When Pain Led Me to the Stars

They say to write about strength. How do you write about something that keeps you going when everything else seems to fall apart? Strength, to me, is like looking at the sky when everything below feels heavy and harsh, when life doesn’t seem fair. It’s like a breath that won’t leave, a reminder that there’s something vast and endless, right above us, holding everything—the storms, the rain, the darkness, and finally, the light.

Strength doesn’t save you from the pain, though. It lets you sit with it. There’s no escape, no magic key to a secret door. Instead, strength holds you close while you feel the weight, lets you cry it out, lets you scream if you have to, lets you feel how heavy it can be to carry something alone. But it doesn’t keep you trapped. Eventually, strength opens a window—a glimpse of stars or a flash of morning light—and says, “Look. Beyond all this, there’s more.”

I look at the sky when I feel pulled down because the sky shows me how to hold both the thunder and the calm, how to be everything at once. It’s strength in its purest form. When the rain falls, the sky doesn’t apologize or try to be anything different; it knows that sometimes it just has to let things pour. And then, quietly, it shifts. The rain stops, the clouds part, and there’s light again. The sky holds a quiet knowing that reminds me: after the storm, there’s still color, still life. It shows me there is life beyond the pain, even when I can’t see it yet.

Pain leads us to beautiful things sometimes. I think that’s where my love for stargazing comes from. I never expected to find beauty in my hardest moments, but there it was, up there, infinite and out of reach but constant. Pain gave me that love. The nights when everything felt unbearable were the nights I’d sit outside, looking up at those stars, feeling like they were all I had, and yet, they were enough.

And that’s where my strength lives—not in a fairytale ending, but in becoming the person I needed when I was young. The person who would have protected me, held me when things felt too hard, reminded me that I was strong even when I couldn’t feel it. Becoming that person has been my most powerful act, and it has transformed the way I look at strength.

So maybe strength isn’t about being unbreakable. Maybe it’s about allowing yourself to break, to feel the thunder, and then to gather yourself up, piece by piece, until you’re ready to look up again. Strength lets you be free, not by making life easy or removing the pain, but by showing you, just like the sky, that there’s always a way forward.