Ten Steps to Nanette

by Hannah Gadsby

The invitation had said dress for brunch, and because brunch is not a real meal, I took that to mean I didn’t have to make a real effort.

And so, what I had thought would effectively seal me off into an obscure corner of both my life and my art form instead became something far bigger than me, something of an international cultural phenomenon that not only shook the comedy world out of its tree but pushed my own existence into a shape I no longer recognise.

But deep down, I always knew that Dad just didn’t want anybody to struggle with carrots, because it annoyed him to watch someone do it the wrong way, especially if they didn’t even know it was a problem.[*1]

But whenever things went wrong, which they frequently did, Mum would suddenly be married again and having the anatomy of her mistakes explained back to her by the very man who’d refused to help in the first place.

It would be great if more people in the world understood just how trusting autistic kids are, because at the moment, outside immediate families, it seems like the only people who see the link between vulnerability and easy trust are predators. This is not so safe.

I did end up climbing into the wardrobe with my pillows and waiting to die. I hardly need to tell you, but I didn’t die. I woke up sometime later, peeled my shoes off of my face, made my way back into bed and I was fine. I’m always fine eventually. I just find it incredibly difficult to cope with change.

do not wish to prioritise my abuse in the telling of my story, is because it was not a luxury I could afford at the time that it was happening.

when you are forced to keep a trauma secret in order to survive, you need to actively avoid incorporating the traumatic event into your official version of self. You don’t forget it, you just don’t put words around it. And when there are no words, there is no sharing. And when there is no sharing, you can’t find your way back to safety. And with all that comes a deep and dark dose of shame.

but I wore an array of sock lengths and every day it was potluck as to where on my leg they would pull up to. This meant that every day I spent in the sun got its very own tan line, which made my legs look like a geological sediment experiment.

These days, I can see how right it was to fail me. You need to attract sponsorship if you’re going to make it in sport. And if you’re a woman, you have to be attractive to attract sponsorship.

I imagined how all the people who had listened to his tapes might have imagined themselves piloting jet helicopters, just like him, and then speaking to stadiums full of people who used to be just like them ten years earlier. Then, not being able to stop myself, I took it to its logical conclusion: emptying out the stadiums because everybody was either a motivational speaker or lying dead in their jet helicopters after the inevitable mass crash that happened after they had all foolishly filled the sky beyond its limits, crashing into each other, spinning out of control and then tumbling down in a smoky spiral before landing into the giant midden of twisted metal corpses that looked like a pile of spider crabs during metamorphosis.

Cave men killed big animals and this made women horny, because protein,[*1] so the women would laugh at the men, which is how the menfolk knew that the women were ready to fuck.

Naturally I have embellished my paraphrasing, but I think it’s only appropriate to distort the ideas of the men who distorted the ideas of other men who distorted the perception of half the human race to the point of erasure.

Fat jokes were my bread and butter, which is a shame, because that kind of bread and butter is basically a shame sandwich, and shame is never part of a healthy, balanced diet.

They say that comedy is trauma plus time. But I have never needed time. I have always written my stories for laughs at the same time as the humiliation is tearing my self-esteem to shreds. This is my gift.

The thing that woke me up was when I began drinking my tea black.

My tea mug had been the only thing I had taken to rinsing during my marathon of sloth. That I could get my act together enough to drink my tea out of something clean was enough to fool me that nothing was wrong; but when I ran out of milk and began to drink my tea black, I knew I was in a very bad place. Buying milk had become impossible, and to put that in its brutal context, I was living above a shop that sold milk.

In 2014, making fun of hipsters had become something of a comedy hack subject, though to be fair, I’d been hostile to the “hipster aesthetic” long before it was cool, but I don’t like to brag about it because that is such a hipster thing to say.

When I was between homes and drifting badly through life, I met my fair share of hippies with safety nets. Rich kids with a chip on their shoulder who were slumming it by choice, all pretending that their motivations were spiritual and not just bog-standard teenage rebellion taken to an extreme. I had hated them because, to me, they seemed incapable of seeing what a privilege it was to be able to reject what was expected. I had never felt as if I’d ever had a choice. My rejection was thrust upon me. But, as infuriating as I found the trappings of late ’90s hippiedom, I would take their privilege-gaslighting over the ironic smarm of this particular type of hyper-aware mid-aughties hipster any day.

“Look,” I said, trying my level best to be charming, “I’m paying five dollars for a cup of tea that I have to put my own tea bag in and then not drink it, because the cup is too hot to hold. It’s too hot to hold because it is made of glass and it doesn’t have a handle…You know why? Because it’s a jar!”

“Crab apple preserve!” I said with great and genuine incredulity. “Why would anybody preserve crab apple!?”

“I sneezed and knocked myself out on a filing cabinet.” He laughed again. I’d rehearsed this response in the taxi. I knew the question would be asked, and the only way I knew how to take my mental health seriously was to make a joke out of it.

Now I was being taught the skill of looking to my environment for my solutions. I solved my sock problem, for example. I threw them all out and then I bought twenty pairs of the same sock. I don’t even put them together anymore, I just put them in the sock box as forty singles. I reach in to get two socks, and it doesn’t matter which I pick, they will always be a pair.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to advocate for quiet time. It was more that I wanted so badly to be the person who loved going out, hanging out with groups of friends, because that’s what well-adjusted people all do. I’d seen it in films.

I pay attention to everything. If anything, it’s attention overload. The deficit is in working out what is important and dealing with it in a timely manner. The bit of the brain that is responsible for prioritising, integrating and sorting out all the incoming—is just a bit shit at its job. My brain is a Ferrari with bicycle brakes, it has no filing system, or what medical professionals might call “executive function.”

I wish more than anything that I had known about my ASD when I was a kid, just so I could’ve learnt how to look after my own distress, instead of assuming my pain was normal and deserved. There is no one to blame, but I still grieve for the quality of life I lost because I didn’t have this key piece to my human puzzle. But

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

But searching for the connections between the big picture and the little picture, however, is a very ASD thing to do. I am never not cross-referencing the trees with the forests, and it can be a very exhausting way to engage, but I wouldn’t change it for the world, because I believe communities need thinkers like me.

I see a fault in the idea, put forward by neurotypical “experts,” that autistic people have mind blindness, which essentially suggests that we are unable to understand the inner workings of other people. I believe we all have mind blindness; why else would we invent language? The problem is that communication skills are developed atypically in autistic people, and, most often, very slowly.

Oh well, I thought, it’s all part of the soup. Too late to take the onions out now.

I have a tendency to worry about the well-being of adolescents before I judge them. It’s a frightening time of life, why shouldn’t they take up a lot of space?

We know that there is a strong correlation between low literacy levels and homophobia. But instead of investing in education, leaders were investing in hate, again.

I truly believe that the only universal “body” is our breath, because breath is the only thing that all human bodies experience and as such, it is something we all must share, not just with each other, but, in one way or another, with all living things on earth. To this day, I still can’t think of a better way of truly breaking us free from the visual rut that the canon of Western art has left us languishing in, than the breath of an Indigenous Australian woman.

Safety is being able to trust that those around you WANT to protect you from harm. But if those around you don’t believe you are “like them,” then they will focus on the discomfort you make them feel, and that discomfort is not a safe space.

We grieve because none of us can reconcile the beauty we can see in our past with the ugliness we were told to remember.