The question
What is the harshest thing anyone has said to you?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.
I love you but I hate your lifestyle.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 22 November 2025 source ↗
A friend and I were talking about eating disorders and he said: “Well, we never have to worry about you not eating.”
“Your career will be over if you have the baby.”To whom would you most like to say sorry, and why? My parents, for my teenage years. I tried to run away when I was 15. We lived in a fishing village in France and, with my boyfriend, I headed to Spain to sell arts and crafts on the beach. Mum came and took me home.
This was said about me in a Radio 1 focus group: “I don’t pay my licence fee to hear scummy northerners.”
On X, I am regularly called a traitor, a fraud, a grifter, a weakling, a narcissist, a coward and a child molester.
A lifelong sleepover.
Leaving the stage from a panic attack in my 20s. Hearing the audience angry.
Self-righteousness and a phobia of embarrassment.
I’m the happiest right now. I can see that I’m in a kind of sweet spot: my parents are alive, my kids are little, my wife is hot and my body doesn’t hurt.
To kids I bullied in school. I have apologised and I will continue to. To repay those things karmically, I will watch my kids’ hearts like a hawk for signs of hardening or any distortions of empathy that they might develop.
Earnest, driven, Gemini.
Miriam Margolyes, Ben Okri, Richard Schiff, Indira Varma, Jon Snow, Bryn Terfel
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