Hannah Gadsby

Before I moved to Hobart, I honestly believed that the elderly were the only people who could possibly enjoy my company, and even then I worried it was only because they were lonely and I was better than a chair.

I was, as always, doing the same things while drinking that I would do while sober: standing on the edges of other people’s conversations, watching, letting people talk at me, agreeing with everything and understanding nothing. But if I got drunk enough, I could almost believe that I was experiencing the world the same way as the person next to me, and that is not something I’d ever felt when sober.

I did not expect that coming out of the closet was something I would have to do in 1998, if ever.

Even after the worst, most stressful days of my life had crushed my spirit to a pulp, if I spent a few hours on my own, in a dark quiet place, thinking about anything my brain took a fancy to, then I could bounce back as good as gold and bring some joy back into my thinking.

excruciating limbo which opens up when you prepare for bad news and dare to hope in the same mind

There is just never a straight line to be found through a life punctuated by trauma.

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.

I can’t imagine what Kevin thought of me, but I was very impressed by how much he reminded me of a wombat.

The thing about wombats is that they might look cute and cuddly, but they have this really hard butt-plate which they will use to crush the skull of any dingo stupid enough to put their faces into the wombat’s territory.

I had also been asked to join the cast of one of my favourite televisions shows, Josh Thomas’s Please Like Me. It was a career highlight for me, because not only was I going to be in it, but Josh had asked me to write for my own character. To be given the opportunity to be the actor who delivers your own material for a television show you love is pretty much the greatest kind of screen work for a stand-up comedian. I was as happy as a clam