Nanette, and the importance of storytelling

I'm a few years late on this, but I finally watched Nanette by Hannah Gadsby. I'm not going to go into the nitty-gritty of the Netflix special, because I think her story is powerful and best told by her. I wouldn't be able to do it justice. (If you are like me and have somehow avoided hearing about this comedy special until now, I advise you to drop everything and turn on Netflix.)

What I will get into is the power of storytelling.

Humans connect through story. It's why storytelling has been around longer than the written word. What began as oral tradition has evolved to encompass any number of mediums—books, art, theater, songs, podcasts, TV, film, video games, even short-form content like Instagram stories or TikTok videos can convey story. So much of what we view as entertainment is rooted in storytelling. It's what captivates our attention and gets us to listen. For those moments, you lose yourself and your own sense of being to live somewhere else.

Hannah Gadsby uses storytelling to walk the audience through her trauma and her pain. In doing so, she speaks truth to her experiences and reclaims her own narrative. She walks us through what it's like to be truly different—and to be persecuted for it. By sharing her story, she makes her experience so much more powerful. We hear her pain. We see her pain. Then, we feel her pain.

Storytelling roots us in the present, and we are challenged to engage. Most of the time, it's almost impossible not to.

Stories teach their audience to empathize, and this is what makes them so important. We are living in someone else's existence, so we, for a minute, feel and hear someone else's reality. It's as close as we'll ever get to living outside of ourselves. We may never know what blue looks like to someone else, but we can at least get a sense of how their individual experiences have shaped them.

Stories are powerful tools that help us process. They take deeply internalized feelings, and they open up these feelings. You take charge of your narrative, and then you allow other people to see it, live it, and own it too. It's a scary, vulnerable process. Anything creative is because woven into its very fabric are the truths you believe.

Stories give us a voice and a platform to share. They give us permission to speak. That is why stories are evergreen—why they will always matter to us. We long to share and we long to listen.

We should continue to listen to people's whose stories sound so different to our own, because that is how we can continue to learn and grow. That is how we can better understand the world we live in, and how we can begin to arm ourselves with the tools to better change it.