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Dear Lamplight Community,
As care providers, we often talk about interventions, strategies, assessments, plans, outcomes, and tools. These are necessary, but not sufficient. Sometimes, the most meaningful moments are the instances that can’t be measured—when someone says, “I’ve never told anyone this before…”
In this way, when we ask for help, I believe we’re asking for something much deeper: Do you see what I’ve been carrying? And for how long?
Similar to a storm, what we carry isn’t just one thing, though we use the single word, ‘story,’ as a container. A storm is comprised of wind, rain, pressure, lightning, and atmosphere. Our experiences are often just as uncertain, violent, distorting, striking, powerful, and perhaps cleansing. Likewise, stories aren’t a single moment: They’re a myriad of relationships, identity, culture, memory, resiliency, and survival.
As care providers, we often meet people when the storm is most visible via diagnoses, crises, behaviour challenges, and symptoms. But we must remember that they’ve been navigating this weather long before it ever arrived. This is a form of unparalleled wisdom.
A story—a glimpse into the world only one can truly know—is an invitation, not just information. As such, it comes with responsibility: Honouring the pauses, contradictions, and all that remains unfinished (and might for a while). Offering care, then, isn’t merely a translation of the words people say into a next step…
Solutions are vital, of course, but storytelling asks us to be present before the solution is considered—to listen without searching for an explanation, and refrain from turning pain into a problem to solve.
That first step isn’t leaving the storm; it’s knowing that we don’t have to stand inside it alone. Therefore, holding someone else’s light—as they learn to hold it themselves—means we must recognize our own.
As care providers, we don’t enter spaces empty-handed. Our own lives are present in how we show up. We’re not outside the story; we meet it with humility.
The purpose of care has never been to remove storms, or even to create a world without them. Our ecosystem needs storms, in more ways than one. The goal, rather, is to help folks see their light, alongside ours, always peeking through the clouds.
Until next time,
Maria
Maria Estrada is a mental health advocate, speaker, educator, and professionally trained Child & Youth Counsellor specializing in mental health and addiction. An immigrant to Canada as a child, Maria encountered mental illness, stigma, and systemic gaps in care at a young age—experiences that shaped her path through diagnosis, relapse, recovery, and ultimately self-advocacy.
Maria works at the intersection of lived experience and professional practice, supporting youth with complex mental health needs while speaking publicly about resilience, recovery, and reform within the mental healthcare system. Her work and advocacy have been featured by CTV News, CBC News, The Toronto Star, Oakville News, Inside Halton, and Inspire By Example. She has also been profiled through MindYourMind as part of its Unsinkable advocacy series.
Her leadership and community impact have been recognized with the United Way Halton Hamilton Community Speaker Award and the Vicky Award from Shine Out Shout Out. In 2024, Maria was selected as a Catalyst Fellow with The Women’s Impact Alliance. She is also a graduate of the Let’s Lead Program at Yale University.
Maria is currently writing Resilient M.E., a multidisciplinary memoir that expands the existing literature on Borderline Personality Disorder by examining her lived experience on both sides of the mental health care system. Blending clinical insight, cultural history, and personal narrative, her work challenges dominant psychiatric frameworks and amplifies voices often excluded from mental health discourse.
Maria’s story also appears in Issue 2 of Lamplight here.
Connect with her on Instagram here.
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