One night a week from 8 pm to 7 a.m., every week for the next two years, I sat in a ratty room furnished out of a thrift store and listened to anonymous voices telling me their stories. I don’t know how many of the people I talked to were really suicidal. All of them were unhappy though, and over the course of those years, I learned that Tolstoy was right: unhappy people are all unhappy in different ways. Some are unhappy because they stepped on a land mine in Korea and now they’re housebound, wheel-chair-ridden, and addicted to pain medications. Some are unhappy because they’re young and
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