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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.
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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 --
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repetitive behaviors, routine,
and obsessive thinking --
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I have another surprising doorway
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into the eye of the storm:
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stand-up comedy.
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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.
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My misfit suddenly had a fit,
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and for a while I got giddy
with a newfound confidence
-
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I had in my thinking.
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But after Grandma died,
that confidence took a dive,
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because thinking is how I grieve,
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and in that grief of thought,
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I could suddenly see with so much clarity
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just how profoundly isolated I was
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and always had been.
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What was the purpose of my human?
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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?
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I'd always been told
that the way out of trauma
-
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was through a cohesive narrative.
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I had a cohesive narrative,
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but I was still
at the mercy of my traumas.
-
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They were all part of my soup,
but the onions still stung,
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and at that point, I realized
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that I'd been telling
my stories for laughs.
-
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I'd been trimming away the darkness,
cutting away the pain,
-
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and holding on to my trauma
for the comfort of my audience.
-
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I was connecting
other people through laughs,
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yet I remained profoundly disconnected.
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What was the purpose of my human?
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I did not have an answer,
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but I had an idea.
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I had an idea to tell my truth,
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all of it,
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not to share laughs but to share
the literal, visceral pain of my trauma,
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and I thought the best way to do that
would be through a comedy show,
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and that is what I did.
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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.
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I punched through that line
into the metaphorical guts
-
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of my audience.
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I did not want to make them laugh.
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I wanted to take their breath away,
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to shock them so they
could listen to my story
-
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and hold my pain as individuals,
not as a mindless laughing mob.
-
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And that's what I did,
and I called that show "Nanette."
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(Applause)
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Now, many have argued
-
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that "Nanette" is not a comedy show,
-
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and while I can agree --
-
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it is definitely not a comedy show --
-
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those people are still wrong
-
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(Laughter)
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because they have framed their argument
-
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as a way of saying
"I failed to do comedy."
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I did not fail to do comedy.
-
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I took everything I knew about comedy,
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all the tricks, the tools, the knowhow,
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I took all that, and with it,
I broke comedy.
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You cannot break comedy with comedy
-
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if you fail at comedy.
-
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Flaccid be thy hammer.
-
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(Laughter) (Applause)
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That was not my point.
-
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The point was not simply to break comedy.
-
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The point was to break comedy
so I could rebuild it and reshape it,
-
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reform it into something
that could better hold everything
-
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I needed to share,
-
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and that is what I meant
when I said I quit comedy.
-
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Now, it's probably at this point
where you're going, "Yeah, cool,
-
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but what are the three ideas exactly?
-
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It's a bit vague."
-
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I'm glad I pretended you asked.
-
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(Laughter)
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Now, I'm sure there's quite a few of you
who have already identified three ideas.
-
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Smart crowd, by all accounts,
-
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so I wouldn't be surprised at all.
-
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But you might be surprised to find out
that I don't have three ideas.
-
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I told you I had three ideas,
and that was a lie.
-
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That was pure misdirection and very funny.
-
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What I've done instead is I've taken
whole handfuls of my ideas as seeds
-
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and I've scattered them
all throughout my talk.
-
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And why did I do that?
-
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Well, apart from shits and giggles,
-
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it comes down to something
my grandma always used to say.
-
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"It's not the garden,
it's the gardening that counts."
-
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And "Nanette" taught me
the truth to that truism.
-
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I fully expected by breaking
the contract of comedy
-
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and telling my story
in all its truth and pain
-
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that that would push me further
into the margins of both life and art.
-
Not Synced
I expected that, and I was willing to pay
that cost in order to tell my truth.
-
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But that is not what happened.
-
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The world did not push me away.
It pulled me closer.
-
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Through an act of disconnection,
I found connection,
-
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and it took me a long time to understand
-
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that what is at the heart
of that contradiction
-
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is also at the heart of the contradiction
-
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as to why I can be so good
at something I am so bad at.
-
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You see, in the real world,
-
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I struggle to talk to people
-
Not Synced
because my neurodiversity
-
Not Synced
makes it difficult for me to think,
-
Not Synced
listen, speak, and process
new information all at the same time,
-
Not Synced
but onstage, I don't have to think.
-
Not Synced
I prepare my thinks well in advance.
-
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I don't have to listen. That is your job.
-
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(Laughter)
-
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And I don't really have to talk,
-
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because strictly speaking, I'm reciting.
-
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So all that is left
-
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is for me to do my best
-
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to make a genuine connection
with my audience.
-
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And if the experience of "Nanette"
taught me anything,
-
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it's that connection depends
not just on me.
-
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You play a part.
-
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"Nanette" may have begun in me,
-
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but she now lives and grows
in a whole world of other minds,
-
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minds I do not share
-
Not Synced
but I trust I am connected,
-
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and in that, she is so much
bigger than me,
-
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just like the purpose of being human
-
Not Synced
is so much bigger than all of us.
-
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Make of that what you will.
-
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Thank you, and hello.
-
Not Synced
(Applause)