garlics in this? Yep! Fucken love it. A GPS? (laughs) Chili. I love Chili. I think it has the highest level of vitamin C in it of any fruit. Vitamin C is good to ward off scurvy. There we go. Just fucken Chili. I don’t know if it’s the need for constant stimulation, but I’ll put chili in just about fucken everything. I love it. I fucken love it. Onions because I use them for everything. I love onions, and Jules is a massive fan of onions, and I hope she’s on the island with me. Let’s pick something weird. Sausages. Sausages and then tomato sauce–ketchup. There we go. So, I can have a sausage sizzled on the island with chili on it. (laughs) What a fucken unsustainable ingredient to bring with you, a bunch of fucken meat.

Woodall: (laughs) Okay, last food question. Do you think a hot dog is a sandwich?

Nat: Well, I suppose I’d call it a roll. Yeah, I suppose it’s a sandwich. Fucken hot dogs. My last tour was called Hot Dogs Probably Aren’t Real, so I’ve been thinking about hot dogs. I find them just one of the most trepidatious mysteries ever. What the fuck goes into them? If you ever look in to videos of hot dogs being made in a hot dog processing factory or something, it is one of the fucken most hectic things I’ve ever seen.

Woodall: You’ve published books like Death to Jar Sauce: Rad Recipes for Champions and Life: What Nat to Do. What’s your process and inspiration for writing the books?

Nat: Well, I barely read any books, so it felt like it was a bad idea at first. It was part of that thing I was mentioning earlier when my phone just started to fucken ring and I was getting all these offers for stuff, and one of those offers was to write a book. Obviously, cookbook was big on the menu, but I thought that was a really awful idea because I haven’t read any books and I’m not very good at reading–I just get lost on a page all the time. I don’t know what it was, but I just fucken took a chance on it and started. The first way I was writing was to just talk into my phone and then go home and type it out with one finger on the keyboard. (laughs) Jules would help me. We turned the cookbook into a comic book where the cooking parts are in comic book form because it felt like that makes sense with what I’m doing, but that adds a phenomenal level of work on top of stuff. It’s very eye-opening making cookbooks because it’s a fucken lot of work, and you have to have people check things, and you can’t just put your recipe out there without having people test it. It’s an incredible amount of effort, and I’ve somehow managed to do it in an incredibly short amount of time–which is probably a good thing–but I think it’s called extreme publishing, where the turnaround time is so short. I wrote one of my books in two and a half weeks. That was the What Nat to Do. It’s like taking the piss out of self-help. It’s pretty much just me having a whinge about shit that I think is just stupid advice I’ve been given or shit advice, whereas the cookbooks are much more meticulous and there’s a lot more people involved. It’s really fucken intense. Publishing a book is fucken intense. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of to and froing and a lot of tears and a lot of sleepless nights. But yeah, it’s wild that I’ve put a book out at all, let alone four of the fucken things.

Woodall: And award-winning, too.

Nat: Yeah. I can’t believe that shit. I feel like I had a bit of an unfair advantage in terms of the winning awards stuff because I’ve got such a fairly prominent social media presence, whereas a lot of authors don’t. I’ll always find a way to make myself feel shit about it, but it’s pretty fucken cool, but not for the faint-hearted.

Woodall: Can you go into a little bit of detail about your advice books?

Nat: So, Uncook Yourself was the first book. I had recipes in there that were illustrated, and the rest of it is just me talking about social commentary stuff. It’s less advice, and more encouragement to just fucken ignore some shit. My book, What Nat to Do, I wanted to call it Live, Laugh, Meld Down, but it didn’t quite fly. One of the chapters is, “Man Up”–I fucken hate that saying. So, I wrote a chapter about why that’s annoyed the shit out of me. I did a chapter about shit sleep advice and all the things I’ve tried for my sleep which haven’t worked. If someone says the word magnesium to me again, I’m going to fucken explode. So, it’s more like opinionated waffle on, really. I’m not trying to enter a self-help space at all, although it just accidentally might not be up to me, but it’s not like “10 steps to fix your fucken shit.” (laughs) Fuck, don’t come to me for that. I’m just here to whinge about it, and hopefully we could relate to it, but that’s about it. I’m not trying to fix anyone. I’m just trying to help have a laugh, really.

Woodall: Let’s transition to your journey in mental health advocacy, what was that like?

