A colleague on my team here in New York has been on paternity leave almost since I started. Despite that, he’s been extremely proactive in reaching out to help me with projects I’ve been working on, and he’s gone out of his way to check in on me to make sure I’m okay and not about to quit (it’s always a concern in a company that is scaling and going through a lot of constant change). We clicked since we first met. He’s the kind of person who just has this warm aura where you immediately feel like you can trust him. You’re not quite sure why, but it’s just a feeling.

Today, he messaged me to let me know that while we have a lot in common, one of the things he recently discovered we also have in common is that we’ve both experienced the suicide of an immediate family member. His father took his own life in the same year Ed did, in 2013, and since then, his family just doesn’t talk about it. I always knew his family wasn’t very close despite all being in the New York area, but now, I finally realized why. “What you said about awareness really hits home. We just don’t talk about it, but we should.”

We have more in common than I thought.