03/19/2026
Anchor to Purpose
This one may be the most sustaining principle of all — because purpose is not something that makes life easier. It is something that makes life worth the difficulty. Let's go all the way inWhat Purpose Actually Is
Purpose is often misunderstood as something grand — a calling, a mission, a legacy. That definition makes it feel distant and unattainable, especially on days when simply existing takes everything you havePurpose at its most real and useful is simply:
A reason that is larger than the immediate discomfort — something that answers the question "why keep going" when the answer isn't obvious.
It doesn't have to be world-changing. It doesn't have to be visible to anyone else. It doesn't have to be permanent or perfectly formed. It just has to be genuinely yours — real enough
to pull you forward when everything in the moment is pushing you to stop.
Why Purpose Hits Differently for Disabled People
For anyone, purpose matters. But for disabled people navigating chronic pain, fatigue,
systemic barriers, and a world not built for them — purpose operates at a different depth.
Because there will be days when:
Your body refuses to cooperate
The system fails you again
The grief surfaces unexpectedly
The energy simply isn't there
The effort required just to exist feels disproportionate to everything
On those days, willpower runs out. Positivity runs out. Strategies run out.
Purpose doesn't run out.
Purpose is the thing underneath everything else — the bedrock that remains when the surface gives way. It is what Viktor Frankl discovered in the most extreme human suffering imaginable:
Those who had a reason to endure could endure almost anything.
Not because the suffering became less real. But because the meaning made the suffering navigable.
The Difference Between Purpose and Goals
This distinction matters enormously:
Goals are destinations — things you are trying to achieve, reach, or complete. They are external. They can be blocked by circumstance. When disability disrupts your capacity to pursue them, goals can become sources of grief and inadequacy.
Purpose is directional — it is the why beneath the goals, the orientation that remains even when specific goals have to change. It cannot be blocked by your body, by systems, or by circumstance in the same way because it lives inside you rather than outside you.
You may have to release a goal. You never have to release your purpose.
A goal: "I want to run a marathon."
A purpose: "I want to show my children what resilience looks like."
The marathon can be taken away. The purpose cannot.
Where Purpose Lives
Purpose is not waiting to be discovered in some dramatic moment of revelation. It is already present in:
What makes you forget time
When you are absorbed in something and the hours pass without noticing — that absorption is pointing toward something that matters to you at a deep level.
What makes you angry
Anger in its healthy form is a signal about values. What injustice, what dismissal, what failure in the world reliably ignites something in you? That fire is pointing toward what you care about most.
What you return to
The ideas, the people, the questions, the activities you keep coming back to across years and circumstances — those consistent returns are the compass.
What you would want someone to say about you
Not your achievements or your titles — but who you were. How you made people feel. What you stood for. What remained when everything else was stripped away.
What you find yourself giving even when depleted
The things you offer even on your worst days — a listening ear, a particular kind of humor, honesty, presence, creativity —
those effortless offerings are often the clearest signal of what you are here to give.
What connects your experiences across time
Even the hardest experiences — the medical battles, the advocacy, the grief, the navigation of a world not built for you — often point toward something. What thread runs through all of it? What have you been learning, building, or becoming across the whole arc?
Purpose Does Not Require Productivity
This is critical — especially in a culture that conflates purpose with output.
Your purpose is not:
What you produce
How much you contribute economically
What you achieve
How useful you are to others
How inspiring your story is
Your purpose can be as simple and profound as:
Being fully present for the people you love
Experiencing beauty as deeply as you can
Telling the truth about your experience
Refusing to disappear
Bearing witness to your own life with honesty and care
Simply being — fully, authentically, unapologetically yourself
A life lived with genuine presence and authenticity has purpose regardless of what it produces. The world's productivity metrics were never the measure of a meaningful life.
How Disability Can Clarify Purpose
This is one of the hidden gifts that hard experiences sometimes carry — and it is worth naming honestly:
When life strips away what isn't essential, what remains is often what actually matters.
