WEBVTT

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My name is Hannah,

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and that is a palindrome.

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That is a word you can spell
the same forwards and backwards,

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if you can spell.

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But the thing is, my entire family
have palindromic names.

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It's a bit of a tradition.

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We've got Mum, Dad,

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(Laughter)

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Nan, Pop.

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And my brother Kayak.

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(Laughter)

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There you go.

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That's just a big a joke, there.

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(Laughter)

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I like to kick things off with a joke
because I'm a comedian.

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Now, there's two things
you know about me already.

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My name's Hannah and I'm a comedian.

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I wasting no time.

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Here's a third thing
you can know about me.

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I don't think I'm qualified
to speak my own mind.

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Bold way to begin a talk, yes,

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but it's true.

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I've always had a great deal of difficulty

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turning my thinking into the talking.

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So it seems a bit of a contradiction then

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that someone like me
who is so bad at the chat

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could be something like
a stand-up comedian,

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but there you go. There you go.

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It's what it is.

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I first tried my hand
at stand-up comedi--, comedie.

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See? See? See?

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(Laughter)

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I first tried my hand at stand-up comedy

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in my late 20s,

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and despite being a pathologically shy
virtual mute with low self-esteem

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who'd never held a microphone before,

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I knew as soon as I walked
and stood in front of the audience,

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I knew, before I'd even
landed my first joke,

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I knew that I really liked stand-up,

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and stand-up really liked me.

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But for the life of me,
I couldn't work out why.

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Why is it I could be so good
at doing something I was so bad at?

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(Laughter)

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I just couldn't work it out.

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I could not understand it,
that is until I could.

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Now before I explain to you why it is

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that I can be good
at something I'm so bad at,

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let me throw another spanner
of contradiction into the works

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by telling you that not long after
I worked out why that was,

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I decided to quit comedy.

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And before I explain
that little oppositional cat

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I just threw among the thinking pigeons,

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let me also tell you this:

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quitting launched my comedy career.

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(Laughter)

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It really launched it, to the point
where after quitting comedy,

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I became the most talked-about
comedian on the planet,

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because apparently I'm even worse
than making retirement plans

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than I am at speaking my own mind.

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Now, all I've done up until this point
apart from giving over a spattering

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of biographical detail is to tell you
indirectly that I have three ideas

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that I want to share with you today,

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and I've done that by way of sharing
three contradictions:

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one, I am bad at talking,
I am good at talking;

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I quit, I did not quit.

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Three ideas, three contradictions.

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Now, if you're wondering
why there's only two things

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on my so-called list of three

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(Laughter)

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I remind you it is literally
a list of contradictions.

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Keep up.

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(Laughter)

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Now, the folks at TED advised me
that with a talk of this length,

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it's best to stick
with just sharing one idea.

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I said no.

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(Laughter)

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Now, what would they know?

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To explain why I have chosen to ignore
what is clearly very good advice,

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I want to take you back
to the beginning of this talk,

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specifically my palindrome joke.

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Now that joke uses my favorite trick
of the comedian trade,

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the rule of three,

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whereby you make a statement

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and then back that statement up

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with a list.

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My entire family have palindromic names:

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Mum, Dad, Nan, Pop.

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The first two ideas create a pattern,

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and that pattern creates expectation,

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and then the third thing, bam,

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Kayak, what? That's the rule of three.

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One, two, surprise! Haha.

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Now (Laughter)

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Now the rule of three is not only
fundamental to the way I do my craft,

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it is also fundamental
to the way I communicate,

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so I won't be changing
anything for nobody,

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not even TED,

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which, I will point out,
stands for three ideas:

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technology, entertainment,

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and dickheads.

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(Laughter)

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Works every time, doesn't it.

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But you need more than just jokes

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to be able to cut it
as a professional comedian.

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You need to be able to walk
that fine line between being charming

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and disarming.

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And I discovered the most effective way
to generate the amount of charm I needed

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to offset my disarming personality

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was through not jokes but stories.

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So my stand-up routines
are filled with stories:

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stories about growing up,
my coming out story,

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stories about the abuse I caught
for being not only a woman

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but a big woman

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and a masculine-of-center woman.

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If you watch my work online,
check the comments out below

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for examples of abuse.

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Now it's that time in the talk
where I shift into second gear,

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and I'm going to tell you a story
about everything I've just said.

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In the last few days of her life,

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my grandma was surrounded by people,

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a lot of people,

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because my grandma
was the loving matriarch

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of a large and loving family.

