Sometimes the People Giving the Advice Are Still Untested
Long before life humbled me properly, I spent part of my graduate school years in the United States, where I volunteered in coaching and counseling roles with distressed teenage girls. Most of them were carrying burdens far too heavy for their age — abuse, instability, depression, broken homes, hopelessness, confusion. They were young girls desperately trying to find a reason to keep going.
And somehow, while trying to encourage them, I was also healing parts of myself.
I drew from what I knew: growing up under difficult conditions in Africa, learning resilience early, navigating survival with dignity, and carrying a deep determination to succeed no matter what life looked like at the time. I spoke to them from experience, from grit, from faith, and from hope.
Every night, I would go home and pray the same prayer:
“God, please use me as an instrument of healing.”
At the time, I truly believed I understood pain.
I didn’t.
But maybe that season planted the first seed of what my life would later become.
Even after that program ended, the conversations never stopped. Over the years, people kept finding me. Women. Men. Friends. Strangers. People from different countries, backgrounds, and walks of life. Somehow, I always became the person they called when life collapsed.
And interestingly, my prayer never changed.
At least not initially.
Then Life Pulled the Ground from Under Me
There’s a particular kind of suffering that changes your entire internal structure.
The kind that leaves you sitting in silence staring at walls.
The kind that rearranges your understanding of people, love, safety, loyalty, faith — everything.
At some point, my own life fell apart in ways I could never have imagined.
Everything I held close began slipping through my hands. Betrayals. Deception. Psychological warfare. Disappointments layered on top of grief. Situations so emotionally brutal they could push someone toward complete hopelessness.
I remember thinking:
“How can this much happen to one person at once?”
And slowly, my prayers changed.
I stopped asking God to use me.
Instead, I started questioning Him.
Why would You allow this?
What did I do wrong?
I’m not perfect, but I genuinely tried to live right. I tried to love right. I tried to help people. So what exactly was this lesson supposed to be?
And the answer I received for a very long time was silence.
Honestly, that silence was one of the hardest parts.
Because when you’re suffering deeply, silence can feel almost offensive.
Pain Has a Way of Expanding Your Understanding
A few years later, after enough heartbreak, enough reflection, enough anger, enough surrender, and enough emotional exhaustion, something changed inside me.
It wasn’t dramatic. It was more like quiet understanding finally arriving after years of internal noise.
By then, my prayers had evolved into something closer to silent meditation. I had stopped demanding answers because life had already beaten most of the noise out of me.
And one day, almost out of nowhere, I heard this thought so clearly inside myself:
“How can you guide people into lives you do not understand?”
Followed by another:
“How do you help someone heal from pain you have never truly experienced?”
I froze.
Because suddenly, so many things made sense at once.
And honestly?
I was slightly irritated by the wisdom of it all.
You mean to tell me I had to go through all that just to understand people better?
I could have gotten another degree.
A certification.
A specialization.
A nice little workshop perhaps.
Something less violent.
I remember literally shaking my head and laughing to myself because the realization felt both profound and deeply offensive.
But the more I sat with it, the more I understood something important:
Pain had not necessarily made me wiser academically.
It had made me softer where I used to be rigid.
It had made me deeper where I used to be simplistic.
It had made me listen differently.
And most importantly, it had made me understand people from the heart instead of just from observation.
That changed everything.
Why Some Healing Feels Different
If you’ve read my posts on “Do Not Weaponize Trauma” and “Finding Your Therapy,” then you already know I’ve spent years navigating my own healing journey.
I’ve worked with therapists.
Changed therapists.
Searched endlessly for the “right fit.”
And through that process, I came to understand something many people quietly struggle with:
Not every therapist can hold your pain properly.
Sometimes the issue is not competence.
Sometimes it’s connection.
Because healing feels different when the person sitting across from you understands your emotional language — not just clinically, but humanly.
That doesn’t mean therapists need to suffer exactly as you have to help you. Absolutely not. Many incredible therapists help people beautifully without sharing identical experiences.
But there is something profoundly healing about being understood without excessive explanation.
About speaking and not feeling translated incorrectly.
About someone recognizing the emotional texture of your experience because they have touched difficult terrain themselves.
Sometimes people cling tightly to therapists who make them feel seen because that feeling is actually rare.
And honestly, I understand why now.
I’m Still Becoming Too
To be clear, I’m not a therapist.
And right now, I don’t necessarily plan to become one professionally.
But over time, I’ve accepted something about myself that I resisted for years:
Part of my ability to help people may genuinely be spiritual in nature.
Not magical or mystical superiority.
Just an unusual ability to sit with complexity, identify patterns, untangle emotional knots, and help people see themselves more clearly when life becomes confusing.
And strangely enough, my own pain sharpened that ability.
Not because suffering is beautiful.
Some suffering is absolutely horrific.
But because surviving certain experiences forces you to develop depth you probably would never have pursued voluntarily.
The truth is, I’m still learning too.
Still transforming.
Still healing.
Still becoming.
I do not write from a mountaintop.
I write from the middle of the journey — sometimes crawling, sometimes limping, sometimes laughing inappropriately during serious moments because that’s how some of us survive.
But maybe that’s also what makes the connection real.
Because people don’t always need perfection.
Sometimes they simply need someone honest enough to say:
“I know this road hurts. I’ve walked parts of it too.”
Sometimes Purpose Is Hidden Inside the Pain
Looking back now, I no longer see my painful seasons as interruptions to my purpose.
I think they were part of the preparation.
Not all pain carries meaning.
But sometimes, buried underneath suffering, there is expansion happening quietly inside us.
A deeper compassion.
A sharper discernment.
A softer heart.
A more honest understanding of humanity.
And sometimes the very thing that almost breaks you becomes the thing that allows you to genuinely help someone else survive.
Not theoretically.
But truthfully.
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Final Thoughts
If you are currently inside a painful season that makes absolutely no sense to you, I won’t insult you by pretending everything happens beautifully or neatly.
Some experiences are devastating. Some losses permanently change you. Some wounds leave scars that become part of who you are.
But I will say this:
Do not rush to discard your pain before you understand what it came to teach you.
Too often, we spend our energy trying to escape suffering when the real invitation is to learn from it. Not because pain is good, but because pain is mostly one of life’s greatest teachers.
Sometimes life is expanding your emotional vocabulary in ways you cannot yet understand. Sometimes it is deepening your compassion. Sometimes it is sharpening your discernment. Sometimes it is preparing you to walk beside someone whose struggle mirrors your own.
And one day, you may discover that the very thing you prayed would leave your life became the source of your greatest wisdom.
Your pain may not be your purpose, but it may become part of the path that leads you there.
The experiences that broke your heart may also become the experiences that help mend someone else’s.
That has certainly been true for me.
The older I get, the more I realize that my ability to guide, encourage, coach, and help people untangle difficult situations does not come solely from knowledge. It comes from having lived through enough of life to recognize pain when it walks into the room.
I am still learning. Still healing. Still becoming.
But if you find yourself standing at a crossroads, struggling to make sense of your circumstances, your relationships, your purpose, or the lessons hidden inside your challenges, perhaps my journey can help illuminate part of yours.
Because sometimes healing begins not when someone gives you the answers, but when someone helps you ask better questions.
And sometimes purpose is simply pain transformed into service.
