Everyone wants to talk about the arrows.
They paint me riddled with them. They build statues of the moment I was shot. They remember the image: the body, the wounds, the spectacle of suffering.
No one paints the morning after. No one builds a statue of a man pulling barbs from his own flesh, cleaning the wounds with what he had, and deciding – before the sun was fully up – that he was not done.
The arrows are not the story. The standing up is the story.
The Wound Obsession
I see this everywhere. People define themselves by the thing that hit them. The diagnosis. The betrayal. The failure. The loss. They carry it like a title, and the world reinforces this by asking, endlessly, “what happened to you?”
What happened to you is information. It is not identity.
I was tied to a post and shot by Roman archers. That is what happened to me. It is not who I am. Who I am is the person who got up the next morning and walked back to the emperor who ordered it.
If you define yourself by the wound, the wound wins. Not because it was fatal – you survived it – but because you gave it the one thing it could not take on its own: your future.
The First Movement
Recovery does not start with a plan. It does not start with a mindset. It does not start with a motivational quote.
It starts with a movement. One small, physical, deliberate movement.
Shift your weight. Sit up. Put your feet on the floor. Stand.
Do not think about tomorrow. Do not think about the full recovery, the return to form, the grand narrative of comeback. Think about the next three seconds. What can your body do right now?
That is the only question that matters when you are on the ground.
What Stoicism Actually Means
People have turned stoicism into a brand. Cold showers and morning routines and the performance of toughness on social media.
That is not stoicism. That is theater.
Stoicism is this: distinguishing between what you control and what you do not, and directing every ounce of your energy toward the first category.
I did not control the arrows. I did not control whether the archers aimed true. I did not control the post I was tied to or the order that was given.
I controlled whether I breathed. I controlled whether I moved. I controlled whether I decided the story was over.
That is the practice. Not enduring pain for its own sake. Not pretending pain does not exist. Choosing, in the presence of pain, to act on what remains within your power.
The Myth of the Clean Recovery
Recovery is not linear. This needs to be said because the stories we tell about comebacks are lies of omission.
The stories go: the setback, the darkness, the turning point, the rise. A clean arc. A satisfying narrative.
The reality: the setback. The partial recovery. The relapse. The smaller setback. The slow, ugly crawl. The plateau that feels like failure. The gradual, almost imperceptible improvement that you only notice in retrospect.
I did not spring from the post healed and whole. I was carried to a widow’s house. I lay there while she cleaned wounds that should have killed me. I healed slowly, painfully, incompletely.
And then I went back.
The myth of the clean recovery does damage because it makes people feel they are failing when they are, in fact, recovering. Recovery looks like failure from the inside. It looks like stalling, like regression, like not enough. It only looks like progress when you turn around and see how far you have come from the ground.
Three Rules
I will keep this simple, because I have never been one for long speeches.
One: Do not lie to yourself about the damage. Assess the wound honestly. Not worse than it is, not better than it is. What is broken, what still works, what hurts. Start with the truth.
Two: Identify the next action. Not the recovery plan. Not the five-year goal. The next physical, concrete action you can take within the next sixty seconds. Do it.
Three: Repeat. That is the entire strategy. Honest assessment, followed by the next action, followed by honest assessment, followed by the next action. There is no secret. There is only the willingness to keep going.
The arrow is not the story. You are.
Get up.