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Now, if you haven't made
the connection already,

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I am a member of that family.

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Now I was lucky enough
to be able to say goodbye

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to my grandma on the day she died,

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but as she was already
cocooned within herself by then,

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it was something of a one-sided goodbye.

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So I thought about a lot of things,

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things I haven't thought about
in a long time,

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like the letters I used
to write to my grandma

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when I first started university,

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letters I filled with funny stories
and anecdotes that I embellished

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for her amusement,

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and I remembered how I couldn't
articulate the anxiety and fear

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that filled me as I tried
to carve my tiny little life

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into a world that felt far too big for me.

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But I remembered finding
comfort in those letters,

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because I wrote them
with my grandma in mind.

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But as the world
got more and more overwhelming

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and my ability to negotiate it
got worse, not better,

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I stopped writing those letters.

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I just didn't think I had the life
that grandma would want to read about.

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Grandma did not know I was gay,

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and about six months before she died,

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out of nowhere, she asked me
if I had a boyfriend.

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Now, I remember making
a conscious decision in that moment

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not to come out to my grandmother,

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and I did that because I knew her life
was drawing to an end,

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and my time with her was finite,

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and I did not want to talk
about the ways we were different.

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I wanted to talk about
the ways were we connected.

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So I changed the subject.

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And at the time it felt
like the right decision.

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But as I sat witness
to my grandmother's life

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as it tapered to its inevitable end,

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I couldn't help but feel
I'd made a mistake

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not to share such a significant
part of my life.

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But I also knew that
I'd missed my opportunity,

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and as grandma always used to say,

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"Ah, well, it's all part of the soup.

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Too late to take the onions out now."

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(Laughter)

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And I thought about that,

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and I thought about how I
had to deal with too many onions

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as a kid,

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growing up gay in a state
where homosexuality in illegal,

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and with that thought I could see

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how tightly wrapped in the tendrils
of my own internalize shame I was,

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and with that, I thought
about all my traumas:

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the violence, the abuse, my rape,

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and with all that cluster of thinking,

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a thought, a question,
kept popping into my mind

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to which I had no answer:

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what is the purpose of my human?

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Out of anyone in my family,
I felt the most akin to my grandmother,

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and we shared the most traits in common.

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Not so much these days.

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Death really changes people.

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But that (Laughter)
is my grandmother's sense of humor.

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But the person I felt
most akin to in the world

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was a mother, a grandmother,
a great-grandmother,

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a great-great-grandmother.

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Me? I represented the very end
of my branch of the family tree,

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and I wasn't entirely sure
I was still connected to the trunk.

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What was the purpose of my human?

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The year after my grandmother's death

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was the most intensely
creative of my life,

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and I suppose that's because at an end,

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my thoughts gather more than they scatter.

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My thought process is not linear.

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I'm a visual thinker. I see my thoughts.

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I don't have a photograph memory,

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and nor is my head a static gallery
of sensibly collected think pieces.

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It's more that I've got this ever-evolving
language of hieroglyphics

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that I've developed

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and I can understand fluidly

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and think deeply with
but I struggle to translate.

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I can't paint, draw, sculpt,
or even haberdash,

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and as for the written word,

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I'm OK at it but it's
a tortuous process of translation,

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and I don't feel it does the job.

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And as far as speaking my own mind,
like I said, I'm not great at it.

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Speech has always felt
like an inadequate freeze frame

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for the life inside of me.

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All this to say, I've always understood

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far more than I've ever
been able to communicate.

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Now about a year before grandma died,

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I was formally diagnosed with autism.

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Now for me, that was mostly good news.

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I always thought that I couldn't
sort my life out like a normal person

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because I was depressed and anxious,

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but it turns out

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I was depressed and anxious

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because I couldn't sort my life out
like a normal person

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because I was not a normal person,

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and I didn't know it.

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Now, this is not to say
I still don't struggle.

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Every day is a bit of a struggle,

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to be honest.

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But at least now I know
what my struggle is,

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and getting to the starting line
of normal is not it.

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My struggle is not to escape the storm.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
My struggle is to find the eye
of the storm as best I can.

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Now, apart from the usual way
us spectrum types find our calm --

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
repetitive behaviors, routine,
and obsessive thinking --

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I have another surprising doorway

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
into the eye of the storm:

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stand-up comedy.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And if you need any more proof
I'm neurodivergent, yes,

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I am calm doing a thing
that scares the hell out of most people.

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I'm almost dead inside up here.

