The popular image of the Stoic is of the unfeeling beast. The tough person, gritting, gutting, it out. 

But this is wrong. 

Just look at the story we have of Marcus Aurelius, consumed with grief. After the death of one of his favorite teachers, a young Marcus could barely drag himself out of bed. One of his attendants tried to rouse him from this seemingly un-Stoic state, thinking it was the right thing to do, but Antoninus Pius, Marcus’s adopted stepfather, stepped in and stopped him. 

“Let him be human for once,” he said, “for neither philosophy nor the empire takes away natural feelings.”

This is an important counterpoint to the Stoic mythology of the superman, the unfeeling, invincible, immovable philosopher robot. Of course a Stoic grieves! Of course they love and favor and get knocked down by life. A Stoic gets scared, a Stoic mourns, a Stoic worries.

A Stoic feels.

There must have been many such moments in Marcus’s tragic life. He lost multiple young children. He lost his wife. He lost Antoninus. He lost Rusticus. He lived and led through a terrible plague. We know he cried then too. Who wouldn’t?

If he had stuffed those emotions down, it wouldn’t have made him tougher. It would have hurt him. It would have been to swallow emotional poison that would have made him more irritable, more vulnerable—vulnerable to the straw that would eventually break the camel’s back. No, it was good that he felt these things, processed them, and worked through them. 

What a Stoic does try to do is to not be carried to excess by any of these natural feelings. We try not to be enslaved or destroyed by them. Antoninus intervened and gave Marcus the space to mourn the loss of a dear teacher who had just died because that was a perfectly reasonable response. Now, if a year later, or even a month later, Marcus still wasn’t getting out of bed? You can imagine Antoninus would have intervened there too, but on the same side as the attendant this time, because to allow death to ruin the lives of the living is not natural or human either.

It’s OK to let it out sometimes, don’t feel bad if that’s what you need. Life can be a bit of a pressure cooker at times, and like an actual pressure cooker, you’ve got to hit the release valve every so often so that the whole thing doesn’t explode in your face. You’re only human. So be human—not just once, but all the time—and let yourself feel.