the luckiest guy in the world
and what competitive Scrabble has taught me about myself and about life (TW: self-harm/suicide)
“My name is Matt Canik, and I’m so grateful to be here.”
I penned those words on the first page of my Scrabble notebook shortly before takeoff on my flight home to San Antonio, Texas. In this notebook, I wrote the 3 and 4-letter words, their front and back hooks, and some of the more peculiar definitions I encountered to help me rebuild the foundation of Scrabble words I’d last studied 10 years prior. The short game of Scrabble is vital, and it’s only possible to be an expert with a near-perfect grasp of these small words. My hand-written notebook was an idea spawned by two recently deceased expert players: Lou Cornelis and David Gibson. Each carried an Official Scrabble Players’ Dictionary at all tournaments, littered with hand-written notes scribbled in the margins. I needed a similar tool to improve my game, and this notebook would be it.
I had the window shade open because I wanted one last chance to enjoy the beauty of the bluegrass city. While I’d never been to Lexington before, I was certain to come back. The city was charming, but the real appeal was in its surroundings: the rolling green hills and picket fences made it clear that Lexington would always be horse country first and the University of Kentucky’s home second.
“I really shouldn’t,” I continued.
This part was also true. I shouldn’t be here. I’ve seldom spoken about this, but I survived a suicide attempt when I was in 9th grade. I remember the day vividly — I hadn’t learned a marimba solo for an upcoming concert because I never actually learned how to read music. I tried for hours to put the piece together, but it required the use of 4 mallets (a technique I was always terrible at) and required me to read music (which I’d never really learned to do, playing almost everything by ear to BS my way through band class).
But my failure at marimba that day merely exacerbated the real feelings that led to the attempt: that I was a complete and utter failure at everything.
I had been bullied in middle school; I didn’t have many friends in high school and was having a hard time adjusting.
I had failed at Scrabble, the one thing I ever really gave a shit about, when I finished 4th at the National School Scrabble Championship in 8th grade and aged out of the youth circuit.
I had ballooned from overweight to extremely overweight — I crossed the 200 threshold in 8th grade and was easily 50 pounds beyond that now.
And I couldn’t even do the one thing that most teenage boys were supposed to do — like girls.
Usually, I ran away from these feelings by sinking into my MMORPG (Maplestory). There was no escape now: I’d be forced to tell my mother that I never learned my solo and had to drop out of the contest. Worse was that, knowing my mother, she’d want to teach me something about “consequences” and force me to play an unlearned solo in front of everybody.
After the umpteenth mistake in a row, I broke. I smashed my mallets down onto the marimba repeatedly, snapping a few. I pulled down a framed school photo of myself, which hung on a nearby wall, and punched my image in the face.
“I am a failure,” I thought, “and the world is better off without me.”
The glass covering the photo shattered, and I grabbed a large shard and made a large slash across my forearm. Blood slowly started oozing from the wound. I thought about cutting my arm again, but the pain from the first cut started setting in, and I thought better of it.
I went to the bathroom with a dual motive: (1) to stop some of the bleeding before I made a mess and (2) to find a less painful way to end things.
I grabbed a bottle of the first thing I could find in the medicine cabinet (acetaminophen), poured a large handful of tablets (around 10 or 12, if I had to guess), and downed them all. Then I went on the couch to wait and die.
Several times, I got impatient and decided to take more pills. While I never kept a tally, I know that I ended up taking somewhere in the neighborhood of 30–50 extra-strength acetaminophen tablets across the evening.
I cried a lot that night. I expected some horrible symptoms to kick in. However, I noticed nothing except a strange and indescribable sensation in my upper throat/nasal sinus that I could best describe as “tingling.”
I don’t remember much else from that day, except that I never died, never felt any other serious symptoms of my attempt, and still went to school the next day as if nothing had ever happened (albeit in long sleeves to cover the cut wound). I still have a small scar on my left forearm where I made the cut. It’s faint, but I’m glad it’s never faded away completely. I don’t think I’ll ever get a tattoo, but this collagenous streak speaks more profoundly to me than any ink ever will.
Acetaminophen was an exceptionally poor choice of medication to choose for my agent to end it, and the more time I spent in pharmacy school the more acutely aware I’d become of this.
For one, acetaminophen deaths are slow and painful — your liver can metabolize a set amount using its stored reserves of a molecule called glutathione, but if you run out of that, then you’re out of luck. By the time symptoms of liver failure actually set in several days later, it’s far too late to do anything to save a patient and a transplant list won’t touch you. You fade into delirium and slowly die, and everyone who loves you watches it happen.
