Rising from the Defeat That Wasn’t
“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.” –Maya Angelou
The most brutal defeats aren’t always the ones we earn. Sometimes the ones that hurt most are the ones that just happen to us. Often unearned, uninvited, yet still painfully real. Rationally, we know we didn’t fail. Emotionally, it’s not that simple.
I once worked for a company for 19 years. That sort of thing used to mean something. Loyalty. Experience. Institutional memory. But in the end, none of it mattered. The last business unit was sold off, and a few of us were left holding the keys with nowhere to go. The new owners didn’t take us with them. It wasn’t poor performance, lack of work, or even a simple downsizing. We were just surplus. Nothing personal. Just business.
But it certainly felt personal in the moment.
There’s a strange guilt that lingers after events like that. You know better, and yet it creeps in anyway. Could I have done more? Should I have left sooner? Was staying that long a kind of quiet failure in itself? These questions aren’t helpful, but they come. The Stoics would call them what they are: judgments, impressions. Not truths, but reflexes of the mind. And like Epictetus taught, just because a thought enters your head doesn’t mean you have to let it take up residence.
More recently, I lost another job I held for five years. This time, it’s not a complete severing of ties. I’m “on contract” for occasional consulting work. While I appreciate the little bit of extra income, it is a bit like being invited to a party with no date, no address, and no one ever texting you to follow up. Again, the cause wasn’t my performance. There just wasn’t enough work. I wasn’t the only one affected. Still, there’s that whisper again: maybe it’s you.
Marcus Aurelius wrote, “You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” He wasn’t denying the reality of pain or disappointment. He was teaching himself how not to be consumed by them. The event is what it is. It’s not what you think about it or how you interpret it, but whether it is within your control.
Even knowing that, I can’t pretend there haven’t been regrets. I’ve made choices in relationships that I would take back if I could. I’ve let some friendships fade, mostly through inattention. I told myself we’d reconnect someday, that people drift apart naturally, that life gets busy. All true. Yet, I still regret the silence that has grown where conversation once lived.
One friendship in particular still stings. Recently, a friend responded to one of my online messages with a curt reply, which was uncharacteristically cold. I reread the thread, looking for some unintentional slight or misstep. But I couldn’t find one. Maybe something else was going on. Perhaps I said something that didn’t land right. I don’t know. What I do know is that it hurt.
The Stoics believed in friendship. Seneca wrote about it often: its value, its fragility, its necessity for a meaningful life. But even friendships are subject to fortuna, the unpredictable nature of the world. You can’t cling to them like possessions. All you can do is offer your best self with integrity. Sometimes that’s not enough to hold something together.
And yet, for all the setbacks, life continues to offer moments of clarity and grace. Not long ago, I coordinated a program through my church called Voices of Justice. We thought it might draw a small group, maybe thirty or forty attendees if we were lucky. Instead, nearly 150 people came. They listened. They engaged. They lingered in the fellowship hall afterward with real questions and real hope. It wasn’t just a good turnout; it was a great one. It was a sign that something mattered.
That evening reminded me of something I often forget in the low seasons: the capacity to rise. Angelou puts it plainly. You need to encounter defeat to learn who you are and what you can overcome. The Stoics would agree. They didn’t fear hardship. They welcomed it as the “gymnasium” of the soul. A place where strength is tested and refined.
Stoicism is often caricatured as a philosophy of emotional suppression. But that’s not it at all. The Stoics didn’t avoid pain. They faced it. They just refused to let it define them. They separated what was theirs to govern…their actions and their responses…from what was not: the economy, corporate decisions, the choices of others. To feel disappointed isn’t un-Stoic. To be ruled by disappointment is.
Maya Angelou wasn’t a Stoic in the classical sense, but she shared with them a deep understanding of inner freedom. Her words echo the same insight. The world can bruise you, even break you, but it cannot determine who you become unless you let it. You may encounter many defeats. You may even need to. Because without them, how else would you learn what endures?
The defeats in my life haven’t always looked like defeat to the outside world. Sometimes it was a slow, silent diminishment. A job that dried up. A friend who walked away. A missed opportunity that lingered on the edge of a decision I didn’t quite make. These are not headlines. They don’t come with dramatic turning points or obvious morals. But they shape you.
And they reveal you.
What rises from that kind of disappointment isn’t always grand. It might be a quiet resolve. A moment of compassion for someone else going through it. The courage to start a new project with no guarantees. The willingness to show up again. These aren’t victories in the worldly sense, but the Stoics would call them progress.
They’d also call them yours.
There’s also a name in Stoic thought for embracing these defeats, not just enduring them. Amor Fati. The love of fate. The belief that what happens, good or bad, is not only survivable, but somehow necessary, not in a mystical sense, but in the sense that we are shaped by what we face. The defeats aren’t obstacles to our path. They are the path.
Maybe the greatest lesson in all this is that we are not solely the sum of what we’ve done right, nor doomed to be defined by what has gone wrong. Our identity and character come into focus most clearly when something falls apart. That’s when you find out what remains. What you’re still capable of. What you still believe.
So no, I haven’t always succeeded. I’ve been let go, left out, and quietly forgotten. I’ve been puzzled by relationships that frayed and unsure of whether I was the cause. But I’ve also done work that mattered. I’ve gathered people in a room who wanted to learn, change, and act. I’ve gotten back up. Never heroically, but steadily.
That’s enough.
That’s resilience. That’s philosophy, lived rather than preached. That’s what both Angelou and the Stoics point toward: a life shaped not by the absence of defeat, but by the refusal to be defeated by it.
So I carry her words with me, not as a shield against difficulty, but as a reminder that difficulty is part of the path. It’s not the end of the story. It’s how you come to know who you are, what you can rise from, and how you can still come out of it.
And I’m still coming out of it. Every day.
