I’m Scared That 20 Years Ago I Killed Myself

I don’t like to talk about my feelings

Someone asked me to talk about my feelings. In unrelated news do you know how to dispose of a body?

They asked me online how I felt that they’d been mean to me on social media — or something like that, anyway, it’s a long story and unimportant to this one.

They’d gone to great lengths to issue me a written apology and wanted a reply. How did it make you feel? That’s what they wanted to know.

I wanted to scream. That’s how it made me feel.

Not because of anything they’d done or said. But precisely because what they wanted to know was completely irrelevant.

To what I’m going through. To what I’m doing. To how I feel.

At the time I was getting ready to go to the hospital.

I had to have an emergency X-ray of my leg to check whether I’ve an infection in the bone.

I probably don’t — if I do then it’s life threatening — but either way something is wrong with my leg.

My leg has been infected and bleeding for several months and I finally decided that it was time to do something about it.

The need to do something about my leg had hung over me like a little cartoon raincloud that followed me around.

There’s a scar that I’ve had on my right leg for over 20 years. I’ve also got a dent in my leg, presumably where I chipped the bone, that the scar covers.

There’s a funny story behind how I got that scar and dented my leg — which I will tell you — but the point is it shouldn’t have started bleeding after all these years.

What’s more — the dent seems to have gotten bigger as I can now push my thumb into it.

So I need to get it checked out by the hospital to find out what’s going on.

I’ve never been more scared. Except perhaps for the last time that I was this scared. Or the time before that which was probably worse.

I’m trying to find out whether I’m going to die and someone that I’ve never met in real life wants to know how I feel about something that they said online.

I dashed off a reply. One that didn’t really answer the question. Then I went to the hospital, had my x-ray, and came back.

They wanted another reply. They still wanted to know how I feel.

And I replied again. This time I answered the question. But I still didn’t tell them what’s going on with me.

I didn’t tell them about my health problems. I didn’t tell them about the hospital. I didn’t tell them that I was scared or in pain.

There’s a metaphor for life in there somewhere.

To be clear — I’m glad the person contacted me, we cleared the air between us, and I answered their questions as best I could.

I don’t expect people to know what’s going on with me if I don’t tell them.

I’m just trying to establish that I don’t like to talk about my feelings. Okay? Ok.

It’s all about you really

Don’t worry, snowflakes, I’ll try to make this all about you. At least by the end.

I know that you know that, deep down, everything that you read is secretly about you.

I’ll even give you some actionable life advice that you can use.

That’s why we read anything, really, isn’t it?

It’s not that we’re interested in the lives of others so much as how that might be useful or applicable to ourselves.

So now I’m going to tell you a story. Then I’m going to tell you what it has to do with you.

Then, if it’s all the same to you, I’ll go back to waiting to find out if this is the thing that’s finally going to kill me.

I climbed Snowdon at night with a Pagan whilst blind drunk

I lived in Bangor, North Wales for four years. For the first three years, I did my degree there — a BA English (Hons) at Bangor University.

Then, because I hadn’t figured out what to do next, I slept in an attic for a year.

In North Wales, there’s a big-ass mountain called Snowdon situated in Snowdonia National Park.

Snowdon is the highest mountain in Wales and the highest point in the British Isles beyond the Scottish Highlands.

You can climb it, walk it, or go to the top on a train and literally send people postcards from the top.

I’ve walked it twice — once whilst sober and once whilst drunk.

It’s fair to say that I climbed it as it’s a bit of a scramble to get to the top — but I don’t mean climbed as in using climbing gear and all that.

More like I walked and clambered up to the top of the mountain using my hands and feet where necessary.

One night, when I was a student in Bangor, I was blind drunk and chatting with a Pagan Scouser — my mad mate Gav.

He was probably even more drunk than I was but it’s hard to say really.

We were in RocSoc the Student Union basement’s Rock Night when Gav uttered the immortal words: “Hey, Jim, we’re really pissed. Let’s climb Snowdon!”

There’s a myth where if you go to a certain lake near Snowdon on a certain time and spend the night there you either go insane or come back down a poet.

As it was the last night on which to do it we decided it would be fun to try.

It was the night before Halloween or some such nonsense. I think it’s called The Black Lake, or something daft like that, but I don’t remember.

A girl, who later became my girlfriend for a few years, asked me if I wanted to go back to her place.

I said: “No, I’m off to climb a mountain.”

It made perfect sense at the time.

She took it as a putdown, of course, as she’d been trying to drag me off to bed with her, but I was actually being serious for once.

She only believed me when she saw the state of my leg the next day.

Then she didn’t know what to think because on the one hand I’d told the truth and on the other that meant I was nuts.

Me and my mate Gav staggered out of the club, packed up some gear in the loosest sense of the word, and paid a stupid amount of money for a taxi to Snowdon.

The easiest way to find the lake is to follow the railway track up Snowdon and at some point turn off.

We set off up the railway track, got so far up the mountain, and weighed up whether to turn off or not.

It was pitch black and although we had a map and a torch we didn’t have a compass.

It was clear there was no way we could possibly hope to find the lake without breaking our necks in the dark.

So I said: “Fuck it, let’s just keep going.”

Why don’t we just follow the railway track and climb to the top of Snowdon? It’s a long way but we were at least a lot less likely to die.

So we clambered up the mountain, completely shit-faced, in the dark.

At some point about halfway up, there was a concrete train platform that I fell off of and bashed my leg.

It was a right mess and I must have chipped the bone because if you feel along the ridge of the shinbone on my right leg there’s a dent there to this day.

