Hannah Gadsby Quotes

Do you know why we have the sunflowers? It’s not because Vincent van Gogh suffered. It’s because Vincent van Gogh had a brother who loved him. Through all the pain, he had a tether, a connection to the world. And that is the focus of the story we need – connection.

To be rendered powerless does not destroy your humanity. Your resilience is your humanity. The only people who lose their humanity are those who believe they have the right to render another human being powerless. They are the weak. To yield and not break, that is incredible strength.

There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.

I don’t identify as transgender. But I’m clearly gender not-normal. I don’t think even lesbian is the right identity for me. I really don’t. I might as well come out now. I identify as tired. I’m just tired.

Coping takes a fuck-ton more effort and energy than thriving ever will.

Ironically, I believe Picasso was right. I believe we could paint a better world if we learned to see it from all perspectives, as many perspectives as we possibly could. Because diversity is strength. Difference is a teacher. Fear difference, you learn nothing. Picasso’s mistake was his arrogance. He assumed he could represent all of the perspectives. And our mistake was to invalidate the perspective of a 17-year-old girl because we believed her potential would never equal his. Hindsight is a gift. Stop wasting my time. A 17-year-old girl is just never, ever, ever in her prime! Ever. I am in my prime. Would you test your strength out on me? There is no way anyone would dare test their strength out on me because you all know there is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.

You learn from the part of the story you focus on.

I want the world to stop demanding gratuitous details in exchange for empathy. Entertainment in exchange for understanding. But I am not in charge of the world. I am not even in charge of my own story, because, as I am so fond of saying, there is no such thing as a straight line through trauma.

Closed minds are a disorder of the highest order.

Self-hatred is only ever a seed planted from outside in.

What good is a coherent narrative if people don’t want to hear it? Because trauma won’t leave you alone until you feel safe, and safety is not something that an individual can summon on their own. 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.

You may or may not be ready to hear this information, but I'll tell you, because knowledge is power, ignorance is a cage and feelings can be dealt with.

A start is not the same as a beginning.

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.

I wish I were deadpan. It's a very effective comic device. It's like the better-natured and kinder-hearted cousin of sarcasm.

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, I will just share it here, because 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.

Nanette is basically Eat Pray Love for autistic queer folk.

I got through it. Of course I did. Hello. But I didn’t emerge from the experience as a person who was wholly committed to the living of life.

To have another person reveal your secret to the world is humiliating enough, but it's so, so much worse when it happens before you've worked it out for yourself and then to hear everyone laugh.

When I told Mum that I was autistic, she said: "Yeah, that makes sense. I always knew that there was a lot going on inside you, but I just couldn't get in. You were like a tin of baked beans and my tin opener wouldn't work on you." It's a tidy metaphor, especially if you know that Mum does not like baked beans.

Fauvism is what you get if you take Post-Impressionism and put it on Expressionist steroids through a technicolour lens. And that sentence is what you get when you've dabbled in enough wank to get by but not enough to participate elegantly.

The power of a joke is not in the writing. It is how you wrap your voice around it.

The myths around ASD and ADHD have wasted enough of my life, so I don't really want to waste any more of my time thinking about them, much less writing them down. These diagnoses have given me a pathway to understanding myself and for the first time in my life, I am able to like who I am. If that's not enough for you, if you want me to convince you that I am autistic or prove that ADHD exists, then you can just go fuck yourself.

To actively isolate a fellow human being is nothing short of structural violence.

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

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.

I should also point out that "Nanette" is not completely devoid of jokes. The first half is crammed full of very solid punchlines. And every time I performed the show I filled the room with a lot of big laughter without fail. That is important, not just as a bragging point but because that is how I built the trust. And I needed my audience to trust me because I needed my audience to feel safe. And I needed my audience to feel safe so that I could take that safety away and not give it back. Why? Because that is the shape of trauma.

His eyes were downcast and his shoulders were slumped, as if he was trying to take up the least space humanly possible. I began to wonder whose job it was to teach people like him that public spaces were shared spaces, and that he was allowed to take up space.

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.

I have never identified with how people see me. I have a great big universe of stuff inside of me. None of it is gendered. None of it. I love who I am. It’s only on the other side of my skin where the pain begins. But I will not negotiate anymore. I am proud to be Queer.

To be able to wrap your own voice around your own mind, and to be able to craft it into something that has the capacity to make a room full of strangers think and feel differently, even if it's just for a moment in time, is an incredible and humbling thing to be able to do.

