Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?

Originally asked

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

The Guardian's The Q&A has retained this Proust-derived prompt from at least 2007 through 2026, and ABC independently put it to the Obamas in 2011.

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

Recorded Laurie Metcalf said elsewhere, not written here
Impatience. The inability to ever finish a knitting project.

Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, February 2018 source ↗

Others on this question

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Bruno Tonioli Italian choreographer
I don’t think anyone should deplore anything about themselves. You can always improve things, but by deploring you’re putting yourself on a losing streak.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 15 April 2023 source ↗
Joyce Carol Oates Novelist, short story writer and essayist
If I had a trait that I truly deplored, I would work to erase or modify it…Probably, a lack of discipline. (Though people think that I write quickly, & don’t revise, quite the reverse is true.) To myself, I work very slowly & painstakingly, & am often frustrated by accomplishing so little. My friend Margaret Atwood has said that in the late afternoon she is likely to be overcome by a feeling of desperation that she has accomplished so little that day, & this is a feeling I share, often. It seems that I waste most of my time gazing out the window here at my (overgrown) garden; & when I am in Berkeley, where I spend about one-third of the year, I am forever gazing out the window toward the San Francisco Bay & a continually changing, always-beautiful sky.
Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, November 2018 source ↗

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