In Defense of Stoic Acceptance

On confronting Nature

Photo by Fabian Kleiser on Unsplash

i.

In late September of last year, I went to bed on a stormy Thursday night and woke up the next morning in the apocalypse. Hurricane Helene had ripped apart my entire region. It carried houses down the river next to my house, drowned people in the riptide, and left behind a devastated warzone the likes of which I have never seen in my life.

After the waters receded, I walked into downtown to see the damage. The trailer park was gone, businesses were flooded, and houses had been ripped off their foundations. Milling, homeless, bedraggled masses huddled together. The ground was covered in stinking, festering mud. A young man was frantically searching for his friend. “I can’t find him!” He told me, “I don’t know where he is! His trailer is gone!” Landslides and disappeared roads across Western North Carolina had trapped tens of thousands of people, including me and my husband, in our tiny, isolated communities. There was no cell service, no running water, no electricity. We were alone, and we had no idea when help was coming.

A local restaurant was serving free food to the neighborhood, and I got a platter of rice and chicken. I sat down on a park bench and looked at the devastation of my tiny, beautiful town. At that moment, I was listening to the audiobook of How To Be a Stoic by

Massimo Pigliucci

which is a modern guide to applying Epictetus’s ancient philosophy to one’s modern life. I’d also been studying Epictetus for the previous month, working my way through his Discourses and Enchiridion.

Epictetus established what has come to be known as the Dichotomy of Control. In his Enchiridion or Handbook, he says, "Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing; not within our power are our body, our property, reputation, office, and, in a word, whatever is not of our own doing."

Grasping this dichotomy, he taught, is the path to peace, strength, and resilience. As I surveyed the disaster around me, I knew that Epictetus and Massimo Pigliucci were giving me the answer: accept. Accept, accept, accept. A hurricane is bigger than me, a force of nature that I cannot begin to resist. I knew, as I surveyed destroyed houses and the huddling masses of the displaced, that I could only accept that this very moment of devastation was my world. I could fight, resist, and push back against reality. I could be angry, I could deny, I could bargain. I could get into the boxing rink with existence and fight and fight until, inevitably, it knocked me to the ground.

Or I could skip all of that, give up the fight with reality, and free-fall into acceptance. So that’s what I did.

People frequently vent their bitterness towards radical acceptance, especially when the topics of Buddhism and Stoicism come up. “It feels like passivity,” one friend told me with surprising anger, “it feels like just letting bad things happen.”

“It feels like letting yourself be a doormat,” another friend told me on a hike, as I was trying to explain to him why I’ve found Stoicism so empowering. Critical essays on Stoicism, depicting it as a fatalistic, grim, and defeatist philosophy that only enables the status quo, have become something of a subgenre on the internet.

There are certainly pathological forms of acceptance in Stoicism. Stoicism is a big, ancient tradition, and it is inevitable that some people will take its teachings in a destructive direction. It is also true that, being an ancient philosophy created by mere mortals, it is flawed and in need of updating and criticism.

None of this, though, undermines the core liberatory power of the Dichotomy of Control. While I appreciate that many other people find it insufficient, Stoic acceptance, and other variations found in Buddhism and the 12 Steps, have probably saved my life. Let me tell you how.

ii.

I was confronted with an out-of-control world at a young age. Looking back, I now realize that the three great challenges life threw at me were an early, brutal crash course in the dichotomy of control. The imaginary Stoic gods had seen fit to teach me these lessons early, and I’m grateful that they did.

Young men always have illusions of control — that we are amateur sorcerers who can bend reality to our will. That illusion was shattered for me when I was 14 years old, and I realized that I wasn’t like other boys. While they were discovering that girls were endlessly fascinating, beautiful, and mysterious, and I started to notice my male peers. This was my first lesson in acceptance, and it came from my body.

Gradually, I came to discover with horror that I am exclusively attracted to men. I wish I could say that I accepted this with grace and was provided the social support to do so. Neither are true. I fought myself for a decade, and my Christian community knew nothing of homosexuality except that it is a. bad and b. causes AIDS. For the next decade, while my peers were going through the socially sanctioned rituals of first kisses, proms, break ups, courtship, and marriage, I was locked in a quiet, deadly battle with myself.

