Ten Steps to Nanette

by Hannah Gadsby

on the rare occasion I spoke, I was barely heard

I didn’t like the idea that beneath my surface ran a deep river of pain and ugliness just waiting to burst free; that I was nothing more than an unregulated abattoir of blood and guts wrapped up in a far too pervious suit of skin.

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 is only now, after a significant chunk of life has passed since, that I can recognise that Mum was not always the right target, she was just the easy one. So, I would like to ask that if you find yourself judging my mother harshly, just keep it in mind that I can be a lazy hunter and Dad is a parental gazelle.

But someone did have that idea, and then even more people must have agreed to it, because that’s how shit ideas get spun into reality.

It is very easy to pick kids with ASD off their pack because we tend to lurk around the edges anyway and we trust very, very easily.

I’m always fine eventually. I just find it incredibly difficult to cope with change.

being too smart in a town like Smithton was way worse than being as dumb as bricks.

was the risk of the outright and often hostile withdrawal of love and safety from the communities into which they had been born.

the toxic debate was met with a considerable and sharp rise in suicide rates of young gay men, particularly on the North West Coast.

But what I did understand was that they were talking about people they knew and, apparently, were friends with. I could never be part of a group of friends, I thought. I

I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to learn, so early in life, that having a decent level of skill means fuck-all in life if you’re a girl, and especially so if you’re of the fat and poor variety.[*17]

It might have been the best year of my life if I hadn’t been some level of suicidal the whole time.

it was a good story. I thought it was shameful. Adding to that shame was my inability to adequately explain, even to myself, how I’d failed so badly at life, and that my success story was so thoroughly punctuated by failure it couldn’t possibly ring

There is just never a straight line to be found through a life punctuated by trauma.

biology has anything to do with this, as it is a wholly anecdotal observation on my part—but women are a lot better than men at registering when someone has stopped listening, and they’re also far superior at modifying their communication tactics accordingly. Which is, I would think, the kind of skill set that would go quite some way toward making someone “naturally” better at comedy.

I’d been fielding open hostility for most of my life.

wanted to step off the spinning of the world.

terrible mistake. It was too much change for me at once.

I didn’t emerge from the experience as a person who was wholly committed to the living of life.

Even a rude little girl like me knows that when you are depressed you lose access to any memory of ever feeling any other way, you simply accept the depressed state as eternal and immutable.

I reserve the right to be able to evolve.

just be cool, OK? I am doing my best.

the experience of ADHD has a lot in common with that of PTSD, and as such, it will often present with other debilitating comorbidities, such as depression and anxiety.

Imagine standing in an orchestra pit unable to move your arms or see the music, but still doing your best to conduct, and the oboe is free-forming Acker Bilk over a French horn, the string section has splintered into twenty different tempos, while the timpani section has just taken acid and formed a drumming circle. Imagine that inside your head, then having to make a dentist appointment. As

I found accessibility and traction within the system due to my public profile.

persuaded me to assume that I was unlikable, and eventually I stopped thinking about the world through the lens of my own needs.

By the time I was middling my thirties, I was no longer living my life. I was merely coping with it, and barely.

Once I am distressed, my moods are not mine to control, but my environment is. I am always working to remove myself from all the cycles and patterns of hostile environments,

I listen to the same music, watch the same shows, and eat the same foods over and over again without any qualms. I find joy in my life where I once couldn’t because I was too busy trying to do the “right” thing instead of checking in with my own needs first.

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

I am unable to intuitively understand what I am feeling, and I can often take a much longer time to process the effects of external circumstances than neurotypical thinkers.

Being perpetually potentially unsafe is a great recipe for anxiety. And, spoiler alert, anxiety is bad. But if anxiety in a child is left untreated—or worse, unacknowledged—anxiety will not only be magnified, it will inevitably compound into trauma. But it is very difficult to explain to a world that has decided Disneyland is the happiest place on earth that a child’s birthday party can trigger a fight-or-flight response in someone with ASD.

Although it was only a mere moment in a much larger evening, it turned into the only moment I really was able to have, because of the way it catapulted me back into another moment

there is a strong correlation between low literacy levels and homophobia.

As someone who was raped as a young woman while I was asleep, I was not particularly interested in metaphor.

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.