David McElroy

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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I’m not good at ending things that really need to end.

It’s one of the enduring mysteries of my life. I like to think I’m a bright guy, but when it comes to my own self-sabotage, I might as well be an idiot. I never can see the stop signs. Or if I see them, I ignore them — plowing right on toward a disaster of my own creation.

When you see a stop sign — whether you’re driving a car or trying to get to where you want to go in life — it tends to be well ahead of time. You see the bright red sign in the distance and you know it’s time to put on the brakes. It’s for your own good and for the good of those around you.

People who ignore stop signs can hurt themselves. Their recklessness can hurt others, too. I’ve never done this in a car, but I’ve done it with my life over and over. I’m doing it again lately. And even though I see this, I’m sabotaging myself by ignoring the stop signs. Again.

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