Many people who struggle to find stable employment also contend with things like intergenerational poverty and/or trauma, cycles of abuse, mental illness, systemic discrimination, disability or neurological disorders. Not only are these all chronically stressful and traumatic circumstances, they have all been linked to a high incidence of impaired executive function. Welfare systems are not built to be easy for people who are anxious about using the phone, or people who mix up dates. They are not designed for people who are bad at keeping time, filling out forms, or people who can’t easily access all the relevant bank, residential and employment details from the past five years, if they thought to keep that information at all. Welfare systems don’t accommodate for transience because welfare systems are not built to be accessible, they are built to be temples of administrative doom, because, apparently, welfare is a treasure that must be protected.

The first time I took Valium was the first time that I experienced being unbothered by my own body. The thing is, until the calm of that little pill spread its lovely little tentacles all through me, I had absolutely no idea how uneasy in my own skin I'd always felt. I am not just talking about pain, either. It's more of an extreme and ever-present awareness of my body, as if I don't quite fit myself properly, as if my flesh is a pair of underpants that is forever sliding up the butt crack of my soul.

To boil it down to its bare essentials, golf is a game of considerable skill, elitism, white supremacy and sexism all wrapped up in a genteel walk, and 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.[

neighbour.

I was always aware of all the big hitters of American comedy, of course I was, because that’s how aggressive cultural imperialism works,

...being inclusive is JUST as important as being included.

Laughter is not our medicine. Stories hold our cure.

Ten Steps to Nanette, which I guess could be dubbed a very delayed Part Two, is more of a traditional memoir. It begins with my birth and ends with a publishing deadline.

The Autistic brain naturally thinks in associations and patterns, which is why answering questions can sometimes feel like a marathon! Our brains want to provide all the context and describe all the associations. We often perceive the interconnections and patterns, creating a sophisticated and intricate web inside our minds, much like a Wikipedia page, as poignantly described by Autistic comedian Hannah Gadsby.

Self-hatred is only ever a seed planted from outside but when you do that to a child, it becomes a weed so thick and it grows so fast, that child doesn't know anything different. It becomes as natural as gravity.

I did not pull myself out of this hole. I just got lucky. So many people work hard their whole entire lives and only ever go backward, through no fault of their own. People are trapped in cycles far worse than the one I was in, and it's just not their fault. So, I won't be claiming that it was some kind of superior grit of mine that got me through it. All I did was enter a comedy competition and had a bit of luck for once.

lot of noises all at once, even if they are exclusively pleasant sounds, will always feel like an assault. So, the relentless cacophony of high school was constantly and unbearably overwhelming. And don’t get me started on the smell of it. Body sprays competed with hair sprays, which competed with the always over-deployed deodorants that still somehow managed to lose the war against the toxic bouquet of teenage body odour. Thank god I was a smoker; I might’ve perished otherwise. The other hurdle high school threw up at me was homework. I am not morally opposed to extracurricular curricula; I just didn’t have time for it. As in primary school, I needed my evenings to catch up on the things my brain had been unable to take on board during the day, not to mention recover from the sheer exhaustion of trying to subtly navigate a sea of hypercritical teens for hours on end. On top of that, the closer I got to being an adult and the further away from being a baby, the more chores I was expected to get done at home. These extra burdens, as reasonable as they were, led to my brain shutting down more and more, and, without my brain, learning became impossible.

I am not good enough at organizing to be an actual activist. But searching for 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.

a lot of noises all at once, even if they are exclusively pleasant sounds, will always feel like an assault. So, the relentless cacophony of high school was constantly and unbearably overwhelming. And don’t get me started on the smell of it. Body sprays competed with hair sprays, which competed with the always over-deployed deodorants that still somehow managed to lose the war against the toxic bouquet of teenage body odour. Thank god I was a smoker; I might’ve perished otherwise. The other hurdle high school threw up at me was homework. I am not morally opposed to extracurricular curricula; I just didn’t have time for it. As in primary school, I needed my evenings to catch up on the things my brain had been unable to take on board during the day, not to mention recover from the sheer exhaustion of trying to subtly navigate a sea of hypercritical teens for hours on end. On top of that, the closer I got to being an adult and the further away from being a baby, the more chores I was expected to get done at home. These extra burdens, as reasonable as they were, led to my brain shutting down more and more, and, without my brain, learning became impossible.

