From Pain to Purpose: What Do We Do With the Light We’ve Been Given?

For a long time, I thought the hardest part of my story was surviving it. I spent years trying to understand why certain things happened, why I struggled the way I did, and whether I would ever feel like myself again. There were moments when my entire life felt reduced to getting through the next 10 seconds. 

And, one day, I just said to myself, “This really sucks. It sucks that you had to go through it, and regardless of how much you want to, you can’t go back and make it different.”

I was reminded of this recently while facilitating a group with adolescents in the inpatient psychiatric unit at UCLA. We talked about how much it sucks to be in the middle of something difficult and how unfair it can feel that you had to experience it at all. I didn’t try to convince them that what they were going through was secretly a good thing. As someone who’s been involuntarily hospitalized in a psychiatric unit, I can promise you that (for many of us) right now, every part of your experience to this point just sucks. And, I made space for them to vocalize it–what they experienced, what they wished the people around them understood about them, and what they wish was different. Not because they could go back and change what has happened up to this very moment, but because they can use it as something to point them forward.

While we were talking, one adolescent disclosed being inpatient in 12 facilities in 3 years, and another shared that people ridiculed their self-harm rather than ask what was going on beneath the surface. After everyone had the space to share the pain in their experiences, I asked a different question.

What are you going to do because of what you’ve been through? Who are you going to become? What are you going to change? What do you want to do differently because you now know what it feels like to be here?

Although I am a huge advocate for turning your pain into purpose, I wasn’t asking them to find meaning in their pain to make it all okay. I was simply asking them to imagine that all of these experiences that brought them here didn’t have to be the end of their story. It was just a chapter along the way, or maybe even the start of a bigger story to come.

That conversation actually reminded me of a keynote I gave in September of last year called From Pain to Purpose.

In my keynote, I talk about my life like a candle whose flame was flickering. There were moments when I wasn’t sure if it would stay lit. The flame felt small and fragile, constantly threatened by another gust of wind, and for a long time, I thought the goal was simply to keep that candle from going out. Keep the flame alive. At certain points in my life, that was enough.

Maybe you know what that feels like, your candle has been flickering, too, and you’ve spent a season of your life simply trying to make it through the day, holding onto whatever little bit of light you could find.

One day, I was desperate for a reason to stay alive, so I asked myself: What if my light could be used for something more?

I believed everything happens for a reason, but I was sick and tired of people saying that to me when my light was going out. Even now, I dislike someone hearing my story and responding with all the pain was worth it. The pain itself isn’t what made me resilient; it’s what broke me. It was my choice to keep fighting for myself every day to hold on to that little bit of light within me, even when it felt like the darkness was about to consume every part of me. I did that. And, so did you, because you are still here. Your pain didn’t get you here; your determination to persevere through the hardest, darkest, scariest, and most isolating moments of your life did.

I believe we get to decide what we do with our experiences. For me, that meant taking the parts of my story that once made me feel broken and asking how I could use them to help someone else feel a little less alone. That’s where purpose began to emerge. It wasn’t gratitude for my experience; it was determination to help someone else who is going through it to have a better experience than I did.

I asked the adolescents what they were going to do and who they were going to become because they will make it through this, and they will survive. One shared that he is going to become a behavioral health tech and work inside the hospitals. Another shared that she wants to work on discharge planning and make it collaborative with the kids so that they feel like they have a voice in their future and their recovery. And, another shared that she will just stop and listen to anyone who is struggling, not trying to fix it, just allowing the human in front of them to feel seen.

All of our stories have something in it that someone else needs, too, because we aren’t alone. If you relate to any component of my story, it is evident that you are not the only one experiencing a broken system, a lack of compassion, or the general feelings of worthlessness and isolation.

Maybe you’ve been through something that taught you how important it is to check on people. Or, you’ve learned how to set a boundary because you spent years not having any. Maybe you’ve experienced loneliness and now notice the person standing by themselves in the room. And, you know what it’s like to be the person nobody believed, and so you became someone who listens. Maybe you’ve learned how to keep going, and one day, that knowledge might be exactly what someone else needs to hear.

I’ve taken pieces of my own experience and turned them into encouragement cards, conversations, workbooks, a podcast, a children’s book, a board game, and opportunities to sit with people in some of their hardest moments. None of those things erase what happened to me. They simply give me somewhere to put the light.

Your pain doesn’t have to become your purpose. You don’t have to turn your entire life into a mission. But your experience can become part of the way you contribute to the world. It can be how you simply show up and treat other humans going through life for the first time, too.

This is an important distinction because we put so much pressure on ourselves to find a lesson, a silver lining, or some grand meaning in everything we’ve been through. You don’t have to. Sometimes healing is simply healing, and surviving is enough. And sometimes, after you’ve had enough distance from the pain, you discover there is something you want to do with the life you’ve been given.

For me, that became a question I continue to come back to: What can I do with my light?

And, now, I have some questions for you: 

What have you experienced that changed the way you see other people? What do you understand now that you didn’t understand before? Who might benefit from something you had to learn the hard way? What do you wish someone had told you when you were going through your hardest season?

You don’t need to have the answers today. You might not know what your purpose is yet. That’s okay. Purpose isn’t something we discover all at once; we find it in the small decisions we make about what to do with what we’ve been given.

There are still days when my flame flickers. There are still moments when I need someone else to remind me that I have something worth protecting. I don’t think that means I’ve gone backward. I think it means I’m human. I’ve also learned that I don’t have to wait until my life is perfect to share what I have. I can share the light I have today, even if it’s small. Someone else needs exactly that amount of light.

At the end of my keynote, I take my candle and use it to light someone else’s. (We did the visualization with phone flashlights for fire safety. I had everyone turn theirs on.) The thing I love about this metaphor is that the original candle doesn’t become dimmer when it shares its light. It doesn’t lose anything. It simply creates another flame. One candle becomes two. Two become three. The light multiplies.

Our stories can work the same way.

Something you’ve survived can help someone else feel less alone. A lesson you learned can make someone else’s path a little easier. The thing you once wished you could erase from your story is now helping you recognize something in someone else.

You don’t have to share everything. You don’t owe anyone your story. But if there is a part of your experience that you’re ready to use, I promise, there is someone out there who needs the light you’ve gained from it.

I used to think my job was simply to keep my flame from going out. Now, I think about what I can do with the light while I’m here. Because a candle doesn’t go out by sharing its light. It multiplies it.

If you’d like to go deeper into my story and the candle metaphor that has become such a meaningful part of how I understand my life, I linked the full keynote at the NAMI Florida Annual Conference in 2025 below.