The problem depends on where you're looking at it from...

A good friend of mine, someone I have known for nearly four years, called me from Afghanistan last Friday night.

He was a wreck.

He is a Marine, a reserve officer, who decided, upon realizing that his marriage was in ruins and that his professional life was in flames, to sign up again and go to Afghanistan.

He is 39 years old.

He shares my birthday, which made us instant friends, although he is five years older than me.

"Holy shit!" he said, on our Skype call the other night. "I don't mind being here and I like being challenged but my life is completely fucked up. My ex-wife will barely speak to me---which is OK in most circumstances---and my kids are treating me like I am already dead. Now I am wondering if I made the right decision. You got any words of wisdom on that topic?"

Sadly, I did. It is one topic I happen to know a lot about.

No, I have never been married and I have never had kids. But I have "escaped" so many times by now that someone should write a book, or at least a TV mini series, about it.

I am a master escape artist.

I have, in the past six years, been to over 75 countries. No, that's not bragging and most of it was for work anyway...but part of it was always an escape act.

My life has never been, per se, in ruins professionally but I have run away from a lot of people and situations I was uncomfortable with by going to, oh, say Cambodia? How about Armenia? Liberia is fabulous in October!

My friends would say, behind my back, "Oh, her life is SO hard! I wish I had her difficulties!"

What they didn't know was, at probably that exact moment, I was huddled over some keyboard somewhere in a third-world country, dehydrated from food poisoning, and typing to my boyfriend saying, "Please forgive me, I didn't mean what I said or did. Or how I acted. Please, please forgive me."

Life is kind, so I would often be granted forgiveness...until I wasn't.

"I sit here everyday watching your pets, living in our house, and talking to your fucking ghost every night because you are off in some asshole of the planet trying to save humanity when you can't even be bothered to save THIS relationship!" my boyfriend of ten years finally told me.

He'll get over it, I thought. Now, let me just go to Panama for a week while he settles down...

He didn't settle down. He left.

Sure, we're still friends, and there were so many underlying factors that hurt that relationship, but I never stuck around long enough to actually figure them out or work through them with him. I just went abroad.

My mother would always tell me, before I boarded a plane and took a last look at the smoldering ruins of my life that lay behind me, "You know that you can't run away from your problems, no matter how many miles you put between them and yourself. "

She was right, of course. But crying on a beach in Senegal is better than falling apart in New York. Deciding if your life is worth living is best contemplated in Florence, Italy. There you are no one. There, or anywhere but here, you can take your life apart and look at all of its ugly pieces and decide what to do next when no one understands your language or tries to convince you that you are, deep down inside, a great person.

You can drink three glasses of wine at noon and spend the rest of the afternoon sitting in front of a building that is older than your great-grandmother crying your eyes out with no one bothering you.

You can go and get a manicure, pedicure, and massage and walk away feeling a little bit better about yourself because you feel, at least on the outside, pretty again. AND it only cost you ten bucks.

You can take yourself out to an amazing dinner and imagine what, if your life were normal, the person across from you would order and then spend the evening flirting with the waiter...making sure to show your pretty toes.

Or...you can have a conversation with someone who lost everything, including limbs, in a needless war and think, "Shit, am I really feeling sorry for myself now?

So when my Marine friend called me on Friday, I told him that it was OK. I told him to stay put for the year and let all of the thoughts he had in his head come, one by one, to the surface.

"I don't know if I will survive," he told me, "I have never done anything like letting myself think through all of the situations I have fucked up in my life. But here, I have only two things to do: think and be ready to kill. It's an odd spot."

You'll be fine, I told him. Trust me.

"How'd you get so smart?" he asked, at the end of our conversation. "Maybe you should be a psychologist!"

Nah, I told him, I don't think so.

"Why not? You gave me really good advice, you seem to have this shit worked out..."

"Where are you calling me right now?" I asked.

"What do you mean...? Oh, I am calling you in Uganda, right? That's where you're living these days?"

Exactly.