How can I connect "Salvation" by Langston Hughes, "Sister Flowers" by Maya Angelou, and "What Suffering Does" by David Brooks? How can I use suffering in my own life as an example?

In his essay "What Suffering Does," Brooks writes that "recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different." He writes that people who suffer gain a quality that he refers to as "holiness" because they see life as a "moral drama" and try to make something good emerge out of suffering. 
In considering what to write about in your own life, think about an experience in which suffering caused you to change so that you saw things in a different light. In "Sister Flowers," Maya Angelou, then a child rendered mute for several years after being raped, is introduced by Bertha Flowers, an educated woman in her town, to literature. It is literature that brings Angelou, then called Marguerite, back to speech and to life. Angelou writes:

"To be allowed, no, invited, into the private lives of strangers, and to share their joys and fears, was a chance to exchange the Southern bitter wormwood for a cup of mead with Beowulf or a hot cup of tea and milk with Oliver Twist."

In other words, by reading, Angelou can escape her bitter childhood and experience other worlds; she emerges from suffering into something better and more beautiful.
In "Salvation," Langston Hughes writes about a boy who does not experience salvation as his aunt wants him to. He pretends to experience salvation, but he experiences the suffering of guilt. This suffering moves him to a new level of awareness about himself and the pain of feeling different and thinking differently from others. Again, in this situation, pain brings the person who experiences it to a new level of awareness. In your essay, think about a way in which suffering has helped you learn about yourself or the world, and use the experiences of Angelou and Hughes and the writing of Brooks to help you understand and comment on your experience.