High Steaks: ‘I wear my mental health scars as a badge of honour’
Entertainment journo, red carpet raconteur, snake wrangler, serial over-sharer: that’s Sydney Con’s flamboyant JMo. What you don’t know is his battle to overcome trauma. And that he really wanted to be a zookeeper.
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During an appointment with his psychiatrist last year, as they were reassessing his medication, the enormity of all the trauma of what Entertainment Editor Jonathon Moran has experienced during his life was explained to him bluntly.
“The psychiatrist said to me it’s actually a miracle that you’re alive,” he starts.
“Because, you know, the way that I function, my normal functioning is with a great deal of trauma underneath the surface.”
Anyone who meets Moran wouldn’t know it. Including myself.
For more than eight years I’ve sat opposite Moran in The Daily Telegraph newsroom.
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Whether he’s parading around the office with a possum stuffed up his jumper (not a euphemism, Moran volunteers for WIRES and is frequently fostering his rescued animals) or regaling us with tales of his many, many celebrity encounters, he’s the gregarious heart of our newsroom.
But as Moran explains, as we escape the office for a lunch at Aalia in Martin Place (one of his favourite restaurants), that’s his “armour.”
Inside, he’s very fragile after enduring years of trauma.
From being sexually abused as a teenager, to drug use, to the death of his mother to, at his darkest moments, his suicide attempts.
His flamboyant exterior has hidden a human being who since the moment he was born to his beloved single mother has been seeking validation, which for most of his life, has been in the wrong places.
And all of which he’s detailed in his brutally honest memoir, Mental As Anyone.
It’s not often we do High Steaks with a colleague. In fact, this is my first.
And it’s been confronting to read with such harrowing detail the truth about someone you spend your day laughing about his Labubu obsession with.
“I made a very clear decision when I wrote this book that I was never going to do anything that was not true and raw and authentic and if that means that I get cancelled because of it, so be it,” Moran says, as we tear apart some flatbread before our steaks arrive.
For months now, The Daily Telegraph has been running weekly stories from Moran’s podcast Mental As Anyone, where he sits down with notable Australians and asks them to be vulnerable and share their mental health battles. Moran believes it’s only fair that he shares his whole story too.
“I write stories about celebrities every day and I expect them to tell their truth. How can I expect people to tell their truth if I don’t tell mine?,” he says.
“And my story is, it’s not for the faint-hearted. I think that I have been through probably more trauma than many but not the most.
“My story is not unique, but I’m sharing it because a lot of people go through trauma and I have a voice and I’m going to share that. I don’t regret anything in life. ”
‘I’VE NEVER FELT GOOD ENOUGH. EVER’
In the book, which the 47-year-old said poured out of him during Covid, he details how a lack of self-worth has underpinned his whole life.
“I never knew my father in my life and I had that sort of whole abandonment thing from a very early age,” he says.
“I think it all stems from that. I’ve never felt good enough. Ever.”
That meant as a vulnerable teenager, who was discovering his sexuality in a small town like Canberra, he was groomed by an older gay man who then repeatedly abused him.
“It was really shit,” he starts.
“But there’s a part of me now, as a 47-year-old man, that wonders ‘did that really happen to me? Am I exaggerating it?’ That’s how my brain is wired in this f**ked up way.”
ACCIDENTAL JOURNO
Moran reveals he never meant to be a journalist.
Instead he saw himself working as a zoo keeper (his partner Alex would probably joke that with their house filled with six snakes, two turtles, four dogs and lots of fish, Moran is a zoo keeper).
But after studying a double degree at university, he doggedly pursued a career in the media. And he’s good at it.
While the book is not about all the celebrities Moran has interviewed, for those wanting a little peek behind the curtain he does detail a few encounters, including the time Canadian superstar Michael Buble invited him around to his house for drinks.
Separate to this, he also tells stories of celebrity hook-ups as he’s had as he moved through Sydney’s social scene.
“Because I didn’t see myself as attractive and don’t, those encounters gave me that little bit of a buzz. There’s part of the book where I talk a little bit about some of the celebrities that I’ve hooked up with,” he says.
“But I deliberately don’t mention them by name only because they didn’t want me to.”
Instead, the book is broken up into the traumas he’s experienced, with a section bravely admitting to his misuse of party drugs over a decade ago.
DARKNESS AND DRUGS
During his darkest periods, he spent more than $US300 paying an Uber driver to take him to pancake chain IHOP and eat with him during a bender in Los Angeles.
But as Moran acknowledges, the drugs were the symptom. Not the cause. It was his self worth.
Even today — sober for close to a decade and regularly working with doctors and psychologists to help him work through his trauma — he says most days, if he’s being really honest with himself, “I look at myself in the mirror and I think that I am ugly, old, fat”.
“I’m not saying it for sympathy, but the words that come to mind are ‘I think I’m disgusting’.”
And instead of the party drugs, he’s now addicted to his job.
But he says he knows what to do to make sure he doesn’t go over the edge.
It’s why his book also includes chapters from psychologist Dr Jodie Lowinger, to help readers build their own coping methods.
“Mental health is part of who I am. I wear my mental health scars as a badge of honour,” he says.
He’s not worried that his colleagues (like me) will now know his heaviest burdens. Instead he’s more worried that people won’t like how it’s written.
“My worry about people reading it is that they’ll find out that it’s not good,” he says.
“I’ve never been nominated for a Walkley Award. I’ve put in nominations for work that I’m really proud of. But I don’t think journalists that do my style of journalism ever get recognised for the work that they do.
“Logically, I know that I’m very good at what I do. But I am fearful that people will realise that I’m a crap writer. Because I don’t want to do fancy shit.
“And it’s taken me a long time to get to the point where I feel okay about that.”
‘BE KINDER’
That’s ultimately why he wants to tell his story: To let everyone know, that you never really know what someone else is going through.
“I don’t think we know anyone that we meet, and that’s why with mental health we need to tread so carefully, because we never know what the person next to us is going through,” he says.
“Let’s try and be a little bit kinder.
“And I’m not meaning sitting around chewing on mung beans and singing kumbaya.
“The world is a tough place. There’s various reasons why all of us suffer from different mental health stuff.
“And I think if we try and be kinder, then hopefully that will help a little bit.”
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