Suicide

Recently it's been suggested that more women should create startups, that actually everybody should.

This post suggests to me that maybe it's not such a great idea after all.

Whenever I find myself having similar thoughts I reread Willa Cather's story, "Paul's Case", here's the relevant part, the very end:

"He stood watching the approaching locomotive, his teeth chattering, his lips drawn away from them in a frightened smile; once or twice he glanced nervously sidewise, as though he were being watched. When the right moment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone. There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands."

Think about the "vastness of things left undone": Have you chatted with a homeless person in winter? Have you read Anna Karenina? Have you watched The Kid? Have you traveled to a foreign city and got completely lost? Have you held the hand of a starving child in Somalia or at least looked at a picture of her and wept? Have you written a letter to Santa? Have you kissed every (and I mean every) square inch of a woman's body? Have you sneaked in and slept among the ruins at Machu Picchu? Have you fallen in love with a woman who's monolingual in a language you don't speak? Have you tried to understand general theory of relativity? Have you tried to explain GTR to a bright 9-year-old kid over coco?

I could go on. These are all the things that come to mind that I haven't done. One day I plan to do at least some of them. Think about this.

The FB effort is this one:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2397551,00.asp

And your point about it not being easy to tell is very true. This is why the thought about the virtual chaplain. People would hopefully carry enough real-world positive thoughts about chaplains into their virtual dealings to feel comfortable "talking" with an online chaplain. If a community had a designated chaplain, that person would be known to the other members of the community and anyone with issues would be encouraged to have confidential communication with that person. (Chaplains being licensed religious ministers are usually permitted by the law to keep the contents of conversations private ... except in a few very specific cases such as child abuse mandatory reporting situations.)

Hang in there, Avner! I'm also in the middle of a divorce which would have seemed like a very bad joke had someone told me about it 9 months ago, but that's life.

I don't have any good advice, I can tell you a couple of things that I'm currently doing that sort of help me go through this pit of despair.

First of all, I'm trying to leave my past life behind me, that is I try to connect with my future ex wife and her parents and friends as little as possible, and when I do I do it only for "administrative" reasons (like collecting my books from our apartment and stuff like that).

Second, and I don't know if this applies to you, I'm lucky enough to have smart co-workers who kind of understand what I'm going through and they always try to cheer me up. That makes me feel guilty about displaying my depression at work, so that for the duration of the 8-9 hours of daily work I try my best to be a normal human being, reacting to jokes, small chatter during the cigarettes break etc. I don't know if medically speaking this is the best take on the situation, but at least I get to "cheat" on that feeling of emptiness for around a third of the day.

Third (even though I think the counting doesn't matter anymore), I've tried to set up some tasks for me to accomplish in the near and medium term. For example for the upcoming holidays I plan to finish one of my personal projects which would be of really valuable help for at least a dozen of people, and during the winter months I plan to put enough money on the side to buy me a VW second-hand van, so that I'll go around the country when summer comes.

And last, before this becomes too awkward of an answer, I've given myself "proud-of-myself" points for not opening that wine bottle that has been sitting on the kitchen table for 2 months, since I moved out of my former apartment. Maybe you can find something similar to cheer you up and make you feeling proud of yourself, it doesn't have to be big.

Hang in there!

I guess I can only really say hang in there. I was divorced before 25 and embarrassed about it, and there were times when I really struggled with wondering whether I had done the right thing to break something that was mediocre but not horrible to find a happier future for both of us. Within about 18 months, I had met someone new that pushed me and inspired me, and we travelled the world for a full year, through 20+ countries and varying experiences. About 8-9 years later, we're married, have built a new house and I can barely even remember that time during and after the divorce. Stay busy and social. Time alone mulling it over is often difficult.