Anxiety, mental health and representation: Celebs open up on their struggles

Mike McRoberts was one of the first guests on Straight Up this season. Photo / Dean Purcell.
The second season of the NZ Herald podcast Straight Up wrapped up this week. Hosted by newsreader Niva Retimanu and Olympian Beatrice Faumuina, the podcast talks to notable New Zealanders about personal challenges they’ve faced, and how they found the resilience to get through.
Here’s some of the best stories from the guests this season, which have ranged from newsreaders and journalists, to international acclaimed chefs and Oscar nominees.
Mike McRoberts on embracing his Māori identity
“You introduced me as a Māori journalist, and years ago I would’ve rallied against that. I would’ve said, ‘no, I’m a journalist who’s Māori’, because I was so terrified about being called upon for stuff I didn’t know. And it was awful. It was quite traumatic. You have all the things that come with being a brown person, but none of the gifts, none of the taonga, none of the language or the tikanga or any of that. And it was incredibly frustrating.
“And I know in my career as I got older, I was being called upon more and more as we are using te reo more and more in news bulletins and things like that. You know, spring or September for me was a time of anxiety, not a time of joy, because I knew there’d be Te Wiki coming up and I knew that I would be called upon to do stories about people’s language journeys, and I wasn’t on my own.
“And you know, it just got to a point where I had to do something, you know? And so I started learning Te Ataarangi, what is a really beautiful, tactile way of learning any language really.”
Monica Galetti on learning to ease off and embrace happiness
“We are always gonna struggle at some point. And you know, being strong, you only know you are strong when you have to be strong. When you’ve got no other option, you’ve gotta hold it together, whether it’s supporting my team or holding your family together. There’s always gonna be a point where you think you’re gonna break and then you’re hurting and you can cry about it. You know?
“I just don’t think it was something that I allowed. I’ve always been the one that supported and gave strength to those that needed. I think it’s just this year has been the one where actually, with everything that’s happened, made me sort of step back and say, actually what’s important here? What is it that we keep going so crazy hard for? What is it that end goal?
“And that end goal, at the end of the day, it’s happiness, isn’t it? But you gotta burn the candle at both ends before you realise it and appreciate it. Coming home for me to see family and seeing that and I just think, God, this is what I miss, you know, and spending time with my daughter and my husband, that quality time cuz you constantly feel you have to achieve and fix things and help people, you know, and, and be there for everyone.
“But at a certain point, you can’t do that if you can’t do it for yourself. But you’ve gotta literally go through all of that before you understand it and [say] enough’s enough. I am gonna put myself first and I’m gonna put my family first. And it’s okay to say I want to be happy.”
Matt Chisholm on how Greg Boyed’s death changed his public image
“I think about Greg a lot and I think about the responsibility that I now have, and you probably feel the same way, that we have a responsibility now to own a lot of this stuff and we don’t want his death to be in vain.
“You know, I made a living out of being a very open, happy sort of guy on the telly, but I was fibbing to people in a way because I was ‘Jack the lad’ on TV and then would go home and from time to time cry myself off to sleep or whatever it is.
“And so we have a responsibility in the public roles that we have to own this stuff and let others know that no one’s immune and everybody’s got stuff going on, and we always will.”
Melodie Robinson on being brown and on the TV
“I had many comments about my naturally curly hair. One producer said to me, ‘We have to Caucasianise you’. We had a lovely head of make-up. She hadn’t come across curly hair like mine before so I’d end up with this big bush of crap.
“And so I’d end up with this big bush of crap. I pretty much was the worst-dressed co-presenter on New Zealand television for about 10 years, because I kept doing crap with my hair. And then I had an incident when I was in Australia and they’d organized this make-up person who thought she was just doing men. I turned up, she’s like, ’Oh, well I didn’t bring anything for you’, so she ended up sort of doing me, and I had some stuff in my back and she brushed my hair, which is the number one thing you don’t do to Pacific Island or Māori women’s hair. And it was like really bad. Anyway, I didn’t care. I was just doing my job, trying to get through it.
“And my boss at the time brought me in for a serious meeting on Monday morning. He goes,’ Now I want to talk to you, Melodie, because my wife noticed that your hair looked like an old horse’s tail at the back of your head. And as a presenter, it’s really distracting. You need to make sure that you look professional every single time’. So I said to him, ‘You could give me a proper make-up at a store, a hairdresser that could actually do my hair properly. He goes, ‘Well, what, what do I have to do to make that happen?’ I said, ‘I’ll give me $10,000 extra a year and I’ll sort it out myself’, and boom, I’ve got 10 grand extra
“But that Caucasianisation of brown presenters’s been happening for years and only in the last four to five years have we on television said, I’m not doing it anymore. So I’m not sure if people notice, but I never wear my hair straight anymore. No way.”
Chris Parker on being a role model and representative for the LGBT+ community
“You can’t be that, you can’t sort of actually physically be that representation. You just have to be yourself, right? In so many ways, who we are becomes political because of the landscape we’re doing it inside of. And so I think people like read it in a way that maybe we are not completely aware of.
“I’ve kind of learned is the art of just existing and putting yourself out there allows other people to comment on it. But I just have to keep following my intuition, and just keep sticking true to my voice and putting myself out there. And then it’ll have its like ripple-out effect, hopefully.
“I think as well constantly challenging what we accept for representation and how we represent, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do in this book in a way, specifically around the chapter of dating.
“I think that it’s important to share not only ‘love is love’ and pride and be yourself, but actually like what is it to work through shame, what is it to be dating when you don’t accept or love yourself and you are doing horrible hookups in places that you know you will regret.
“It’s hard to write about that, but actually that’s like what it means to represent myself now. When I was coming out, I needed someone to be honest with me because just to be all ‘Be yourself’ was not enough. Like I needed to learn, ‘oh my god, these public figures also have shame and weakness and vulnerability’.”
Chelsea Winstanley on why she has opened up about her past trauma
“In terms of my trauma and things that I’ve experienced and I have talked about openly, I did that because I knew that other people out there, especially young women who maybe have experienced childhood sexual abuse and things like that, I think it’s just important to let other people know that they’re not alone.”
And it can help maybe for you to start to unpack your own trauma, because silence can be so damaging and it can really cause so many problems to your life. Just anything, relationships-wise, anything going forward in your life, it can be such a hand break on just experiencing life.
“So I have chosen to be honest about that because I just think if my story can help someone else move forward a little bit easier in their life, then I’m happy to do that. And then there’s so much shame around child abuse. There’s so much shame around sexual abuse, because we just don’t talk about it enough, so again, if we can lift that veil of shame, that can be so empowering for people.
“And then also, I love hearing about other people’s lives and dreams. That always gives me strength to keep going.”