Nat: So, a couple of things. The main thing was that I didn’t want all this attention and shit to be about me. I want to do something with it, and I want to help. I want to help in a way that it’s manageable and I can speak to. So, I made a video reviewing depression and anxiety while I was in the States, actually, and I posted the video. It was called Is “It Shit?” It was the series I was making. I just spoke very frankly about how I felt about those things, and the response was fucken wild. It was really amazing, really touching. So slowly, bit by bit, I started to speak about it a little bit more, and it is a bit of an underpinning in my videos anyway, mental health shit. But it got to a point where I wanted to speak about it more often. I made some donations from Nat’s What I Reckon. My book won an award here, and I wanted to donate that money to Beyond Blue, which is a mental health foundation here. They’re fucken incredible. Then they offered me an ambassadorship with them, not because of the donation, but because I’d expressed some support. A bit of a part of my identity, I suppose–as Nat’s What I Reckon, but also as a person–is mental health struggles. It’s slowly making sense, but I’m not a mental health professional outside of having it at a professional level going on. (laughs) It feels like the right thing to do. I just think mental health–is it the fucken most important thing on Earth? I don’t know. I feel like the fucken meaning of life, really, is not having to suffer every moment of your existence. Some people just suffer, and constantly, and I think that’s fucked, and I think that really sucks, and I wonder whether they would suffer so much if they had more support at some stage or now. How many fucken wars would be going on if everyone’s mental health was looked after and they felt cared for? I think it’s just so, so fucken important. The knock-on effect from people having a fucken hard time is massive, not just for them, but for all of us. Yeah, so that’s why I got into it.

Woodall: Can you talk about your personal experiences with mental health?

Nat: It’s never been good. I’ve never been a happy person. I present that way to people, but I just had a really tough growing up. I felt very lonely. I had little pepperings of being bullied a bit. I didn’t have heaps of friends when I was younger, and the religion stuff made it a bit hard. So, it got to a point where when I was a teenager, I was in such a fucken bad way and in such bad shape. I was being sent to therapies and trying all sorts of stuff out, but it was like a lot of fucken screaming in the corner and rocking back and forth and just fucken flying off the handle, not knowing what the fuck and I was just so self-destructive. I just didn’t want to be around. It was the worst. People were trying to support me, too, but I think I just have mental health problems, and I need to talk about it. Sometimes it takes some time to get through that shit and It’s still every day. I have to get up, I have to take my fucken medication, and I get on with it. But I talk about it, and I’m lucky because I can afford to see a therapist, so that’s massive. I’m lucky, but some people can’t. But it’s every day. It’s fucken every day. It’s every night. It’s nonstop. I suffer all the time. Even in our chat now, I’m anxious. I’m really fucken anxious. I’m so used to it and meds help and stuff, but I never really, truly feel at ease. I feel like I’m in a space where I have a choice of what I want to do with that, and I’ve tried the other thing, which is just fuck myself up and just see where that goes, and it doesn’t end well, or I can try. I can try to keep it up every day. I can try and fucken get better and do it for Jules and do it for people that love me if I can’t do it for myself. It sounds a bit black and white thinking, but that’s what I want. I want to get better. I know I’ll never be “better,” whatever that means. I’ll never be happy happy, but that’s all relative. Happiness is a health halo thing that’s sold to people a lot of the time anyway. If you’re eternally happy all the time, that sounds fucken annoying as well, to be honest. The comedy would be shit. (laughs) But yeah, that’s it. I’m just on a constant hum of going through it, so I can relate to people struggling from that angle. There’s levels of it far worse than what I’m going through.

Woodall: For such a long time, there’s been–and there still is–a stigma against mental health where it’s equated to weakness.

Nat: It fucken baffles me that it’s seen as a type of weakness. Like you’re saying, it’s not at all. How hard it is to get through a day when you’re fucken just begging not to have to get out of bed. You don’t want to see anyone, you don’t want to do anything, you don’t want to fucken shower. I don’t want to eat. I just want to cry and hide in a fucken doona. A real blokey thing that I can speak to is that men have this like “you can shut up and put up” kind of attitude or the messages that some of these fucken dickheads online telling you “You have to be aggressive and strong and alpha and all this showing emotion is vulnerability and therefore it’s weak. You leave yourself vulnerable to attack.” My God, that’s just such a fucken toxic way of thinking. Everyone’s got some shit going on. Not being able to relate to each other on that level seems like a fucken endless bummer to me. We all know someone or are the person with fucken mental health struggles. We can all talk about it. Fucken why not? Why does it have to be a stigma on something? It’s because people are told it’s wrong or you’re not heading the right direction if you give in to it or if you’re crying. It’s like some military movie or something. It’s not war. Well, it is in some respects in your head, but I find it so frustrating. I just see people just ignore it and I know people that are like “No, no, I don’t need to talk to someone. I’ll be alright.” Fuck, yes, you do. Yes, you do. We all deserve that. Even people that have fucked up and might be in jail or whatever need support. Everyone deserves support. Otherwise, we can’t get better. To make that seem like a “don’t talk about it” zone is so fucken dangerous. I do worry about the way the world’s going in that respect, too. I’m seeing a lot of that fucken alpha bro shit, and it’s crushing to see people squashing people’s need for support.

Beyond Blue: https://www.beyondblue.org.au/

Nat’s What I Reckon: https://natswhatireckon.com/

End of Days Bolognese illustrated receipt by artist Onnie O’Leary PDF