Disability has a way of clarifying:
Who your real people are
What genuinely brings you joy versus what you pursued out of obligation or performance
What you actually value when you can no longer do everything
What kind of presence you want to be in the world
What is worth your finite energy and what is not
Many people spend decades accumulating, performing, and achieving without ever asking what any of it is actually for. You may have been forced to ask that question earlier and more honestly than most. The clarity that comes from that — hard-won as it is — is real and rare.
When Purpose Feels Lost
There will be seasons — sometimes long ones — where purpose feels absent. Where the question "why keep going" doesn't have a ready answer. Where everything feels flat, pointless, or too heavy to carry.
This is not evidence that you have no purpose. It is often evidence of:
Grief that hasn't been processed yet
Depression that needs real support
Exhaustion so deep that nothing can be felt clearly
A season of necessary fallow — the ground going quiet before something new grows
A purpose that was borrowed from others and never really yours, now falling away to make room for what is
A purpose that was borrowed from others and never really yours, now falling away to make room for what is
In these seasons the work is not to force purpose into view. It is to:
Tend to the basics — rest, nourishment, connection, safety
Trust that flatness is a season not a permanent state
Stay curious rather than concluded — "I haven't found it yet" rather than "it doesn't exist"
Seek support — therapy, community, honest conversation with people who can hold the question with you
Purpose sometimes needs to be waited for as much as searched for.
Purpose as Resistance
For disabled people there is a dimension of purpose that deserves its own naming:
Simply living your life fully — with authenticity, with joy where joy is available, with presence, with refusal to be made invisible — is itself an act of resistance against a world
that often treats disabled lives as lesser, tragic, or not worth full investment.
Your purpose does not have to be explicitly about disability. But the act of pursuing it — of insisting that your life has direction and meaning and worth — quietly and powerfully contradicts every message that said otherwise.
Every disabled person who lives with intention is saying to the world:
My life is not a footnote. It is not a tragedy. It is not an inspiration for your consumption. It is a full human life, lived on its own terms, pointing toward something that matters.
That is purpose. And it is also resistance. And it is also legacy — because every person who witnesses you living that way carries something forward.
Anchoring to Purpose on Hard Days
Knowing your purpose intellectually is one thing. Being able to reach it on your worst days is another. Here is how to build that anchor so it holds when the storms come:
Make it concrete and personal
Vague purpose is hard to hold. "I want to make a difference" is too abstract to anchor to in a crisis. "I am here for my daughter. I am here to tell the truth about this experience. I am here because curiosity about this world is not finished with me yet." — that is something you can hold.
Return to what you have already survived
Your history is evidence. Every hard season you have navigated, every moment you kept going when stopping would have been easier — that is a record of a person anchored to something. Look back at it. It tells you who you are and what you are made of.
The Deepest Truth About Purpose
Purpose is not something the world gives you. It is not something disability can take from you. It is not contingent on your body cooperating, on systems being fair, on circumstances going the way you hoped.
It lives in the part of you that remains — underneath the pain, underneath the grief, underneath the exhaustion, underneath everything that has been hard.
It is the quiet, persistent, undefeatable answer to the question the hardest days ask:
"Why keep going?"
And when you know your answer — really know it, in your bones, in a way that belongs entirely to you —
No hard day, no limitation, no system, no person, no circumstance can fully take it from you.
Purpose is not what you do with your life. It is what your life is for. And that — no matter what — remains yours.
Separate Your Worth From Your Limitations"For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."
— Ephesians 2:10You are not an accident or a diminished version of something better. You are handiwork — deliberately, carefully made. Your worth was established before your limitations ever entered the picture.
The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart."
— 1 Samuel 16:7The world measures by what it can see — capability, productivity, appearance. That has never been the measure that matters most."I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well."
— Psalm 139:14
ot fearfully and wonderfully made except for this part. Wholly. Completely. As you are.Protect Your Energy"He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul."
— Psalm 23:2-3Rest is not something you earn. It is something you are led into. Restoration is part of the design — built into the shepherd's care from the beginning.
