I made a suicide attempt at 12 or 13 years old.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 14 October 2023 source ↗
The question
How close have you come to dying?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A recurring Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I made a suicide attempt at 12 or 13 years old.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 14 October 2023 source ↗
I’ve had a surprising number of near-death experiences: I was nearly blown up by a landmine in Sudan; I was stranded on the Zambezi river at night; I was bucked off a rodeo horse in Arizona and had to be airlifted to hospital; and, worst of all, I once ate a Pot Noodle.
We were doing a tour in Japan and as our plane landed, it rose again, out of the blue. About 10 years later there was this programme about 10 of the nearest misses, and it was my flight. There was another plane on the runway and we nearly landed on top of it. I didn’t know until 10 years later.
Probably when I didn’t sleep for a week on drugs in 2009. I’d had a lot of meth and my heart felt like it was giving out. I remember climbing over balconies really high up, and I thought I was going to die, until I eventually fell asleep in someone’s garden.
In the early 90s, in the Andes, caught in an atrocious storm above 20,000ft with three others. We were all in a very bad way. Some guys close to us perished; we were lucky.
Believing in, even admiring, people who refuse to believe in me, and not believing people who do.
That I can’t write.
The Prince and Princess of Wales for not knowing when to leave their home.
When I was a child, a member of staff at Wood End Assessment Centre [a former children’s home in Wigan] bellowed: “He copies them poems off of Bob Marley records.”
Also my most triumphant: 2017 at the Royal Court. Julie Hesmondhalgh reads my psychologist’s report over two hours. Every excruciating intimate word of it. Extreme verbatim theatre. One night only.
In a photo album of just one family.
Clive Myrie, Rita Wilson, Joanne Froggatt, Helen George, Emily Mortimer, Joseph Fiennes
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