Losing my mind.
Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
The exact prompt is fixed in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire and independently sustained in The Guardian's The Q&A over multiple decades.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Pola Pucheta, The Creative Independent, 14 May 2024 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 283 →Either living up to or not living up to my potential.
To die before I know certain things.
Losing my family. And fear that the world won't become a better place.
More from Ja’Tovia Gary
View profile →You can become a different person. That’s actually my favorite thing about Malcolm X is that he transformed himself multiple times over. He became a different person and always for the better. He kept leveling up.
I’m leaving these things behind so that in 2076 someone can say, “Oh, wow. OK, so this is what they were dealing with,” and maybe they can draw some sort of parallel to whatever is happening in their reality right now, the conditions that they face right now, as much as I can draw a parallel from what Fred Hampton was talking about to what I’m experiencing now.
It’s really a kind of roadmap or a record. It’s breadcrumbs in the forest. It’s like the hieroglyphic on the wall. It’s me attempting to code some sort of roadmap that helps us think and act our way out of these conditions.
One of my biggest disappointments: I used to take piano lessons as a young girl, and then I stopped, because I was having a really difficult year as a kid. My step father had died, and I didn't want to do anything -- so I just stopped taking lessons. And then I think back and I'm like, “Damn, I could have been Nina Simone!” Haha
Certain people really aren’t getting their emails answered. Certain people are getting their emails answered at a very deliberate and delayed rate. There are certain things that I’m passing up that people think that I should be taking, jumping at and clapping over. There’s a certain amount of refusal happening right now because I’ve got to prioritize my health and my ancestral mandates.
So I don’t ever feel the urge to kind of rewrite the work.
More on identity & self
- Which trait do you most dislike in yourself? 260 answers
- What did you want to be when you were growing up? 226 answers
- What most recently made you cry? 195 answers
- What is your idea of perfect happiness? 167 answers
- How would you describe yourself in three words? 121 answers
- What are you most proud of? 117 answers
Also answered this
Felicity Jones, Johnny Flynn, Carrie Fisher, Craig Charles, Leelee Kimmel, Alan Dale
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All identity & self questions
- The The Proust Questionnaire questionnaire — 5 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject