When People Come for You
The notification lands and your stomach drops before your brain catches up. Someone has said something about you — in a group chat, under a post, in a meeting you weren't in. Maybe it's a stranger with an account and a grudge; maybe it's someone you know. The words replay themselves. You draft a reply, delete it, draft a sharper one. The evening is gone and you've spent all of it in a fight no one else showed up for.
Epictetus knew this feeling, and he had unusual standing to speak of it. Born a slave in the Roman Empire and lamed for life, he had every excuse to let other men's opinions rule him — and he built an entire philosophy on refusing to. In the Enchiridion, translated by Elizabeth Carter, he lays down the hinge the whole thing turns on: "Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things." The insult is a sound in the air. The suffering is the story you tell yourself about it.
Then he gets specific — almost eerily so, for a man two thousand years dead. On being told that someone has spoken ill of you, he advises this reply: "He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone." It is a joke, but a serious one. It refuses the bait and keeps your feet on your own ground. You, and not the critic, remain the authority on who you are.
So here is the counsel. When people come for you, run the question Epictetus taught his students to run on everything: is this in my control, or not? Their opinion of you — not yours. Their motives — not yours. What you post at 11 p.m. with your pulse up — entirely, painfully yours. The freedom is in spending your energy only on that last column. Answer if an answer serves you; not to win a stranger, but because silence would cost you something real. Then close the app and go be, in private, the person the insult claimed you weren't.
Some criticism is a gift with an ugly wrapper — take the note, drop the wrapper. The rest is weather. You don't argue with weather; you just decline to stand out in it.
Their words were a sound in the air. You decide whether to build a house in it.