I went to support groups to change my orientation. I went through Christian exorcisms to no longer be gay. I met with pastors to do ex-gay therapy. I dated three women, one of whom I certain I was going to marry, and each relationship ended in heartbreak and catastrophe.

It wasn’t until I was 24 that I finally gave up in exhaustion. I was gay, and that wasn’t going to change. This was the sexuality nature had given me. I still didn’t know what that meant — I didn’t know, for example, if I was ever going to marry, have sex, or if I was called by God to a life of permanent celibacy. But I finally, after a decade of fighting, knew one thing: I was exclusively romantically and sexually attracted to men, and fighting that fact was far worse than accepting it.

The relief at this acceptance was palpable. I could finally, in my mid-20s, begin to live my life.

This experience with my sexual orientation has, perhaps, predisposed me to the wisdom of acceptance. Now, when I examine the source of my day-to-day suffering, I realize that it very often comes down to a lack of acceptance — a sort of mental combativeness with reality.

People believe things that I think are stupid, and I struggle to let that be true. I get frustrated and discouraged by my body because I can’t accept that I have inherited the consequences of my past actions. The world is not what I want it to be, or think it should be, and that makes me sad. Almost without fail, when I find myself sad, angry, or frustrated, I pull back the mask and find a lack of acceptance.

.iii

The first lesson in the Dichotomy of Control came from my body; the second lesson came from my psyche. In high school, when I was 16 years old, something very strange started to happen to my mind.

I started to get ecstatic, euphoric highs of creativity, during which I wrote three novels and neglected (and failed) most of my classes. Meanwhile, a dimmer light switch in my brain would suddenly be tweaked, and I was plunged into darkness. Bouts of extreme emotional pain — pain that still seems incomprehensible looking back — pervaded my mind. These bouts were often laced with paranoia. I was convinced, for example, that I was going to die in my sleep, or that someone had poisoned the drinking water. I became a serious self-injurer at 16, and the habit persisted until I was 26.

The mental instability of my teens culminated in a hideous climax when I was 17 when, on a late summer night, the abyss opened. The first time the abyss opens is like the first time you have sex: you never forget it. It was a Lovecraftian emptiness, a loneliness, a terror, that felt infinite. I could only pace about my room and weep and wring my hands; I collected all my sister’s old stuffed toys and hugged them in bed, desperate for company.

My life rapidly spiraled after that. I cut myself seriously in the bathroom school, and this was interpreted as a suicide attempt. I was taken out of school, enrolled in therapy, and came a terrifying hair-breadth away from killing myself.

My heroic parents got me through, and I even managed to graduate from homeschooling. Now, as an adult, I look back on that time and know I owe my life to my parents. Their stability and love saved me.

Unfortunately, my battles with my own mind didn’t stop at high school graduation. Instead, they were merely the beginning of a cycle that continues to this day. I have Bipolar II with psychotic features, and though greatly curtailed by therapy and meds, I still regularly struggle with not spinning out. (I’ve written a lot about living with Bipolar, e.g. here, here, here, and here.)

Stoicism has taught me what I desperately struggled to accept when I was young: I did not choose my mind, and I did not choose this condition, and that is neither good nor bad. Good and bad are only found in my response to what nature gave me.

The popular aesthetic of Broicism is mighty, virile, and Herculean, but this misses the heart of Stoicism. The great writers of late Stoicism struggled with debilitating maladies, and philosophy gave them a path through hell. Seneca battled a debilitating illness that nearly drove him to suicide, Epictetus was a cripple, possibly at the hands of his slave master who deliberately broke his legs, and Marcus Aurelius suffered from a mysterious ailment for which he took opium.

Stoicism isn’t about improving your bench press (though it does encourage voluntary discomfort, which exercise certainly accomplishes). Rather, it is about working with your limitations, your pain, and your inevitable decline.

Maybe this is when the offense starts to fester. But Stephen, I can hear my skeptical friends say, that’s just giving up. You don’t have to live this way. Why don’t you fucking fight?

