I have considered myself an optimist for roughly the past 30 years. I look for the silver lining in every situation, even though it can be very difficult to see. It can be especially difficult since I will not settle for the obvious, cop out, linings. There is no formula for finding it, and in some cases it does not become clear until months or even years later. Many of my darkest seasons came before—or shortly after—I began to believe that every storm has a silver lining, no matter how well hidden it may be.
I won’t pretend that I know exactly what you are going through or how you feel. Even when someone’s circumstances appear nearly identical to my own, each person experiences suffering through a different lens. So rather than offering easy answers, I want to share some of my own darkest moments—not the merely difficult ones, but the deeply buried, midnight-level ones. As you read, I invite you to reflect on your own dark seasons and consider whether any of the silver linings I found might help you recognize one in your own story. I hope at least one will.
RECOGNIZING THE DEPTHS OF MY MENTAL HEALTH DEPRAVITY
From a very early age I knew that my brain did not work like other kids’ brains. I obsessed over inconsequential things; had daily suicidal ideations that even led to attempts starting around age twelve; and sought violence so that I could feel and cause pain. Despite all of that, I took some comfort from my ability to hide my struggles, control most of my impulses, and focus my violence on bullies like some sort of vigilante.
Then the uncontrollable, unstoppable, fantasies started. By the time I was a freshman in high school, I rarely walked into a classroom, business, or down the street without analyzing the items that could be used as weapons and the order I would have to act to murder everyone in the area, even my “friends.” I visualized and sometimes sketched the bodies, the blood splatter patterns, and the headlines that would follow. Sometimes other acts of depravity added themselves as well. I ignored the first few times this happened, chalking it up to stress or insomnia. After a week, I knew that I was a monster and thoroughly irredeemable. Those fantasies persisted until early in my junior year of college. I was sure that I was completely insane or headed that way but could never admit it to anyone because of the potential consequences.
There were a few obvious silver linings, even at the time, but in full retrospect they were more of a tarnished bronze:
- I never acted on the darkest fantasies, other than the attempted suicides.
- I only severely injured a few people in my fights and they were ones who used weapons and caused or attempted to cause severe injury first.
- I maintained the ability to hide my struggles, which I thought meant that I had them under control.
The true silver lining was not revealed until many years later. When I converted to Christianity due to divine intervention during my final attempted suicide, I knew that I was called to love others instead of harming them. What I did not realize was that most of my struggles and deepest depressions came from feeling that my true self was unlovable by people or by God. The core value in my life, from very early on was Love. I did not love myself and wanted to punish others who couldn’t love me. Those dark years, in retrospect, were the key to eventually learning that Love is what I value most in my life and not just some debt owed to the God who saved me. I needed to loath myself or I never would have learned to love myself.
LOSING TWO CAREERS TO ALLOCATIONS OF WRONGDOING
These were really two separate dark seasons, each with its own silver lining. Still, they share enough in common that it makes sense to discuss them together here.
I loved teaching a special education preschool class, and I was good at it. I had a special place in my heart for the children who struggled with severe emotional and behavioral issues, partly because they reminded me of myself—only their struggles had begun much earlier than mine. That did not mean I loved my other students any less. Some were typically developing peer role models; others had speech delays, physical challenges, global delays, or complex medical needs. Especially early in the school year, it was not unusual for me to be managing several crises at once: one child trying to break a chair across my legs, another experiencing hyperkalemic paralysis, and a third leaving the bathroom while flinging feces from his fingers.
By the middle of most school years, a casual observer could no longer tell the difference between my peer role models and my students with emotional or behavioral challenges. By the end of most years, more than 90 percent of my students could count to ten in multiple languages, and more than half could read picture books.
But love and effectiveness did not mean I was seeing the whole picture. I loved children whom society often treated as unlovable, but I also blamed parents, daycares, or earlier environments for much of what I saw. Whether openly or only in my own mind, I was judgmental. I did not do enough to talk through the patterns I was noticing so families could understand what might need to change—or even realize that change was possible.
At the time, what mattered most to me was proving that I was the best at what I did and that I was “saving” those children. In hindsight, many of them went on to kindergarten and then struggled because I had not done enough to equip their families or next teachers with the strategies that had worked for me, the triggers I had learned to avoid, or the context they needed to help those children keep growing.
