How Stoicism Helped Me Deal with Suffering
And hopefully, help you as well.
As I’m furiously typing away, it hits, a blinding wave of pain. Slamming shut the lid of my laptop, I rise from my chair and drop onto my bed. I can’t think of anything else. The pain is too intense. There’s grenade after grenade exploding inside my head and bead after bead of sweat dripping off my forehead.
I clutch and squeeze my head, roll around, bury my face inside the pillow, hang my head off the bed. After what seems like hours of squirming, suffering, and cursing which, in reality, must have been a few minutes, the pain finally goes away.
When I developed a severe migraine, this was how every episode went, well, until I discovered Stoicism.
What Suffering Really Is
As the bolt of pain strikes, I sit back in my chair, close my eyes and take a deep breath. But this time, I don’t struggle, squirm, or cuss. The grenades are exploding, the pain is intense but I don’t suffer because I choose not to.
Stoicism taught me that suffering was a choice. As Marcus Aurelius said, “Choose not to be harmed and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed and you haven’t been.” Earlier, I was a soldier caught in the explosions, but now I was a bystander at a safe distance.
