When I first read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, it wasn’t just another book, it was like being handed a mirror I didn’t expect. Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, writes about enduring unimaginable suffering in Nazi concentration camps, and how survival often came down to one thing: meaning.

His words shifted me because they validated something I had always intuited: pain by itself can break you, but pain connected to meaning can transform you.

1. Suffering Without Meaning Is Despair

Frankl observed that those who could not find purpose in their suffering were often the first to collapse under its weight. But those who could hold on to even the smallest thread of “why” found resilience in the face of horror.

For me, this spoke directly to my growing-up years. My home life was a daily battlefield: dysfunction, abuse, and constant gaslighting. Fights were so routine that the sound of shouting felt normal, and police calls were woven into the rhythm of our lives.

And then there were the quieter cruelties, the kind that cut deeper because they were deliberate. There was a season when my family, fully aware of my chronic insomnia, went into my room and took away my sleep aids and pills: not out of concern, but as punishment. My mother (instigated my own very own sibling) wanted to “break me” because I refused to participate in something unethical that would sabotage my father’s business for her benefit. Those nights, lying awake with no relief, were some of the darkest I’ve known. It was a different kind of prison.. one designed to strip away my will.

Depression became my shadow companion. Sabotage followed me even into exam seasons, on top of a full-time job, making survival itself an act of rebellion. Narcissism twisted every interaction, making me doubt my own memory and sanity.

If I had seen those years only as cruelty, I might have been crushed by them. But somewhere deep inside, I clung to the belief that there had to be more. That even this pain could become something else.

Later, when I went through lung cancer, I understood this lesson in my bones again. If I only saw it as a cruel interruption, it was unbearable. But when I began to see it as an initiation, a painful, yes, but profound turning point in how I wanted to live? Something shifted.

Takeaway: We cannot always choose our pain, but we can choose our relationship to it.

2. The Freedom to Choose Our Attitude

One of Frankl’s most famous lines: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

Growing up in dysfunction, that line hit me like lightning. Because so much felt stolen: my peace, my safety, even my chance to rest. When you’re gaslit daily, told you’re the problem, sabotaged in your efforts to build a future, it’s easy to believe you’re powerless.

But Frankl’s words planted a seed: even when I couldn’t control the chaos around me, I still had a choice in how I met it. That didn’t erase the pain. But it meant I wasn’t fully powerless.

Takeaway: You may not control what happens, but you always carry the freedom to choose how you respond.

3. Meaning as Medicine

Frankl’s therapeutic approach is built on helping people find meaning. Not happiness, not success but meaning. Because meaning can carry you through both.

For me, meaning became the thread that wove my fractured pieces back together. It looked like transforming the scars of my childhood into empathy. It looked like turning illness into awakening. It looked like creating Crysto.light not just out of love for crystals, but out of a desire to make my pain serve a greater purpose.

Takeaway: Meaning isn’t something abstract. It’s something you create.. in relationships, in service, in how you transform your wounds into wisdom.

4. The Universality of Suffering and Hope

Frankl never romanticised suffering. He was clear: suffering is not necessary to find meaning, but when it is unavoidable, it can be transformed. That nuance mattered to me. I didn’t need to glorify the dysfunction, abuse, or illness I endured. But I could allow them to become fertile soil for growth.

Depression. Narcissism at home. Daily fights and disputes. Police calls. The sabotage of my studies and career. The cruelty of having sleep withheld as punishment. Lung cancer. These were not blessings. They were real wounds. But meaning gave me a way to grow something from them, to create beauty from what could have destroyed me.

Takeaway: Suffering doesn’t automatically make us stronger. What makes us stronger is how we meet it.

Closing Reflections..

Man’s Search for Meaning helped me see my own journey differently. It reminded me that my pain wasn’t proof of failure.. it was an invitation to create meaning. To turn grief into service, illness into awakening, and fear into compassion.

When I think of the books that changed me, this one is special because it threads them all together: the body remembers (The Body Keeps the Score), the witness watches (The Untethered Soul), the Now holds us (The Power of Now), and habits build us (Atomic Habits). Frankl adds the deeper question: “What is it all for?”

And maybe the answer is simply this: we find meaning in love, in service, and in showing up fully human.. even in the hardest of seasons.