At the end of my fifth year in that classroom, I was accused of accessing thousands of pornographic images and videos on my computer within the span of about one month. There had been no such allegation during the previous 4.9 school years and no evidence of a single image or video prior to that month. There was also no explanation for how the data supposedly showed days when I was on the computer from 7:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. while somehow still teaching my class, working alongside my paraeducator, and interacting with the steady stream of therapists who came through the room.
Instead of answers, I was asked to resign in lieu of being fired, and the State Superintendent was asked to suspend my teaching license for several years. I did resign but I wanted to fight the suspension. I built arguments, gathered evidence, sought expert opinions, and eventually received free counsel from a union lawyer.
That lawyer advised me to state that I was not guilty while acknowledging that my innocence might not be clear from the evidence. He told me to seek the minimal penalty: a four-month suspension. He assured me that the suspension would end by October or November of the following school year and that I could be back in the classroom soon afterward.
He was wrong. The suspension ended in October, but after that I applied to every school district and private school within a 50-mile radius, and not one acknowledged receiving my application. My teaching career had been destroyed by illogical allegations and terrible legal advice. Because I had resigned, I could not even apply for unemployment. We became a single-income household with dreams of having children, depleted savings, and maxed-out credit cards.
I entered one of the deepest depressions I had experienced since my last suicide attempt. Eventually, I took a few part-time jobs. One involved merchandising beer for a company that soon began seeing me as a potential sales representative. Another involved retail hardware for a company that quickly offered me a department manager position with training toward shift manager. None of those jobs felt fulfilling. I kept moving forward, but mostly I trudged along, wishing I could return to teaching.
I soon learned that daycares cared less about the suspended license than they did about finding someone with a Master of Teaching who was willing to work for a fraction of the pay—and even less of the esteem—that came with teaching. At first, it was a challenge because families all assumed that I must be a pedophile to want to work with young children. Many families refused to have their children in my class or even leave them in the center. Within a few months I became one of the most requested teachers in the center.
The silver linings came slowly. First, I learned that loving others mattered more to me than potential financial gain. Second, I learned that some people were still willing to trust me, even after my reputation had been dragged through the mud. Finally, I discovered that helping families—not just children—gave me a deeper sense of purpose and satisfaction, even without the recognition I once received. For a while, that was enough.
A little over seven years into daycare work, I began to feel the old itch to become something more: more impactful, more inspirational, more meaningful—maybe even more special. Although I had seen clear evidence that I was changing lives, I convinced myself that working in a daycare for middle and upper-middle-class families was not what I was meant to do.
So, I took a teaching position in a program serving very low-income families. From the beginning, it was obvious to me that the program needed change, and I believed I was the person to bring it. Almost immediately, I found myself in conflict with another teacher who followed a set curriculum and practiced what she described as caring detachment.
In my previous daycare work, teachers and children openly expressed affection for one another. With two- to five-year-olds, hugs were almost impossible to avoid. This teacher believed that kind of affection was harmful for the children in our care because, as she put it, “they don’t receive those messages at home, and if you tell them you love them here, it will confuse them.”
I disagreed. I argued that we would never withhold healthy lunches from a malnourished child out of fear that food would confuse them, and I believed emotional starvation could be just as deadly as physical hunger. Leadership did not agree. I tried to limit myself to side hugs and less visible affection, but I did not have to struggle with that tension for long.
Less than three months after I started at the center, a family alleged that I and two medical providers had molested their three-year-old daughter. I was placed on administrative leave for what should have been a one- or two-month investigation. More than two months later, my attorney was told by Child Protective Services that they had no record of any allegation under my name or Social Security number. A week or two after that, the record apparently appeared, and an interview was scheduled several weeks out.
I was finally interviewed nearly four months after I first learned of the allegation, and the case was closed as unfounded within another week or two. The investigation records showed that the child and her mother had been interviewed during the first week and that the child repeatedly told her mother to stop lying.
By then, however, my position had been eliminated. Even with an “unfounded” resolution, my degree would no longer help me find work with children in that setting. I was unemployed, with no clear prospects. Worse, I once again felt that my muddied record—unfounded or not—made me unlovable in the eyes of much of the world. I believed that most people would assume I was a pedophile who had gotten away with it, especially if they knew about my struggles with mental health. I did not hide my depression from my wife, but I minimized it as much as possible so she would not worry about me.
I wanted to escape unemployment as quickly as possible, which meant training for something other than teaching. I had always loved cooking and still dream of opening a nonprofit restaurant someday, so culinary school briefly appealed to me. But I had two young children at home, and I knew a new line cook’s salary would not stretch far enough.