As the school year progressed, my learning window would get smaller, and smaller, and by the year’s end, it would be closed tight by morning break, if it opened at all. This had always been the case, but in primary school I had a chance of keeping up because there were significantly fewer variables in my day. High school in comparison was a cluster-fuck of environmental shapeshifting, with no day ever looking the same as the one before, and as you’ve probably picked up by now, change was not my friend anymore than my classmates were

Some people, most particularly the guy who came up with the concept, will tell you that 'The Grim Reaper' was a work of genius, a revolutionary approach to television advertising. But I’m here to tell you that was, and remains, a total and utter shit stain of an idea. And you don’t need to go any further than the first line of the ad to understand why: 'At first, it was only gays and drug users being killed by AIDS.' It is the word 'only' that pisses me off. 'Only gays and IV drug users.' that is to say: 'Only' people who don’t matter. 'Only' people whose suffering should be of no concern to you. Like I said. A total and utter shit stain of an idea. Defenders of the ad might argue that the 'only' was simply about identifying those whom the AIDS epidemic was affecting, and not a statement of this demographic’s value to the community. To which I would say: If you’re such a genius at mass messaging then you should be aware of how the word 'only' would work in the minds of those who are already looking for ways to subjugate the humanity of the people who are listed after the world 'only'.

Sounds have always had the ability to make me feel things; audible chewing elicits anger, loud noises can bring on sudden anxiety, and high-pitched sounds resonate in my spine with something akin to physical pain. It’s not all bad, a satisfying key-change in a song brings on all the sensations of cresting on a rollercoaster, but stripped of the terror. It’s lovely. But a lot of noises all at once, even if they are exclusively pleasant sounds, will always feel like an assault, so the relentless cacophony of high school was constantly unbearably overwhelming

Around the time I'd gotten my invitation to the reunion, Smithton had been in the news because of a murder investigation. Two men had been slain in their home and those responsible had been at large for quite some time before being brought in and charged. As brutal as it all was, I followed this story with half a mind of amusement simply because it all took place in a town called Penguin. Once I'd read the headline Penguin police on lookout for murder weapon it stopped being a terrible crime in my head and just became a fantastic episode of "CSI: Antarctica".

about the conditions as they have been. Meanwhile, angry art of the new era—from Naomi Alderman’s best-selling novel The Power; to Dietland, a television show about a women’s magazine . . . and a feminist terrorist group that throws men out of planes; to Hannah Gadsby’s cult stage show Nanette and the exhibition of Adrian Piper’s art at MoMA and the feminist street art of Tatyana Fazlalizadeh—captures the furious female energy of contemporary America.

Modern art which, if you are unclear on that as a concept, is the art that tends to look like your kid could do it, but your kid couldn't do it and your kid didn't do it, so it's probably best if you let go of that cliché and just think about how it makes you feel.

It was clear that neither of us really mattered to the world, we were both just caught in the crossfire of a process neither of us understood. The difference between us was that he'd been promised the world, and I had not, which made him the underdog, whereas I was just a dog.

And I needed my audience to trust me because I needed my audience to feel safe, and I needed my audience to feel safe so that I could take that safety away and not give it back. Why? Because that is the shape of trauma.

I will always love you no matter what, but I don’t have to like you.

Art is restoration: the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life, to make something that is fragmented—which is what fear and anxiety do to a person—into something whole.” —louise bourgeois

I heard it again and my rage was replaced by calm. That was what adrenaline does to my body. It shifts my gears down to almost neutral. It makes me sleepy, and this is not good in an emergency. Humans are given two options when faced with mortal danger: fight or flight. I’ll give you the third: narcolepsy.

Looking back, this is so clearly the kind of wonderful rite of passage that I had always wanted, but I didn’t recognise it at the time because I didn’t think being normal could hurt so much.

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

It really is something when you can make collecting and organising objects boring to a young kid with autism spectrum disorder (but that’s exactly what Stamp Explorer managed to do).

The main stumbling block to succeeding at school was how difficult I found it to do the learning in class. Halfway through a lesson, my brain would just switch off. ‘Nope, I’ve had enough. I don’t want to do it anymore’. It wasn’t melodramatic about it, it would just hit its threshold and shut down, leaving me helpless to take in new information

I was no longer making an effort at school. I didn’t decide to become lazy on a whim born of a bad attitude, I was tired. I was tired of all my earnest and concentrated scholastic efforts being met with not just dwindling grades, but also my teachers’ lowering estimation of me. My report cards were almost exclusively filled with sentiments like, ‘Hannah does not apply herself’, or ‘Hannah is falling well short of her potential’, sometimes the sentiments were more bluntly expressed. ‘Hannah is lazy’, or ‘had a bad attitude’. Sometimes they were contained within genuinely insightful observations and far more interesting language, ‘Hannah’s participation in class is spasmodic’, or, ‘Hannah brings a rather ethereal presence to class discussions’. The truth is none of my teachers seemed to notice how hard I was trying. Instead they would invariably conclude that laziness, mine, was the root cause of the ever-widening gap between my perceived intelligence, and my poor results. None of my teachers were inclined to wonder if it was their teaching methods that were falling short

