David McElroy

I was listening to an interview today with an Oklahoma teacher who helps women trapped in sex-related work — prostitution, stripping, porn. She mentioned that many of the women want out of that world, but they feel stuck. Then she said something that caught my attention.

“A lot of times, that kind of work is very financially lucrative,” she said. “And so, once you start making that kind of money, it’s very, very hard to walk away from.”

For a moment, I had trouble processing what that must be like. Why wouldn’t someone walk away from something which she had come to see as toxic for her life? And then it hit me that I wasn’t so different from these women.

I once did exactly the same thing — but with politics instead of sex work. I’ve joked many times that I’m a recovering political prostitute. For years, I kept doing things that I thought were disgusting, simply because I didn’t want to give up the huge payoff that came with the work.

Just like those women, I was trapped by my own desire for money and success.

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Cheslie Kryst lived the kind of life that most people can only dream about.

She was a 30-year-old attorney — who held an MBA, too — and she lived in a fancy New York City apartment. Just a couple of years ago, she won the Miss USA pageant. She was followed by more than a quarter of a million people on Instagram. In addition to her law practice, she was also a correspondent for an entertainment news site. She lived a life of glamour that millions of young women envy.

Despite all that, Kryst killed herself Sunday morning. She jumped from the 29th-floor terrace of her Manhattan apartment building.

I have no idea why Kryst wanted to die and I have no judgment about her life or death. But the news of her suicide immediately brought my mind back to a lesson I learned through a 19th century poem when I was in the sixth grade.

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I got a work-related email Thursday that made my stomach churn. It was from a client asking me about an issue I’d managed to avoid to avoid talking with him about. I knew he wouldn’t be happy with a decision I’d made related to his account — and I dreaded the day when I would have to deal with it. That day had come.

For a few minutes, I stewed in my unhappiness. I worried about how I was going to handle it. And then something finally clicked in my brain. I forced myself to ask the question I needed to ask.

“What is it that I need to learn from this?”

It sounds ridiculously naive, but for the last few years, that one question has saved me from a lot of grief. It doesn’t protect me from my own mistakes, but it puts me in the right frame of mind to deal with problems. But this isn’t some technique I learned from a book.

It’s something I learned from the experience of a woman who says she died briefly and visited heaven. It might sound crazy, but it’s been useful for me.

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