Shaparak Khorsandi It’s hard but you can do it

Comedian and author 1 September 2021

At 16 I was extremely shy and quiet and had very long, thick curly hair that I hid behind.

I was very self-conscious about my weight and couldn’t talk to boys easily.

I just hung out with a few girlfriends and went to a lot of indie discos.

At school I only got four GCSES because I had undiagnosed ADHD and dyslexia.

At that time racism was only talked about in the context of racial slurs. Or duffing people up in alleyways. We didn’t have the vocabulary we have now to describe the more subtle racism that even the people who were harming us weren’t aware they were doing.

We felt in literal danger as children. In 1984 terrorists were sent from Iran to shoot my dad (exiled Iranian poet Hadi Khorsandi).

The plot was foiled but it was a trauma. My dad was my absolute hero. I’d love to say to my anxious 16-year-old self:

“You did it. It was really f***ing hard but you did it and it’s so much fun.”

I still meet people I can’t believe I’m meeting. At an awards party and I stood and stared at Billy Connolly because I think he and

MY HERO Shaparak and her poet father Hadi

Richard Pryor are the greatest comics ever. He saw me staring and understood that giving a comic like me a moment of his time would provide me with a precious memory.

He came over with a chocolate-covered strawberry and said “I brought this for you” and we had a silly conversation about chocolate strawberries for about 20 seconds. Then he kissed my hand and said “I’ve got to go now”. And off he went.

I thought that was the most humane, compassionate thing, to know how happy you can make someone by just saying hello.

If I could tell my 16-year-old self that one day Billy

Connolly’s going to come over to you at a party and give you a chocolate-covered strawberry... that would be a very big deal for me.

SWEET TIMES Shaparak now and, below, in 2008