DS
To my younger self. I was incredibly self-loathing and self-doubting, and I’m still undoing that damage 30 years later.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 22 April 2023 source ↗
The question
Who deserves an apology from you, and for what?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A fixed Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Others on this question
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Christy Turlington Burns
American model
To strangers. Living in New York, I see individuals every day who are invisible to so many. I want to say sorry that so many of us think their pain and suffering is not our own.
Don Warrington
British actor
To my brother, because I wish I’d been there for him more.
Andrea Riseborough
British actress
Helen Edmundson, because I wasn’t able to be a better friend at school.
So many. I have been very cowardly in the past, and it came across as me not caring, when the opposite was true.
More from Douglas Stuart
View profile →The summer of 1997. My husband, who is an American, gave up everything to come and live with me in Edinburgh when we were students, and we were so skint but we had so much fun.
People who can’t hear other points of view. Absolute certainty always scares me a little.
When I was about 18, I worked on the chicken counter in a large supermarket, and every morning I had to pierce 64 birds on to industrial skewers to load up the rotisserie. That was very grim.
My creative freedom. I was the creative director of a large fashion brand when I packed it all in to pursue my writing.
At a fashion show after-party in New York in 2004, my friend dared me to push her into the pool. I did, and you’ve never heard laughter die so quickly.
My mother and my brother would still be alive. So much of my life has been coping with the grief of losing them.
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