Hannah Gadsby

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

They say that comedy is trauma plus time

I don’t sleep very well. I never have. My brain is too busy. Anxiety is sometimes the root cause of my wakefulness but it isn’t the only culprit. Sometimes I don’t sleep simply because I’m having too much fun solving problems. Not real problems, to be sure, just creative problems. I’d always done this. When I was a kid, I would lay awake at night imagining how I could pack my school bag more efficiently, or different ways I could rearrange my bedroom.

Comedy made my world very big. Too big. With comedy came chaos.

In 2014, making fun of hipsters had become something of a comedy hack subject, though to be fair, I’d been hostile to the “hipster aesthetic” long before it was cool, but I don’t like to brag about it because that is such a hipster thing to say.

I hated the way hipster businesses would steal survival strategies from the economically helpless and then charge a fortune for whatever service they were hocking—in this case it was serving food on chipped and mismatched plates, and hot beverages in mason jars. When I was a kid, we drank out of vegemite jars because I was one of five kids, and when glasses broke there was not enough money to buy more.

I hate to be startled, which is unfortunate because I startle embarrassingly easily

Optimism for my own future was not a privilege I had experienced very often in my life

At the time, I was working under the assumption that I had a responsibility to keep my audiences up-to-date with the bits and bobs of my life, which I absolutely did not.

I wanted to be in a partnership more than anything. I come from a family of marriers. It’s all I knew, and I always did my best.