Nanette and why stories matter

When I was in high school trying to come up with a college major and career path, I thought long and hard about my talents and what I loved. I was a solid student in pretty much every subject (although I hated math after I reached trigonometry) but I loved liberal arts. Reading literature was my big love, but I knew of no profession where I could sit and read novels for a living. I loved to write (at that time in my life I was writing a lot of angsty poetry and stream of conscious narratives) and the one profession I knew about where I could get paid to write was journalism, so I decided that was my path.

I knew English literature was technically a major, but what was the point? I didn't know what one did with a degree in literature unless they decided to turn around and teach it, and at that point in my life, I wasn't keen on the idea of teaching. I needed something concrete, a path to follow with a career at the end, so literature, while it held my passion, was out of the question.

My first day of Communications 101 (beginning class for a journalism major) the professor grumpily informed us that most of us would wash out of the major and why. I quickly realized I didn't quite fit the personality type of the other Coms majors, so I switched majors to history. Then a year later to pre-law. Then to environmental science (don't get me started on a class I took called Living with Plants... It was not what it advertised). Finally, I came full circle to my first love, English literature.

The point to this rambling relation of the many college majors of an older millennial is to say that in all of my struggling to find my passion and something to do that "mattered," I discovered that literature had a much more important place in the world than idle recreation or a way to pass the time on an uneventful afternoon. When I was growing up I read as an escape, as company, as a way to experience the wider world from my very quiet, narrow existence. The more I was exposed to great literature, the wider the world became, and the wider my heart for the people in it. Challenging stories, the one that breaks your heart and makes you reconsider everything, the ones that stay with you for days and weeks and don't let you go, those stories defined who I was and how I interacted with the world.

I learned that stories matter. They matter in a world that desperately needs the kind of truth that surpasses partisanship and quibbling, the big truth with a capital T that only comes from a quiet place of empathy and listening and connection. Stories, as Hannah Gadsby so eloquently put it in her comedy special, Nanette, stories will save us.

The story she ultimately shares at the end of her special will break you. It's the kind of story that in its rawness and honesty makes you question humanity and why we are the way we are and why can't the world be a better place. It's the kind of story we need, because we need to examine ourselves and re-examine and then we need to do better. We need to be better. Because if not, what is the point?

My experience has very little in common with Hannah Gadsby, but that makes stories like hers all the more important for me to protect. I need to understand her experience so that I can be a better person, and raise better people, and vote for better people, and raise my voice asking for a better world.

You can watch Hannah Gadsby's comedy special "Nanette" on Netflix.
If you feel so inspired, you can contribute to an organization supporting LGBTQ youth. I donated to Encircle, a great organization in Provo and Salt Lake City, Utah.