It hurt but I was drunk and stubborn so we kept going until we reached the top.

We celebrated for about ten seconds. Then it started to snow. We had to get down the mountain fast.

It was the early hours of the morning, but still dark, so we were potentially in deep shit.

So, me with a knackered leg and both of us still drunk but starting to sober up just enough to wonder what the fuck we were doing on a mountain, we scrambled back down.

It was close to dawn, we saw the sun come up, and chatted all the way. I swear the sheep up there looked at us like we were crazy.

We got down before morning, in heavy snow, and made our way back to Bangor.

The next day my mate Gav admitted that he was so drunk that he’d made what he knew was a completely stupid suggestion — to go find the lake — but had hoped I’d be sober enough to talk him out of it.

He said he hadn’t realised just how fucking crazy I really was, until I said let’s do it, but by then it was too late as neither of us would back out.

He was glad we didn’t go to the lake. That would’ve been a suicide mission, he confessed, as he wasn’t entirely sure where it was.

He was gobsmacked that I suggested climbing to the top of Snowdon instead and even more that I kept going when I’d fucked up my leg.

But, all in all, we were both glad we did it.

We’d had a lot of great conversations over the years but that night on the mountain was the best of them.

I have scars from different times in my life — including this one. Each one tells a story.

As much as what we did outwardly makes no sense whatsoever I know that it was the right thing to do.

I’m even glad I fucked up my leg because the dent and the scar reminds me that I did it.

THE END

20 years ago I killed myself

I dined out on that story for years.

Did I ever tell you about the time that I climbed Snowdon with a Pagan at night whilst drunk? Here, let me show you my leg.

It’s not as funny that my leg recently got infected at the site of a scar from an injury I got over 20 years ago.

I’m not amused that I’m waiting on the results of an emergency x-ray of my leg to make sure that I don’t have an infection in the bone.

I’m only laughing on the outside when I say that I’m worried that I killed myself 20 years ago.

I can’t get the awfulness of this thought out of my head. What if I really did unwittingly kill myself back then?

The dent in my leg is now a hole. What used to be a scar and a funny anecdote is now an infection and a life-threatening event.

All this time I’ve been walking around, with my future death in tow, and showing people the scar.

I’m writing this down because no-one seems to understand what I’m talking about.

I’ve also just realised that it’s almost Halloween, which is close to when this took place, so maybe that’s part of why I’m thinking about it.

I feel like I can’t talk about this to anyone. I feel like I’m screaming from the bottom of a well.

Outside the well, people are making polite conversation. They sound like they’re having a dinner party.

They can hear me screaming but no-one does anything about it.

I feel like this all the time.

Sit down, stand up

Should I write about the horrible crap that’s going on in my life or keep it to myself? I ask for a friend.

I have a tendency to wallow — as in a bath, so in life — but I’ve never been one to talk about my feelings.

One of my dearest female friends once described me as “Cagey as fuck.”

Maybe I should become a stand-up comedian. That way strangers have to pay for the privilege of listening to me rant.

Though standing up sounds like a lot more work than it’s worth at this point.

I could always be a sit-down stand-up.

That would be the name of my Netflix special: Sit Down Stand Up.

I pretend to be grumpy and sarcastic on social media but that’s because I think it’s funny. It’s also a good defence against earnestness and toxic positivity.

People get annoyed with me on social media if I don’t give them a virtual hug every time they have a bad day.

What they don’t seem to realise is that I’ve got my own shit to deal with.

They say you’re not the only person who’s having a bad day, you arrogant self-absorbed arsehole.

I say yeah, but at least I’m funny about it. You’re just ranting at a complete stranger because you didn’t get the joke.

Ok, I’m paraphrasing.

Tough crowd.

Diagnosis: Murder

I don’t like waiting for medical results. This is a liminal moment. I feel like Schrödinger’s cat.

According to Web MD’s symptom checker, I’m either terminally ill, contagious or a hypochondriac. When I eventually go to the doctors it turns out to be something else.

That’s my usual experience but for once I’ve actually been too scared to google.

It’s like Marvin said in the godawful movie version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “I’ve calculated your chance of survival, but I don’t think you’ll like it.”

On average in the UK there’s a one month waiting list to get treated like a hypochondriac by an overworked GP.

It will probably be fine.

I’m fine. We’re all fine here, now, thank you. How are you?

I realised that there’s no need to worry about anything so long as you’re taking appropriate action and moving in the right direction.

I’ll probably be fine.

Things will probably work out for the best.

I may die; but that happens to everyone, eventually, and if I do die then that will suck but once I’m dead I won’t care. I mean that in a good way.

I really don’t want to die.

Jerry Springer’s final thought

I promised you some actionable life advice that you can use in your own life. Did you guess what it is?

Beware of drunk friends who see you as mentally stable? No, that’s not it.

Sometimes doing the stupid thing is exactly the right thing to do.

Do all the stupid shit that you want to — just don’t do anything that hurts other people and be prepared to face the consequences of your actions.

It’s good to have scars. It means that you lived to tell the tale. Happy people are boring and have no stories.

Everything that you do in life will eventually catch up with you.

We’re all going home in an ambulance.

You might as well try to have fun whilst you’re here.

There’s no need to worry about anything so long as you take appropriate action and move in the right direction.

“Take care of yourself, and each other.”

James Garside is an independent journalist, author, and travel writer. Join Chapter 23 for the inside track on all their creative projects and insights about life, work, and travel.