*Content warning: This post discusses depression, PND, and suicide.
It’s International Women’s Day, and this morning my Facebook memories were filled with wonderful, empowering posts from March 8s past, but when I got to March 8, 2013, I found some posts I had forgotten belonged to this day, and the tears began to well. On this day in 2013, I said goodbye to a friend I met (oddly coincidentally) on Women’s Day in 2009 at a company breakfast. I had only been working there a few months, and was in the engineering department where there weren’t many women. I was seated between two women I didn’t know and, as I tend to do in these situations, I kept to myself and hoped someone else would break the ice.