Pain = Info - Not Identity

There's a moment that happens, sometimes gradually, sometimes all at once, when you realize you've been carrying someone else's story about who you are. Not your story. Their interpretation of your pain, your mistakes, your so-called failures. And somewhere along the way, you started believing it was true.

You are not your pain.

Let me say that again, because this is where everything shifts: You are not your pain.

Yet so many of us, particularly women who've lived rich, complex lives, have spent decades identifying with our wounds. We've become the divorce, the betrayal, the disappointment, the trauma. We introduce ourselves through our scars before we ever mention our light. We've confused the information we gathered from difficult experiences with our actual identity.

This confusion keeps us trapped in what I call the P.A.S.T. — Pain, Assumptions, Stories, and Triggers. And living from this place means we're operating from crushed feelings and emotions rather than from the powerful, divine BEings we actually are.

The Difference Between Information and Identity

Pain is data. It's feedback. It's the Universe showing you where growth is needed, where boundaries were crossed, where you gave your power away. But data is not destiny, and information is not identity.

When you cut your hand, you don't become "the person who cut their hand." You acknowledge the wound, you tend to it, you learn to be more careful with the knife, and you move forward with new awareness. The cut healed, but the lesson remained.

Emotional and spiritual wounds work the same way, except we've been socialized to wear them like badges, to let them define our entire existence. We say things like "I'm damaged" or "I'm broken" or "I'm too old to change" when what we really mean is: "I experienced damage. I felt broken. I believed for too long that change wasn't possible."

The experience happened. But it is not who you are.

Your true identity, the essence of who you've always been, is Spirit having a human experience. You are the observer of the pain, not the pain itself. You are the consciousness that survived, adapted, and continued forward despite the difficulty. That's power. That's who you actually are.

Living From Your Higher Self vs. Living From Hurt

When you identify with your pain, you're living from your ego's crushed perspective. The ego loves to replay old footage, to remind you of every slight, every loss, every moment someone made you feel small. It whispers: "This is who you are. This is all you'll ever be."

But that's not your higher self speaking. That's the wounded ego trying to protect you by keeping you small, keeping you from taking risks, keeping you from stepping into the fullness of your power.

Your higher self, the part of you connected to divine wisdom, knows something entirely different. It knows that every experience was simply information gathering. Every heartbreak taught you about love. Every disappointment revealed what you truly value. Every betrayal showed you the importance of self-trust. Every failure demonstrated resilience you didn't know you possessed.

After 50, you have accumulated enough data to recognize the patterns. You've lived long enough to see how the painful experiences were actually catalysts for your greatest transformations. You know, really know that what felt like the end was often just the beginning.

This awareness is your advantage. This is what younger women are still learning. You already know.

The Ego's Grip and the Path to Liberation

The ego maintains control through repetition. It plays the same painful memories on a loop, insisting they define you. It creates assumptions about what's possible based on what happened before. It weaves stories that justify staying stuck. And it sets up triggers that keep you reacting from hurt rather than responding from wisdom.

This is the P.A.S.T. operating system, and it runs automatically until you consciously choose to upgrade.

Liberation comes through awareness. When you catch yourself saying "I am [insert painful experience]," pause. Reframe it: "I experienced [painful event], and here's what I learned." When you notice yourself making decisions based on old wounds, stop. Ask: "Is this my higher self speaking, or is this my ego trying to keep me safe by keeping me small?"

The shift from identification to information happens in these micro-moments of choice. Each time you choose to see pain as data rather than destiny, you reclaim a piece of your authentic power.

Transforming Pain Into Propulsion

Here's what changes everything: pain isn't meant to weigh you down. It's meant to propel you forward.

Think of it like fuel. The experiences that hurt you most contain the most potent energy for transformation. But you can't access that energy while you're busy being the pain. You access it when you extract the wisdom and leave the identification behind.

After 50, you have the perspective to do this extraction work. You can look back at your 30-year-old self and see what she couldn't see then. You can recognize patterns your 40-year-old self was just beginning to understand. You can connect dots that form a clear picture of growth, resilience, and evolution.

This isn't about toxic positivity or pretending painful things didn't hurt. They did hurt. They were real. They mattered. But they don't get to be the entire story. They don't get to be your identity.

You are not the trauma that happened to you. You are the force that survived it, learned from it, and chose to keep going despite it. That force, that unstoppable essence, is who you actually are.

The Joy That Replaces Pain

When you stop carrying pain as identity and start treating it as information, something remarkable happens: joy rushes in to fill the space.

Not manufactured happiness. Not forced gratitude. But genuine, authentic joy that comes from recognizing your own power. The joy of knowing you're not a victim of your past but a veteran of it. The joy of understanding that every hard thing you survived made you more capable, not more damaged.

This is the joy available to women over 50 who choose to rewrite their relationship with pain. This is the joy that emerges when you realize: "I am not my wounds. I am the healing. I am not my mistakes. I am the wisdom. I am not my past. I am the present moment, alive and powerful and still evolving."

When you recognize that you ARE purpose itself, not something you need to find outside yourself but the divine essence you've always been, the pain loses its grip. When you identify with pain, you disconnect from this truth. When you see pain as information, you reconnect with purpose: to continue evolving, to continue expanding, to continue expressing the fullness of who you are.

Moving Forward With Wisdom

Inside of the tube of life there is a force that keeps moving forward, pulling you toward what's next. You can move through it carrying the weight of painful identities, or you can move through it propelled by the wisdom those experiences created.

After 50, you get to choose. You've earned the right to choose. You have enough perspective, enough experience, enough proof of your own resilience to finally say: "That happened, and I am more than that."

Your identity is not found in your pain. It's found in your power to transform that pain into progress. It's found in your ability to gather information from every experience and use it to move faster, smarter, more intentionally toward what you truly want.

You are Spirit having a human experience. The human part includes pain, that's part of being alive. But the Spirit part? That's infinite. That's eternal. That's unchangeable.

And that's who you really are.

The shift from pain-as-identity to pain-as-information is the difference between staying stuck and stepping into the most powerful chapter of your life. After 50, you have all the data you need. Now it's time to use it.

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About the Author

Dr. Diva Verdun, the Fierce Factor Expert and Architect of Ageless Power™, is the founder of FENOM University and the Age with Power™ movement, where she empowers ambitious women to crush it after 50 and rewrite the rules of aging. Through her signature Core 4 Principles of F.I.R.E.™ — Purpose, Passion, Prosperity, and Power — she guides women to ignite their inner brilliance, embody their authentic power, and expand into a life of bold, liberated expression. On the campus of FENOM University, Dr. Diva leads transformational experiences, legacy brand training, and deep mindset shifts designed to help women rise into their next chapter with unstoppable fire.

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