For two, the LD50 (the lethal dose required to kill 50% of people exposed to it) for this medication is calculated on a mg/kg basis — the larger the human, the more medication you need to kill someone. If my fuzzy recall is correct, I exceeded the LD50 for a normal-sized teenager on that night. But because I had ballooned up to ~260 lbs, I stayed about 30% clear of the LD for a person of my size. One of the reasons I hated myself may also be the reason I’m still alive.
—
The next morning I woke up, much to my dismay. My older brother ran extra late that morning. I needed him for a ride so I had no choice but to wait. I arrived 40 minutes late to my 1st-period class. I must have been in some kind of mood that day — it’s fuzzy to me — but I remember my 1st-period math teacher, Ms. Griffin, hand-writing me a kind note and handing it to me on the way out the door. I don’t recall what it said, but I still remember that brief moment of kindness from a teacher I didn’t feel particularly close with. She’s still wholly unaware of this, but that random act of kindness means more to me now than I can possibly put into words. I settled down, sobered up, and left the terrible headspace I was in.
I don’t remember if I played in the marimba concert or not — it really didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. When an upcoming event gives me anxiety, it is helpful to remind myself that at some point, I won’t remember it, and neither will everyone else and that it’s never worth getting that anxious about anything.
I never took another attempt on my life after this. Self-loathing and poor self-image have been mainstays in my head, but they have never taken me to the same low, and I don’t expect they ever will again.
—
A portion of the Lexington tournament will remain a core memory forever:
It was the end of round 9. I’d just lost four of my last six games. At 5–4 as the tournament’s 1 seed, and with the solid 2-seeded Darin True sitting at 9–1, I seemed dead in the water in the 15-game tournament. I was coming to terms with that dull reality when J approached me in the hall. J, an older woman also playing in division 1 of the tournament, was someone I’d known for years on the circuit and was always happy to see.
J was coming off of a string of lopsided losses herself. She lamented her poor drawing to me in the hallway one at a time. I could truly feel the pain in her voice as she described exchanging 5 vowels and drawing 4 more vowels.
J has experienced far more painful events than drawing vowels in a Scrabble tournament. J is a mother whose son, who was near me in age, passed away unexpectedly. On a cosmic scale, a bad draw in Scrabble is nanoscopic compared to the pain this woman has experienced.
In J, though, I also see shades of my own mother. If not for a bit of luck (or a little obesity, depending on your spin), my mother would be in the “lost-a-child” club too. I shudder to think about it. A former coworker (and one of the most incredible people I’ve ever known) also tragically joined the “lost-a-child” club a few years ago. Life is an absolute bitch sometimes.
I let J finish her story and then said, “Look, J. We’re spending our weekend in a beautiful city playing our favorite board game with some of our favorite people. Win, lose, or draw, we’re all winning today — even if we’re getting crushed in the tournament.”
J won 3 of her next four games. I finished even hotter — I didn’t lose for the rest of the tournament, winning 6 straight games including a nailbiter of a do-or-die championship game in which I made several major blunders late in the game that were brilliantly capitalized upon by Darin. The tile gods were adamant that I win, though. They left him with a final, horrifying rack of BGGGIIV. I won by 8. This was the first time I’d won a multi-day Scrabble event in 6 years, and it had been handed to me on a platter despite my subpar play.
This Lexington win is likely my “peak” as a Scrabble player — in my heyday I’d sniffed the world’s top 10 list, but I’m not as sharp as I used to be and the top players now are just so incredibly good that I don’t suspect I’ll ever be back. But every time I’m at a Scrabble tournament, I’ll remember how blessed I am to be playing my favorite board game with my friends. Hell, I’m blessed to be. The rest is gravy.
—
Humans will forever try to understand the cosmics, but we never really will. Why did I draw each of the last three crucial E tiles while Darin drew BGGGIIV? Why did 14-year-old me grab acetaminophen out of the medicine cabinet instead of a drug with a lower LD? Why did Mrs. Griffin choose that one day to show kindness? Why did I draw 13 straight blanks at a 1-day? Why did J, A, and M have their kids taken away while my mom was spared the same fate?
I swear to remember that I’m running on borrowed time for the rest of my life. I reject the notion that the world is better off without me; instead, I pledge to make it better because of me.
—
I grabbed my pen and made one addendum to the notebook:
“I’m the luckiest guy in the world.”
I could draw 37 straight vowels and never win another Scrabble tournament, but I’ll never stop believing that.
