1. Why Hannah describes her later-in-life Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnosis as “an exfoliation of shame.” 2. How neurodiversity affects Hannah’s relationships–and how she connects to the world through what’s “interesting” instead of what’s “important.” 3. Hannah’s revolutionary commitment to stop using self-deprecating humor about her body, sexuality, and gender–and why we might all consider the same commitment. 4. Why it’s easier for Hannah to share her personal stories “in bulk” on stage instead of one-on-one. 5. What it takes for Hannah to prepare for conversations–like ours on We Can Do Hard Things. About Hannah: Tasmania’s own Hannah Gadsby stopped stand-up comedy in its tracks with her multi-award-winning show, Nanette. When it premiered on Netflix in 2018, it left audiences captivated by her blistering honesty and her singular ability to take them from rolling laughter to devastated silence. Its release and subsequent Emmy and Peabody wins took Nanette (and Hannah) to the world. Hannah’s difficult second album (which was also her eleventh solo show) was named Douglas after her dog. Hannah walked Douglas around the world, selling out the Royal Festival Hall in London, the Opera House in Sydney and the Kennedy Center in DC, a sit-down run in New York and shows across the US, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Douglas covered Hannah’s autism diagnosis, moving beyond the trauma at the centre of Nanette and instead letting the world see the view from Hannah’s brain – one that sees the world differently but with breathtaking clarity. The show was an Emmy-nominated smash hit and is available throughout the world on Netflix, recorded in Los Angeles. Hannah Gadsby’s “overnight” success was more than ten years in the making, with her award-winning stand-up shows having been a fixture in festivals across Australia and the UK since 2009. She played a character called “Hannah” on the TV series Please Like Me and has hosted multiple art documentaries, inspired by her comedy art lectures. In 2022, Hannah’s first book Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation was published by Ballantine, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in the United States, Atlantic in the UK, and Allen & Unwin in Australia. Hannah has done plenty of other things over the course of more than a decade in comedy, but that will do for now. IG: hannah_gadsby TW: HannahGadsby To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Hannah Gadsby and why is she on the podcast?
Hi, everybody. Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. Today, we are having an absolutely beautiful conversation with the incomparable, brilliant, honest, funny, and absolutely wonderful Hannah Gadsby. I have been wanting to speak to Hannah Gadsby for so long, ever since I laughed and cried and raged my way through Nanette. And then after that with Douglas. Which are her stand-up specials.
Right, her stand-up Netflix specials. And we talk about all kinds of beautiful things today, telling stories and parenting and especially neurodiversity, which I know, sister, you've been wanting to talk about on the pod for so long.
I'm so thankful that she came on and shared so honestly and quite a lot about she has a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. And I think it's so important to hear from women about that. Her story is fascinating. She went through really hard times. She was unhoused. She was in terrible situations a lot of her life and was only diagnosed when she was 30, basically.
I think it was a year before Nanette came out. And a lot about her story has to do with living... without this knowledge of herself, but just living in kind of an ill-fitting world. And it is a place where a lot of girls are, and it's just so important that people learn about this and the way that girls do not exhibit the same science of autism that boys do. We live by a male model of autism.
So that means they're looking for the same markers. That means when they're ultimately diagnosed, they're getting the same therapies when in fact the girl brain with autism looks different than the boy brain with autism. It results in a lot of real damage. 42% of girls are diagnosed with another mental disorder instead of autism when they go to get checked.
And boys are diagnosed two years earlier. So there's a lot of girls struggling out there with depression and anxiety. And like Hannah not being diagnosed until they're 30 and in her words, not haven't participated in life up to that point because they've been so sidelined by it. This conversation can help a lot of us to understand ourselves and give us insight into people we love.
And importantly, it can help us reframe neurological diversity as differences, not as deficiencies. What Hannah shared about the exhaustive preparations she has to do to navigate everyday things, including this conversation today, was so important. It reminded me of something I read that explained how we all have a social brain, a network made up of multiple regions
throughout the brain that help us navigate social interactions. And there's a new line of unpublished research suggesting that in girls and women with autism, they keep their social brain engaged, but every bit of social interaction may be mediated through the prefrontal cortex.
Which means that whereas many of us are able to deal with social interactions instinctively, for girls and women with autism, processing every social interaction can be the equivalent of doing high-grade math.
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Chapter 2: How did Hannah's Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnosis change her life?
Uh, the problem is, is the privilege of neurotypical people is they don't have to learn how to parallel play with, you know, what happened is you're pathologized. It's like, you're not communicating correctly. Therefore you are less than you are not doing this right. You are weird, you know? Back in the day, they'd burn you at the stake, you know, like totally think I'm a witch.
Like I think that's what witches were, just neurodivergent women.
I'd totally float if you threw me in the river. That blew my mind because I heard you say ultimately what I'm in the business of is to demand people be more aware of how and why they think, not what they think, because that's the reality of autism. You have autism. You have to think about how you think. That's what you do. And neurotypicals don't do that.
They just assume the way they think is right. I live with people who have some... Sprinkling? Sprinkling. It's a veritable cornucopia over here. It's carnival. Yes. And that thinking, you know, turning that lens on myself and thinking, no, this is how you're thinking about it. And that is why you're out of sync. Not necessarily there's something wrong or broken about the way they're thinking.
And how do you think that people who want to balance that hierarchy as it's set up right now, who want to connect with people of who they love, who are neurodivergent. How do we begin to understand about how we think that is building those barriers
I think a really great place to start is not to take things personally and just move past it to the next thing. It's really difficult, I think, with the parent-child relationship because, you know, children don't have the language yet. They're learning the language in order to, you know, then communicate things.
uh, what, what issues are, what the problem are, you know, what might look like as, you know, a tantrum is probably a sensory overload and it looks like a small problem. Um, so, you know, a parent might go, well, you know, I, I'm taking you, I'm taking you seriously, but really that, you know, come on, this is, you know, like you don't like that cup, come on, clam down.
Um, but what's happening is perhaps there's something about the sensory part of this process that seems insignificant to a neurotypical but is, you know, a war zone for someone on the spectrum. There's an expected, you know, bond that's supposed to happen with parents and children that neurodivergent children are always going to disappoint.
And I think one of the first things is like, yeah, you've got to stop taking that seriously. I mean, you've got to take it seriously, sorry. Words are my gift. Personally, like try and sort of, meet people where they're at. And there's always going to be a lag with children because especially if you have difficulty with language, it's going to take a while to sort of get to that place.
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Chapter 3: What challenges do autistic women face with social interactions?
Yeah.
Okay.
I have another thing that I had a moment when she was speaking and when she was talking about how her mom said, I'm so sorry that I raised you straight. And I think that that's something that we can think about and be like, oh, that's right. But then she talks about how when she was growing up, right. You know, she'd be playing by herself. She'd say, I don't want to go to that birthday party.
I don't want to. And, and, and, As a parent, but you're sad. You're sad if you don't go to the birthday party. And she's like, I'm not sad. And I think sometimes I, although I would never raise my kid with the assumption that they're straight and look at them that way, I think that I can very easily raise my kids with the assumption that they're neurotypical. So if I see...
a group of kids playing and my daughter playing separately on her own, I feel intense pain and I project on her loneliness and sadness and separateness. But that's raising her like a straight kid. That's raising her like a neurotypical kid. I just really got that from today's podcast. I want to let my kid be exactly who they are without projecting what the world will see them as.
I just want to see them through their own eyes and their own experiences.
Amen. That's the next right thing. It's like what Hannah's mom said. I wish I had been your friend.
Yeah.
Meaning like, I wish I hadn't been a fixer of you. I wish I had just been a friend to you.
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