Journalist and screenwriter Chris Jones spent 14 years as a contributing editor and writer-at-large for the men’s magazine Esquire, writing everything from celebrity profiles on George Clooney and Penelope Cruz to in-depth features on astronauts, soldiers and wild animal zookeepers. He twice won the National Magazine Award in Feature Writing for his work at the magazine, in large part because of his commitment to looking back on past events and dissecting how they happened. And what went wrong.

On this episode of Paternal, Jones looks back on two major events in his life, and how they shaped his stance on what it means to be a man today. The anxiety from work, fatherhood, and marriage led him to nearly commit suicide twice more than a decade ago - he wrote about the experiences for Esquire in a candid essay in 2011 - and then his first marriage fell apart years later, leaving him to sort out fatherhood and what the second half of his life looks like now. “If your life becomes a smoking crater,” Jones says, “it’s little fixes everyday. You can’t fix it all at once.”

If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts please visit suicidelifeline.org to access a national network of local crisis centers that provides free and confidential emotional support to people in suicidal crisis or emotional distress 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 

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