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After posting a three-minute video to Facebook on the difference between being 18 and 30, Tanya Hennessy went from being a local radio presenter in Newcastle to the most talked about woman on the internet.
Real, brutally honest, and unapologetically herself, in the last two years the author of Am I doing This Right has achieved what she once believed was impossible. Despite all of her success, Hennessy tells WHO’s editor Keshnee Kemp on her podcast, Raw Talks, that the funny people are often the saddest.
“I went back on anti-depressants because I felt extremely uncomfortable with success even though I’d been chasing it for a long time,” Tanya told Keshnee in the candid chat. “I think that my job is to entertain. I want people to be happy and I want to make them happy because life is fu*king hard.”
Speaking openly about her daily battle with depression and imposter syndrome— a psychological pattern in which a person doubts their achievements— Hennessy knows the detrimental impact suffering in silence can have on your ability to function.
“I give myself permission to be sad and to cry,” she says. “I have such a dark element to my personality and I have always, always struggled with mental health. My depression is real. But I also say ‘without this, I wouldn’t be who I am’. So I kind of embrace when I’m down and overthinking because those parts make me who I am. And I like who I am.”
“I would tell myself I’m not good enough. I’m not worthy,” she continued. “I still feel that way sometimes when I do TV. It’s the hardest one for me because I don’t look like a traditional television presenter. I don’t sound like a traditional television presenter. But I studied at NIDA and out of my whole graduation class, I am the only person who has presented on television. I have to put a game face on, and I have to pretend sometimes.”
Hoping to remove the negative stigma that has a firm grip around mental health, Hennessy has made it her mission to show both men and women that suffering in silence shouldn’t be an option.
“When I grew up there was no one who looked like me on television and no one who sounded like me being reflected back to me. So I’ve got to be that person for somebody else so they can go, ‘I’m like that and I can do this’.”
Fortunately for Hennessy, she uses her pain to inspire the comedic gold.
“Every stand-up and every comedian is sad as fuck. They watch, they listen, they’re very existential. They look at themselves and the world and where they fit into this world. It’s a deep thought process and it comes out of the mouth as a reflection of society. That’s what comedy is. I teeter on that edge a lot.”
Listen to Tanya taking about manifesting success, leaning on her partner, the pressure to make babies and body image on this week’s episode of the Raw Talks podcast.
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