Alright, let's talk about this "courage" and "stoicism" stuff. People throw these words around like they're some kind of superpower you're born with, or something you get from reading a dusty old book. For the longest time, I just nodded along. Seemed like something for heroes in movies, not for regular folks like me.
My Own Messy Encounter
Then, a few years back, I got a real taste of what it actually means. I’d poured everything into this community project. Late nights, weekends, all my savings – the whole nine yards. I genuinely thought it was going to be something good, something that helped people. We launched it, and man, the silence was deafening at first. Then came the criticism. Not constructive stuff, mostly. Just… harsh. Online comments, people I knew suddenly looking the other way. It felt like I’d failed, big time. And publicly.
Was I brave? Heck no. I wanted to crawl under a rock and stay there. Stoic? Please. I was a wreck. I remember just sitting there, staring at my screen, feeling completely hollowed out. My first instinct was to delete everything, pretend it never happened, maybe even move to a new town where nobody knew my name. Seriously, it got that dramatic in my head.
After a couple of days of moping, and probably too much cheap coffee, something shifted. Not like a lightning bolt, more like a slow, creaky door opening. I realized, okay, this is a disaster. Fact. People are saying nasty things. Fact. I feel like garbage. Double fact.
Figuring Out the "What Next"
But then, what could I actually do about it? That was the big question. I couldn't magically make the project a success overnight. I couldn't erase people's opinions. I certainly couldn't change what had already happened.
So, I started with the tiny things. The stuff I could control.
- I could read through the criticism, the actual feedback, not just the insults, and see if there was anything, anything at all, that made sense. That was hard. My ego was screaming.
- I could write down what I learned. Not for anyone else, just for me. What went wrong? What would I do differently?
- I could decide if I wanted to try and fix parts of it, or just let it go and move on.
Making those small decisions, and then acting on them, that took something. Every email I had to send, every awkward conversation I had to have to tie up loose ends, felt like lifting a mountain. There was no glory in it. No cheering crowds. Just me, slogging through the uncomfortable bits.
I remember one specific decision to shut down a part of the project that clearly wasn't working, even though I'd personally loved that bit. Admitting that to the few people still involved, that was tough. My voice shook a bit when I made that call. That’s not what I’d have called ‘courage’ before. I’d have thought courage was charging into a burning building, not making a difficult phone call with a shaky voice.
So, What's the Real Deal?
Looking back, that’s when those fancy words started to make a different kind of sense. Stoicism, for me, wasn't about being emotionless. It was about seeing the mess clearly, figuring out what little piece of it was mine to handle, and accepting the rest for what it was – outside my control. It was about not wasting energy raging against the storm, but instead, focusing on patching the holes in my own little boat.
And courage? It wasn't about not being scared. I was terrified of more failure, of more judgment. Courage was feeling all that fear and doing the necessary thing anyway. It was the small, ugly, necessary actions. Showing up when I wanted to hide. Speaking up when I wanted to stay silent. Cleaning up my own mess, bit by bit.
So, yeah, my "practice" of this stuff hasn't been about meditating on a mountaintop. It's been in the dirt, in the failures, in the uncomfortable moments. It's about getting up one more time than you fall down, and focusing on the next right step, no matter how small or scary it feels. That’s all it is, really. No magic involved, just good old-fashioned grit.