The other hurdle high school threw at me was homework. I’m not morally opposed to extra-curricular curricular, I just didn’t have time for it. As in primary school, I needed my evenings to catch up on things my brain had been unable to take on board during the day, not to mention recover from the sheer exhaustion of trying to subtly navigate a sea of hypercritical teens for hours on end

When you soak a child in shame they cannot develop the neurological pathways that carry thought ... thoughts of self-worth.

I tried to decide if I found him attractive, and the most I could say was that I thought he was neat.

nd I’m so grateful to be able to look back at my childhood, and find this pocket of my memory filled with knowing I was safe, that I belonged, and I had a right to exist. Because these are the memories that were to become my tether once life began to pull me deeper and deeper into a world where safety and belonging were not things I was capable of achieving on my own.

Laughter is rarely benign, but it is often malicious. So, I don't think it really matters much if you think your jokes are 'pure,' you're a chump if you think an audience cares about your intentions. They'll take your 'harmless' jokes and laugh for their own harmful reasons, or, in the case of me, not laugh at all, because I won't rest until comedy is dead.

Another problem I had was that the only time I could laugh at menfolk was on the rare occasion I found them genuinely funny. Their mere presence was not humorous to me in the same way it seemed to be to 'natural' women. Furthermore, whenever I felt as if I had any kind of knowledge, I was inclined to share it, whereas natural women rarely seemed to want to do the knowing of things out loud. They could be so smart, charming and funny then lose it all as soon as they hit the orbit of larger groups and/or boys. It was confusing to me. I decided that if ever I stumbled into the ability to be smart, charming and funny I would never turn it off. Not for anyone.

It is always offensive when victim status is claimed by the very people who are actively advocating for legal limitations on the human rights of a marginalised and vulnerable group within their community. But the vileness of this tactic goes through the roof when they do so by co-opting the vernacular of the very group they are so proud to hate and oppress, legally or otherwise. How can 'all lives' possibly 'matter' in a world where people just keep doing this kind of horrific shit?

Western culture is built around the fucked-up and demonstrably false premise that 'white men' are the natural peak of the human pyramid. By that measure, history becomes nothing more than a glorified mood diary for white men. But this history of art is not only sexist and racist, it has also totally rewritten the narrative of queer bodies, and by rewritten, I mean erased. We see ourselves all the time, but time and time again we have been gaslit out of ever existing, and yet, paradoxically, thinking about the history of art has only ever reminded me that I do exist. Because isn't it possible that hidden amongst all the things that history has forgotten is what holds the key to what we are missing now?

It doesn't matter whether the compulsion to point out difference is malicious or good-natured, it will always hurt to be reminded that you don't belong to the only world you've ever known.

Novelty socks are the gift you get adult men who have everything except a personality.

I could no longer believe that I was assaulted because of my sexuality alone, it was my gender expression that had invited the brunt of the violence. If I had looked like what he expected a woman to look like, it would never have happened as it did. I think he hit me because he saw me as being incorrectly female. I think he hit me because he saw me as a threat to his masculinity. But most of all, I think he hit me because he saw it as his job, as a man, to enforce the rules as he understood them.

The best way to judge a woman is by the way she looks. The best way to know a woman is to let her speak her own story.

When I was a kid, I used to feel sorry for Dad. We all did; and sadly, Mum knew this and that must have been painful. Dad's preference for fence-sitting has been a near-constant source of frustration for Mum. As a child I couldn't at all comprehend why, but now, as an adult, I can see the immense pressure she must have been under. Essentially, when it came to emotional labor and decision-making, Mum was operating as a single mother of six (five children and one adult man). 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.

because I knew better than most that “coping” takes a fuck-tonne more effort and energy than “thriving” ever will.

How can a man so drunk on the power of being a doctor have such a devastatingly ignorant understanding of the insidious nature of depression? 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.

Common wisdom has it that the pathway out of trauma is a coherent narrative; but I had a coherent narrative and I was still stuck in the painful maze of my Trauma. I’d tried everything in my power to heal and I was left to wonder whether it was entirely my responsibility. What good is a coherent narrative if people don’t want to hear it? Because trauma won’t leave you alone until you feel safe, and safety is not something that an individual can summon on their own. 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.