You forgot your floaties

Madness, sadness, and magic

Yes, this is about an episode of Adventure Time, but before you click away, it’s also about mental health.

In my first year of university, we examined the idea of the tortured artist. It was my first time understanding what the ‘tortured’ part meant, that artists often have a mental illness (think Vincent van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, and even Robin Williams). I think it was also the first time I realised the connection between my own mental health and creativity. Because there was a connection.

Obviously, you don’t need to be depressed to be an artist, but on a personal note, I think my writing wouldn’t be what it is if I didn’t have depression. I know that sounds dark, but I’ve made my peace with it. In fact, You Forgot Your Floaties, from season 6 of Adventure Time resonates with me so much because of the connections to how I see my own career.

In the episode, a human character called Betty studies magic and finds that all magic users are either mad, sad, or both. She wonders if madness and sadness is the cause of magic, or the effect.

The title of the episode emerges after an experiment goes wrong and Betty inherits powerful magic (which eventually does turn her mad) and in her visions she sees a backyard pool at night, and something in the water mouths, ‘You forgot your floaties’. It means she’s in way out of her depth. But to save the cartoon from getting too deep, there’s the usual Adventure Time quirkiness, where protagonists Finn and Jake get turned into bread and try to fight their way to freedom. This balance is one of the appeals of Adventure Time for me, the way it dives into some pretty deep themes while remaining light and silly in a fantastical way.

This is how I explore mental health themes in novels - through fantasy. Fantasy provides a safe space to explore these themes, as it takes the realism away and becomes less personal and therefore easier to face. It’s easy to use a lot of metaphors. And raising the stakes often makes these themes easier to explore, too, by putting them in a more extreme situation. So although Betty’s situation - preparing a transmutation where the helmet of a once-god will combine with her sweat so Magic Man can turn into the ruler of Mars - sounds ridiculous, her feelings are very real. Having depression often feels like you’re in the middle of the ocean, lost and battered, and if you aren’t armed with strategies - or your floaties - you’re probably going to drown.

My writing is a way of processing emotions and sensations. Whenever something makes me angry, I immediately think of it in a fantasy worl. For example, sometimes when I’m a particularly salty mood about our country’s obsession with football, I wonder what it would be like if writers had the same power as footy players - if writers were the ones selling products and services, if the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards were broadcast like the Brownlow is.

In Made of Steam and Stardust, two of the main characters have similar feelings of low self-worth, something I was grappling with at the time of writing. I wrote these feelings out through the novel, but instead of a lonely young woman at her desk wondering if she’d ever get published, I was an inventor in a dystopian world, fighting an incoming comet. I was a prince without a throne, searching for a legendary sceptre to defeat the bad guy. In my other novels I explore depression, a fear of responsibility, and many other feelings, all through the safe lens of fantasy.

Writing is definitely my therapy, and I find, amongst the madness and sadness, that I rarely forget my floaties anymore - I create magic with paper, a pen, and my imagination.