Wolverhampton Literature Festival: Shaparak Khorsandi talks about ADHD, finding a connection with people and being an aspiring psychotherapist
Finding out you have a neurodevelopmental disorder in your late 40s can have different effects on people, but Shaparak Khorsandi said she found that it made everything in her life make a bit more sense.
The comedian and author said she reassessed her life following her diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) when she was 47-years-old through her book "Scatterbrain", which detailed her life and career through the prism of her diagnosis.
The 51-year-old Shaparak is set to bring that story to the Wolverhampton Literature Festival when she closes the festival on Sunday, February 2 at Bilston Town Hall with a show that will allow those in attendance to see what is going on inside her head.
The show, which is called "Scatterbrain", will be a love-letter to letter-writing, a trip back through her early years as a comic and woman-about-town, and many other stories about her life and her diagnosis, a word she said she found troubling at times.
She said: "I'm a comedian, so I write shows and I get obsessed about certain things and that's what I write my show about, so it was Emma Hamilton, Horatio Nelson's mistress, one time, then a show about the fights between my brother and then when I got my ADHD diagnosis, everything in my life just made a little bit more sense.
"I also discovered I wasn't the only one as there were a huge swathe of people becoming aware of our brains all work differently and the word diagnosis is troubling for me because it's not like it's something that you have to cure.
"ADHD is just a recognition that there are some things that I find really tough to do and that other people find easy to do, like opening post, so I did a show about it, which got an incredible reception, as did the book, and so I thought it would be good to take this out on the road."