Sonia Gray on how she learned to make time for herself
“I wasn’t very good at that, to be honest. I remember the principal of the school was just so lovely and she said, ‘Sonia, the staff have been watching you and you’re losing weight’, and I was just in tears all the time because I just felt so hopeless. I had promised my daughters that I would make them happy, provide a happy, loving environment for them, and my daughter just wasn’t happy and not coping.
“And [the principal] said to me, What are you doing for yourself? And I just looked at her like,’ How can I take time out for myself when this is going on?’ Like every minute has to be focused on making this okay, fixing this. Now, looking back, I see that wasn’t helping me, it wasn’t helping my daughter, obviously, but it’s a process you go through because there’s so much guilt and shame and lots of other things.
“It’s only been fairly recently, unfortunately, that I’ve gone ‘Hey, if I step back, not only am I helping myself, but I’m helping her’, because Inez is a very sensitive kid and she can feel without me saying she can feel when I’m stressed and that makes her stressed. And so I didn’t get that and now I, yeah, we are taking a whole different approach now and it just makes our whole family environment happier.”
“I meditate and I do my Pilates and I spend time with friends. I have had to, in order to survive, really go deep, and find out what it is that it’s gonna make me stronger and I think it’s love, really. Love for self-compassion for myself, but for others, land just seeing the, seeing other people’s struggles too. I think that’s what the beauty is. You know, it’s been such a tough experience, but now I just see other people in a different way. I think I’ve always been a bit of a bleeding heart, but I just see other people and, and see that everyone’s on their journey and it’s tough. “

Lindah Lepou on gender identity
“There’s this Western dictionary of definitions of what you should be as a woman and what you should be as a man and what you shouldn’t be, and it’s so one-dimensional. And I find that the reason why I have identified as fa’afafine is because it’s such a multidimensional term that encompasses my masculinity, my femininity, my inity, all the inities that I want – and no one else has the right to define who I am.”
“I find that all this political talk, this rhetoric that we hear in all these circles about what is a woman and what is a man. I tell you, it’s just this obsession with what’s between a person’s legs. And it’s none of your fricking business what anyone does to define who they are and what they are.”
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