Ten Steps to Nanette

by Hannah Gadsby

If I were pushed to categorise Nanette, I would call her “stand-up catharsis,” an experiment in the transmutation of trauma. You see, I was not simply telling my audience about my traumas; my goal was to simulate a feeling in the room that was akin to trauma, because I wanted to see if I could create an experience of communal empathy in a room full of strangers. Not just for me, but for all the people who have ever gone to comedy shows and been triggered by all the rape celebrations, violence, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia that gets spewed into microphones the whole world over.[*19]

You may well laugh at the absurdity of wanting to be a dog, but I have grown up to become an incredibly successful one. I am a very trusting adult with devastatingly simple needs, I like being told I am good, I’m distressed by loud noises, I always feel much better after a walk, and I am very easily bribed with the promise of food.

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.

Safety is not a gun. 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.

Western culture is built around the fucked-up and demonstrably false premise that “white men” are the natural peak of the human pyramid.

We don’t grieve for what we’ve lost but for what we never knew. We grieve because none of us can reconcile the beauty we can see in our past with the ugliness we were told to remember.