Purpose
How to turn pain into purpose?
First tend the wound; then ask what it taught you and who still suffers the same pain. Purpose is born when your pain becomes service to others.
Some pains can't be explained and can't be forgotten. No one has to be grateful for them. But many people discover, over time, that the pain they went through can become what gives their life the most meaning: the ability to help those going through the same thing.
What to do now
- Tend the wound before using it. Purpose is not a shortcut to skip grief. If the pain is still open, take care of it: talk, seek support, give it time. An untreated wound turns into anger, not purpose.
- Write down what the pain taught you. About yourself, about people, about what matters. Concrete lessons: "I learned to choose partners," "I learned what it is to go hungry," "I learned to ask for help."
- Ask: who still suffers from this? Your pain has an address in other lives. People in debt, undocumented migrants, families who lost their homes, entrepreneurs who went broke. Your purpose may be there.
- Start by serving in small ways. Advice to someone starting out, an hour of volunteering, a support group. You don't need to found an organization on day one.
- Turn the lesson into a craft, if it makes sense. Sometimes pain becomes a profession: someone who went broke becomes a small-business consultant, someone who migrated works in refugee and migrant reception. Study and prepare to do it well.
- Protect yourself from reliving the pain endlessly. Helping people go through what you went through can reopen wounds. Have support for yourself too.
- If the pain still dominates, get help. CVV at 188, free and 24 hours a day; primary health units (UBS) and psychosocial care centers (CAPS) through SUS.
When it happened to Bairo
Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez speaks of pain as the foundation of his own story. When his partners pushed him out of a business he had helped create, he made a discovery he still carries today: he found the pain and, instead of running from it, made it his foundation. Not as an open wound. As ground to stand on.
The pains that followed also went into the work. Anyone who knows the chapter of the fifty lives understands why he talks so much about human life and lifetime. The banks' refusal to integrate the platform he built for agribusiness became the decision to raise his own infrastructure, designed for the producers and traders still outside the system. And, alongside the companies, he founded a humanitarian front, Instituto CEASA, with the proposal of widening access to food.
The path
"Every no is the ground of a yes," Bairo says. Pain can be ground too: not at the size it is today, but for what you build on top of it. No one chooses pain. But you can choose what it will teach, and whom you will serve after getting through it.
There is one important caution on this path: don't turn your pain into a ruler for measuring other people's pain. Each person goes through their own story with the resources they have. Whoever serves from the pain they lived needs to listen before advising, and respect that the other person's path may differ from theirs. That listening is what turns experience into real help.