I hear you, but I think this misses the point entirely because this is the point at which the magic of the Dichotomy of Control really shows up. Acceptance isn’t merely the path to healing, but also the beginning of action. This is the second chapter of acceptance — the ascended upper story, which so many people never reach. When I closely examine what is in my control, I am empowered rather than demoralized. I can’t act to repair a reality until I have accepted it to be true.

Surely you must first accept that you have cancer before you can treat it. Surely you must first accept the reality of injustice before you change it. Acceptance is not passivity — it is creating a mental map that allows you to live with greater resilience.

Epictetus, so often seen as the patron saint of dour fatalism, speaks directly to this empowerment, to this delicate balance between peace and action:

The question, then, is how to strike a balance between a calm and composed attitude on the one hand, and a conscientious outlook that is neither slack nor careless on the other. Model yourself on card players. The chips don't matter, and the cards don't matter; how can I know what the deal will be? But making careful and skillful use of the deal - that's where my responsibility begins. So in life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control. Where will I find good and bad? In me, in my choices.

Gandalf, the ultimate Stoic Sage, also expressed this sentiment perfectly. When Frodo tells him, “I wish the ring had never come to me,” he responds, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

Nature has dealt me a specific hand, and railing against it is the definition of futility. This acceptance of my condition has resulted in what I now call my Bipolar Monastic Rule: the code by which I live my life to avoid future episodes. It requires that I be fitter, healthier, stronger, more well-read, and have more self-insight than many other people around me. Acceptance of my limitation has not imprisoned me; it has liberated me.

iv.

The first lesson came from my body, and the second lesson came from my mind. The third lesson, and the most horrible of all, came from the world. When I was 19 years old, I survived a shooting in which two of my friends were murdered in front of me.

I was the fifth person in the hallway and the only one who was uninjured. I was a kid, much too young to see anything like my friend Phil’s white, terrified, staring eyes gazing at the ceiling as the life drained from him. I hadn’t signed up for this. I was just enjoying the evening after a Christmas party with friends when, completely without warning, someone tried to murder all of us.

The gunman shot multiple rounds into the hallway. One friend was shot in the throat. Another in both legs. Another — my friend Phil — was shot somewhere in his vital organs, and he internally bled out. The person who got the worst of it was Tiffany, who was shot full. Her hand was shot off, but I didn’t know that at the moment. I only remember her as a crumbled doll in a spreading circle of blood.

The following months and years of my life were a cataclysmic collision with death. I had PTSD symptoms, I had nightmares that woke me up screaming, and I self-medicated with alcohol and self-injury. I tried to wrap my head around the impossible — that my friends were gone. Not gone in a temporary way, or a reversible way, like they had traveled to a different country and I could still email them. But gone gone, forever. No-longer-existing gone. And I struggled to accept that we lived on a planet where such senseless violence and death took place every day, usually invisibly and without fanfare.

It took me years to accept that my friends were dead at the hands of another human, that violence was done to me, and, most terrifying of all, that we all must die. I accepted that the shooting was my story. My past is out of my control, death is out of my control, the absence of my friends is out of my control. How did this happen? I don’t know. It was a process bigger than me.

I still get nightmares sometimes, and I still get edgy when I hear fireworks and loud bangs. Just yesterday, I found myself falling down a death spiral of ruminating over what I would do if someone came into my workplace with a gun. But, generally, my distress over the shooting has declined in direct proportion to my acceptance.

I now know that reality is God, and we all must bend the knee eventually. Submission to death, to the laws of nature, to the facts of the world which continue to exist even when we don’t believe them, is inevitable. We can submit willingly, or we can be broken by our pride, our refusal, our fantasy, and our world-building. The choice is ours. We will all die; those we love will die. I could, in the face of death — and the death of my friends — declare, as John Donne did, “Death, be not proud.” Or, I could take the opposite, truer path: “Self, be not proud.”

Here, another objection might be raised: I can see how it’s helpful to practice the Dichotomy with the shooting you went through and the death of your friends, but aren’t you also accepting an unjust reality in doing so? Wouldn’t it be better to fight for a world where you don’t have to experience a shooting at all? Isn’t your acceptance just enabling the status quo?

