Dont let anyone ever judge you for surviving pain, or carrying it. Pain is what makes you strong and empathetic. Pain allows you to understand the worry and weakness of others. It allows you to better form a connection with the weary. Without my own, I could not do my job as well

The reason I am able to understand my patients is because we share something unspoken. I feel it in my bones. It shortcuts the rhetoric and tells a story without words. It brings clarity to chaos and shines a light on the way forward. It has value in its universality.

The difficulty is in establishing boundaries for self-protection, not to lose myself as I once did. But that is where the strength resides, in realising that recovery is becoming a guide as well as a fellow traveler. It is sublimation with insight.

And beneath it all, weakness is nothing to judge, only see as part of being a human, an inevitability of our own story and experience on this earth. Each shining star burns out and is formed of the one that died before it. We must be aware of the fragility of our rigidity.

Not be afraid to be wrong, to be flawed, to regret and have not regretted, to take risks, make ourselves vulnerable, offer ourselves to the chaos that forms the tapestry of our shared time alive. In the end, it is just this that we share, the rest is an armour that shields us.

Life is simply that, a weak and fragile burst of light in an unending dark, and to be aware of the loss and the value that rebirth brings in the formation of the temporary is to understand the value of human connection. Pain is a bridge, as is happiness and love.

Our emotions, ancient as they are, still hold the essence of life before anything else.

So value pain, it makes us human, and you stronger.

I hope this was timely.