Ten Steps to Nanette

by Hannah Gadsby

Who said selfishness can’t lead to human rights advocacy?

Had I read about it at the time, I undoubtedly would have assumed the vote was made by an actual chair.

It was my personal hell in a tiny box, but I loved it because I was supposed to.

Aside from the retired ballerina, the only thing I put in my jewellery box was a blue copper sulphate crystal I’d made in science class. Other than its stunning shade of blue, it was not a particularly pretty situation, and, as it hadn’t occurred to me to cut the string I’d grown it off, it looked more like a jagged little tampon than it did a precious stone. But it was still the closest thing I had to jewellery until I bought myself a necklace.

reverse-engineering normality.

I thought that if I could bridge the gap between the words and the images, then perhaps I could find the key to the hows and whys of other people’s thinking.

It took me even longer to understand that the reason I’d taken to collecting ideas that had nothing to do with me, was because they had everything to do with me, and I must have known it, even if I didn’t understand it.

Years later I learnt that Daisy had become suddenly ill and died shortly thereafter. I pressed Mum: “Why didn’t you tell me?” “Well,” Mum replied. “You were only four years old; I didn’t think you were ready to grapple with traumatic things like death and disease.” To this day I don’t understand her logic. Death and disease are facts of life, and as such can be explained, even to a child. Or, she could have lied. Kids can swallow a lie! But a sudden disappearance of a friend left completely unexplained? How could any child hope to wrap their head around that without rising distress?

chose not to think about it and just held it in my head like a hot potato,

even more ashamed by the fact that art on its own apparently didn’t make me “feel” anything.

feeling frustrated by my lack of appropriate feelings.

More on that later.

find out how to want what the world wanted me to want.

imagine my future. Anytime I tried this seemingly simple task, all I could conjure was a dark void. It wasn’t necessarily bad, it was just empty.

“I never know when you are joking or not,” to which I responded with a shrug and the truth, “Neither do I.”

I had decided to sleep with Black Satin Man because I was hoping to discover that I was straight.

I rarely ever want to change things in my past.

I want the world to stop demanding gratuitous details in exchange for empathy.

I can’t explain it, because I don’t do chemistry, not with other people, anyway.

I could tell that nobody was laughing at me, they were laughing with me, connecting through their own version of adolescent body image trauma.

I would do all the dishes once the festival was over, but I never acted on these intentions.

Optimism for my own future was not a privilege I had experienced very often in my life, so I don’t want to be too harsh about that little glimmer of it, despite the disastrous end it led me to.

I studied the shit out of borderline.

But nobody seemed to notice that I had major depressive episodes every other year, and debilitating anxiety the rest of the time. Not even me. Nobody noticed that I never made eye contact. Nobody noticed that I often spoke in a patchwork of collected phrases.

Please, stop expecting people with autism to be exceptional. It is a basic human right to have average abilities.

I couldn’t process it, so I went back to sleep.

Our family unit had been collateral damage, nothing more than pawn porn for the juvenile and toxic political games being played out well above our heads. That is the shit that ruined my life. I couldn’t see that until then, but once I did, I became furious and filled with an unrelenting urge to update the way I told my story.

I had been drowning in that fucking shit my whole life and I just couldn’t bear hearing any more people having their first ever thoughts on the matter, out loud and unfiltered. I had lived this shit. But I felt too overwhelmed to do anything about it. I felt too small and too weak, which is to say, I felt too traumatised.

I have never identified with how people see me.

“I can’t say for sure, but she is what grew out of the baby they handed me at the hospital.”

Celebrities filed through the door, I got standing ovations every night, and I won the Edinburgh Fringe comedy award—the holy fucking grail of my small world if ever there was one. And still, it was one of the worst months of my entire life.

talking to people who talk.

But to this day I can’t think about that debate without thinking about them. It was so incredibly avoidable. So many of us sounded the alarm, but we were ignored. And we continue to be ignored as the win is being painted into history as a “victory” pure and simple. It was not. The lives of a vulnerable minority should never have been put into the hands of the majority in a media landscape that is all too happy to be powered by the fumes of a toxic debate. So, while everybody else was doing victory laps, I could only seem to grieve.