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(Laughter)

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Diagnosis gave me a framework
on which to hang bits of me

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I could never understand.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
My misfit suddenly had a fit,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and for a while I got giddy
with a newfound confidence

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I had in my thinking.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
But after Grandma died,
that confidence took a dive,

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because thinking is how I grieve,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and in that grief of thought,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I could suddenly see with so much clarity

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
just how profoundly isolated I was

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and always had been.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
What was the purpose of my human?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I began to think a lot about how autism
and PTSD have so much in common,

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and I started to worry,
because I had both.

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Could I ever untangle them?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I'd always been told
that the way out of trauma

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
was through a cohesive narrative.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I had a cohesive narrative,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but I was still
at the mercy of my traumas.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
They were all part of my soup,
but the onions still stung,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and at that point, I realized

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that I'd been telling
my stories for laughs.

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I'd been trimming away the darkness,
cutting away the pain,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and holding on to my trauma
for the comfort of my audience.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I was connecting
other people through laughs,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
yet I remained profoundly disconnected.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
What was the purpose of my human?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I did not have an answer,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but I had an idea.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I had an idea to tell my truth,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
all of it,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
not to share laughs but to share
the literal, visceral pain of my trauma,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and I thought the best way to do that
would be through a comedy show,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and that is what I did.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I wrote a comedy show
that did not respect the punchline,

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that line where comedians are expected
and trusted to pull their punches

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and turn them into tickles,
I did not stop.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I punched through that line
into the metaphorical guts

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
of my audience.

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I did not want to make them laugh.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I wanted to take their breath away,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to shock them so they
could listen to my story

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and hold my pain as individuals,
not as a mindless laughing mob.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And that's what I did,
and I called that show "Nanette."

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Applause)

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Now, many have argued

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that "Nanette" is not a comedy show,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and while I can agree --

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
it is definitely not a comedy show --

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
those people are still wrong

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Laughter)

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because they have framed their argument

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
as a way of saying
"I failed to do comedy."

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I did not fail to do comedy.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I took everything I knew about comedy,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
all the tricks, the tools, the knowhow,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I took all that, and with it,
I broke comedy.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
You cannot break comedy with comedy

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
if you fail at comedy.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Flaccid be thy hammer.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Laughter) (Applause)

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
That was not my point.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The point was not simply to break comedy.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The point was to break comedy
so I could rebuild it and reshape it,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
reform it into something
that could better hold everything

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I needed to share,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and that is what I meant
when I said I quit comedy.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Now, it's probably at this point
where you're going, "Yeah, cool,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but what are the three ideas exactly?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
It's a bit vague."

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I'm glad I pretended you asked.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Laughter)

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Now, I'm sure there's quite a few of you
who have already identified three ideas.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Smart crowd, by all accounts,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
so I wouldn't be surprised at all.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
But you might be surprised to find out
that I don't have three ideas.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I told you I had three ideas,
and that was a lie.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
That was pure misdirection and very funny.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
What I've done instead is I've taken
whole handfuls of my ideas as seeds

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and I've scattered them
all throughout my talk.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And why did I do that?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Well, apart from shits and giggles,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
it comes down to something
my grandma always used to say.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
"It's not the garden,
it's the gardening that counts."

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And "Nanette" taught me
the truth to that truism.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I fully expected by breaking
the contract of comedy

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and telling my story
in all its truth and pain

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that that would push me further
into the margins of both life and art.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I expected that, and I was willing to pay
that cost in order to tell my truth.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
But that is not what happened.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The world did not push me away.
It pulled me closer.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Through an act of disconnection,
I found connection,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and it took me a long time to understand

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that what is at the heart
of that contradiction

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
is also at the heart of the contradiction

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
as to why I can be so good
at something I am so bad at.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
You see, in the real world,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I struggle to talk to people

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because my neurodiversity

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
makes it difficult for me to think,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
listen, speak, and process
new information all at the same time,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but onstage, I don't have to think.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I prepare my thinks well in advance.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I don't have to listen. That is your job.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Laughter)

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And I don't really have to talk,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because strictly speaking, I'm reciting.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So all that is left

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
is for me to do my best

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to make a genuine connection
with my audience.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And if the experience of "Nanette"
taught me anything,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
it's that connection depends
not just on me.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
You play a part.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
"Nanette" may have begun in me,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but she now lives and grows
in a whole world of other minds,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
minds I do not share

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but I trust I am connected,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and in that, she is so much
bigger than me,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
just like the purpose of being human

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
is so much bigger than all of us.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Make of that what you will.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Thank you, and hello.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Applause)