So much of what I’d learned about autism during the assessment process made sense: of who I am and how I operate in the world, of my experiences and illnesses, of why the treatments for them never worked. The timing was uncanny, true, but I was fine: I’d spent that day with my girlfriend, whose own autism diagnosis some months before had been one of the reasons I’d finally sought an assessment of my own, and while I had shed a few tears thinking about how different things could have been if I’d known earlier, most of what I felt that day was relief, alongside a strange excitement. And so I laughed, to put them both at ease, certainly, but also because I genuinely wasn’t rattled. The moment she said that word, autism, both of my housemates instinctively, immediately whipped their heads around to look at me, nervous smiles stretched across their faces. But it really shouldn’t come as a surprise… because everything in the show up until that point works as a big sequence of red flags that I have autism. And I’m going to tell you in such a way that it’s going to sound like a big reveal. …what I’ll do then is change gears dramatically in the show, and I will do that by telling you that I have autism. About halfway through this spiel, Gadsby says: Douglas opens with Gadsby explaining to her audience exactly how her ‘show is going to unfold’, which, she claims, is a means of ‘setting expectations’ so that anyone hoping for another Nanette won’t be upset by this ‘difficult second album’ (which, she concedes, is actually her tenth). We’d watched a movie already, the kind of brainless farce that felt manageable in the early days of the pandemic, but we weren’t quite ready yet to call it a night – and Netflix’s algorithm suggested Gadsby’s show as something we might like to turn to next.

The day that I received my autism diagnosis, my housemates and I watched Douglas, Hannah Gadsby’s new Netflix special, projected wonkily on the blank wall of our front room, and by accident rather than design.

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