Standing Again: The Return of Strength

As I practice what I teach, I again experience the reality of a man's rational and emotional ability to support himself.

You’ve heard it before. A Stoic teacher says:

Do you control what happened to you? No. So focus on what you do control.

It’s a pointer, not a magic spell. It doesn't solve for your pain in that moment—but it gives you direction. And when you follow that direction, even once—when you say, “Here’s one thing I can do today,”—you feel a flicker of hope.

Hope helps.

But hope isn’t strength. Not yet.

What happens next is more important. As you do this again—ten times, a hundred times, five hundred—something changes. Slowly. Then suddenly.

It’s as if, after weeks of treading water in a cold, dark sea, you feel something under your feet. A stone ridge, maybe. Solid. Unexpected. Real. You put more weight on it. It holds.

And for the first time in weeks—or maybe in your entire life—you’re not drowning. You’re standing.

At first, the rock comes and goes. The tide shifts. But each time you choose a task—something small, something you can actually do today—you feel the strength return.

Not abstract strength. Real strength. Like legs waking up after years of atrophy. And that’s the truth of it: I was unaware of how to support myself emotionally, for most of my life. Not because I lacked capacity, but because I had never learned to stand on my own without needing the dedicated love of a woman. 

When that need dissolves—not all at once, but steadily—you begin to reclaim that strength.

It doesn’t mean the pain vanishes. It doesn’t mean the grief of lost love stops immediately. But it means you can hold the pain as it heals out. You can absorb the grief as it evaporates. You can carry it in legs that now have tone and strength and movement toward goals that you have chosen.

And if those legs had grown weak again over ten years of love and comfort—if they’d gone unused while you leaned into a relationship—then just like a man who hasn’t stood in a decade, it takes time. And it’s worth it.

Because when you rise—on your own, by your own volition—you are no longer dependent on anyone else for your sense of strength.

You are no longer drowning.

You're standing, hiking. Able to love.