The only other option that interested me was law. Law school was out of reach while I was unemployed, so I enrolled in a one-year paralegal program. My original goal was to work with youth or with people who had been wrongfully accused, offering better guidance than I had received from the union attorney.
During that year, several professors told me I belonged in law school rather than paralegal training. I earned an easy 4.0 and was named paralegal student of the year. Then I sent out hundreds of resumes and applications, received very few interviews, and got no offers. The depression deepened.
Eventually, a friend from church helped me get into an elder law firm that needed someone with my background. I hated the work, and the attorney and I were not so much oil and water as gasoline and a blowtorch. I was miserable, but I had an income again and could contribute to my family.
I finally escaped when a family friend who practiced civil litigation asked me to join the firm he planned to move to so I could work as his paralegal. It was another elder law firm, and I did not want more elder law, but I expected it to be temporary. More than eleven years later, I am still there—as a partner.
What changed was Medicaid. I fell in love with the work because it challenged me and allowed me to help families during some of the lowest moments of their lives. I was able to act, in a very real way, as the hands and feet of Jesus: improving lives and seeing the impact almost immediately. The rest is history. But I could not see the silver lining in the false allegations that ended my work with children until I discovered the joy and purpose of this new work.
I loved working with children, and I believe I was good at it. Yet even as I got older and suspicions toward men working with children lessened, I never fully escaped the feeling of being judged by families. Even when I was one of the most requested teachers, some parents would not allow their children to be in my care.
For someone who values loving and being loved above all else—and who has a long history of harming himself and others when he feels unlovable—that life was unsustainable. I needed a way to love and protect vulnerable people without constantly living under a cloud of doubt.
Despite the abundance of lawyer jokes and the generally negative view many people have of the profession, that particular fear has not followed me into law. I even joke about it now: lawyers are not as bad as the jokes make us seem; it is just the 99 percent who are that make the rest of us look bad. I have also trained my friends and family to call me an attorney, because people joke about lawyers but turn to attorneys when they need someone to save their bacon.
In short, the darkest time I had experienced in nearly two decades after my last suicide attempt eventually revealed the brightest silver lining—once I could finally see it.
There have been many storms since then. Life will never be pure sunshine and rainbows. But once you have learned to recognize a few well-hidden silver linings, new storm clouds can begin to look less like total darkness and more like shadows passing over the silver light already present in everyday life.
CONCLUSION
You do not have to be an optimist to be happy, nor a pessimist to be sad. There is no magic formula for finding the silver lining in every challenge, whether large or small. What you need is an understanding of the lens through which you view the world, a good measure of patience, and a desire not to remain miserable.
If my core value had been Financial Stability rather than Love, my life would likely have taken a very different path. Working twelve months a year for two-thirds of what I had earned in nine months as a public-school teacher would never have felt viable. Moving into law might not have seemed much better either, at least not until long after law school. With law school loans still hanging over my head, I might still be miserable today—or I might have found a way to pay them off and called that the silver lining.
That does not mean someone with financial stability, or any other core value, could not find a silver lining. It means they might need to look for a different one. The specific value is less important than knowing what your core value is, because that knowledge helps you understand how a painful situation might strengthen, clarify, or redirect what matters most to you.
If I had demanded immediate understanding of what good could possibly come from my suffering, I could easily have turned away from God for not giving me another miraculous intervention. I am not naturally patient with online purchases, drive-through orders, or food when I am hungry. But my past has made me far more patient when waiting for God to show me what I need to understand.
Even as I write this essay, I know I could not have followed my own advice in my teens or early twenties, and many readers may not have that patience yet either. My prayer for those who do not is simple: may they find a way to endure until the silver lining is revealed, or may they learn to develop the patience needed to keep going until it is.
If I had not carried an all-consuming need never to be as miserable as I was on the day I was saved, I could have let self-pity consume me until it destroyed my relationships and my life. Some people, whether because of mental health challenges or life experiences that shaped unusual core values, seem to value misery above almost everything else. Statler and Waldorf from The Muppets come to mind. For people like that, misery itself may be the silver lining.
For the rest of us, it often takes a conscious decision to stop wallowing in the pains of the past. We can learn from those dark times by finding the silver lining, or we can choose to let those pains go without needing to identify one. Sometimes the past is simply the past—Hakuna Matata.
One of my all-time favorite quotes is often attributed to Nelson Mandela: “Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” You will not improve your health or your life by obsessing over the storms you have survived while waiting for someone else to magically wipe them away and clean up the aftermath for you.