The question
What lesson has mattered most in your life?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Verbatim recurring item in The Guardian Q&A; two fully readable publisher-hosted respondent pages establish institutional recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Life is not worth living if there is no one you would die for.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 14 October 2023 source ↗
Life is never fair.
To keep going and never give up, and to enjoy it to the absolute full because, at any moment, the curtain can fall.
Shakespeare said, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” – I think that’s true.
Stay out of other people’s business.
I would build relationships. I would remember people’s significant moments. I would not fear closeness.
Also my most triumphant: 2017 at the Royal Court. Julie Hesmondhalgh reads my psychologist’s report over two hours. Every excruciating intimate word of it. Extreme verbatim theatre. One night only.
When I was a child, a member of staff at Wood End Assessment Centre [a former children’s home in Wigan] bellowed: “He copies them poems off of Bob Marley records.”
Believing in, even admiring, people who refuse to believe in me, and not believing people who do.
I made a suicide attempt at 12 or 13 years old.
I spent my life searching for family. I travelled around the world to look each one of them in the eye. Unfortunately, but understandably, for most of them, I am their biggest disappointment.
Eleanor Tomlinson, Richard Schiff, Bill Clinton, John Waters, Caroline Lucas, Aung San Suu Kyi
Search the directory for somebody in particular.