Acceptance alone can certainly become pathological, but that is true of any principle in the absence of other principles that contextualize and limit it. Fortunately, the Stoics don’t leave us alone with our fatalism.

Stoicism is a Eudaimonic school, meaning a philosophy dedicated to the pursuit of the good life. The Stoics believed that virtue was the highest good; four virtues in particular: justice, courage, wisdom, and self-control. The ultimate goal of Stoicism is to live a virtuous life, a significant part of which is to fight for what is right in the face of injustice. The Dichotomy of Control exists within this larger philosophical framework, not as a hindrance to attaining justice and acting courageously, but in the service of doing so.

The inevitable result of this framework is a radical engagement with the world. The Stoics encouraged civil engagement, and the very name — Stoicism, derived from the Stoa, or the porch, where the early philosophers met in the marketplace to speak with the public — demonstrates the socially engaged nature of the philosophy. (In The Practicing Stoic, Ward Farnsworth suggested that the philosophy should be called Porchism rather than Stoicism.) If you are imagining Stoicism as a philosophy of retreat, then you are thinking of Epicureanism, not Stoicism. Stoicism doesn’t retreat to the garden, as Epicurus did; it leans into the bloody maw of reality.

St. James declared that grace without works is dead. Something similar can be said here: acceptance without justice is dead. Yes, an acceptance without the Four Virtues is pathological, and you would be right to criticize it. Fortunately, Stoicism doesn’t allow us that option. The whole deal — the whole point of Stoicism — is justice, self-control, courage, and wisdom no matter the consequences. This is why the Stoics used to get into a fair bit of trouble with the powers that be, resulting in their execution.

All that aside, though, I can’t help but wonder if so many find the Dichotomy of Control offensive, not because it might perpetuate systems of an unjust world, but because it stings our pride. Look the abyss of nature in the eyes and it will offend your ego, your religion, your deepest values, and, most of all, your delusions of immortality and god-like power. We are not God, yet we have had delusions of Godhood since time immemorial.

Because of these early brushes with death — my own near suicide, and the brutal murder of my friends — I have thought about death daily since. It has shaped my life in unforeseeable ways. The days that I am well are indescribably sweet. The ordinary moments with people I love, or when I am simply doing boring, unglamorous work, are sacred. This is because life, which is so terrifyingly fragile, is also unimaginably precious — even, or maybe especially, in the boring, unglamorous, quotidian moments.

v.

We never know when our lives will run headlong into death or disaster. I certainly never planned to be trapped in a desolate, water-drenched apocalypse. It could easily have been me washed away in the river, killed by a falling tree, or homeless. It was only a matter of luck that none of these fates were mine.

Acceptance of my fate, no matter what it is — Amor Fati, as Nietzsche put it — is what got me through the months after the storm. I accepted that I would be going to bed and waking up in the dark. I accepted that I wouldn’t bathe for weeks. I accepted that the store I worked for might go out of business. I accepted, even, that people close to me might have perished in the storm. I accepted all of this. It didn’t make life easy; it didn’t wipe away the fatigue or the fear. But, in an inexplicable way, it helped me find a peace that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

And, because acceptance is not the end, but only the beginning, of action, I also volunteered. I helped friends. I did what I could to repair my grieving and fractured community. I decided that now, of all times, was when my community needed courage, wisdom, self-control, and justice.

If you innately revolt against the Dichotomy of Control, I want to ask, with all sincerity, what I should do other than accept. I’m open to suggestions, truly. Would you prefer I not accept that my friends are dead? That I’m gay? That a hurricane destroyed my town? That I have bipolar II?

I know the alternative to acceptance of things I cannot change: unmitigated suffering. I’m not God. I cannot reverse death. I cannot unwind time. I cannot resurrect the dead or change physics. I cannot put a hurricane back in its bottle. I am a mere mortal, woefully confined by my body, by time, by the actions of others. Tell me truly what I should do other than accept this? How is the rejection of acceptance not the embrace of madness?

When you come up with something half as powerful for healing, growth, and resilience, I’m all ears. Till then, I’ll take the Dichotomy of Control.

But that’s just me. What do you think? Let me know in the comments section, and if your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post.

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