adrienne maree brown: What did you want to be when you were growing up?

What did you want to be when you were growing up?

Originally asked

The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A

This is a standing question in The Guardian's decades-long The Q&A and also recurs independently in career and life interviews.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Recorded adrienne maree brown said elsewhere, not written here

I'm about to be a superstar. I'm about to be a singer.

Emily Race-Newmark, This Is How We Care, September 2023 source ↗

Others on this question

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Fay Ripley English actress, television presenter, cookbook author

Donny Osmond’s wife. Still do.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 26 November 2022 source ↗

Busta Rhymes American rapper

I always wanted to be a rapper.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 19 December 2020 source ↗

Derek Sivers Founder of CD Baby; author of Anything You Want

14. I always played music until then, just like piano lessons. Viola, violin and clarinet as a kid. But at 14 I started playing guitar and I was like, “this is it. This is what I want”. I am so thankful that I had this single mission from the age of 14 till 29. For 15 years of my life I wanted nothing but to be a great musician.

Recorded Joe Ciccarone, podcast transcript, Built Not Born, 13 July 2022 source ↗

Billy Porter American actor and singer

The male Whitney Houston.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 9 January 2021 source ↗

More from adrienne maree brown

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Question What have you come to understand about what it means to be human? Values & belief

we’re just bags of water with the capacity to reason and spiritual callings.

Recorded Krista Tippett, On Being with Krista Tippett, The On Being Project, 23 June 2022 source ↗

Question What important truth do very few people agree with you on? Values & belief

when someone has caused harm, harming them might not be the move.

Recorded Justin Scott Campbell, Medium, 10 May 2018 source ↗

Question Which writers or artists most influenced your work? Taste & recommendation

And then Octavia, I open up her books and the protagonist is a Black girl. And both the Blackness and the youth matter here, that it was like, she was writing people who were 15 years old and who already had a sense of destiny and a sense of, the world needs to change, and I’m going to shape that. I’m going to be a part of that. And she was very solution-oriented in her writing, she was very practical in her writing, so everything is very clear. You’re not going to read Octavia and come away confused.

Recorded On Being, interviewed by Krista Tippett, 3 July 2024 source ↗