Embrace your weirdness and forgive others: two Stoic lessons

Executive overview

Suppressing your authentic self makes you replaceable and causes suffering. Forgiveness — of others' ignorance and failings — is both a Stoic and universal virtue.

Authenticity and forgiveness are not soft ideals; they are the foundation of a well-lived life.

Embrace your weirdness

• Rainn Wilson tried to fit the mold of a "serious Broadway actor" in 1995 — and by his own account, he sucked.
• The tension of performing as someone else left him stuck in his head, miserable for months.
• After that play he resolved to find his authentic voice, embrace his "nerdy weirdness," and stop performing for others' approval.
• That decision led directly to landing Dwight Schrute — one of the most iconic TV characters ever.
• When we are like everyone else, we are replaceable by definition.
• Stoic premise: each person is genetically and experientially singular; abandoning that uniqueness is a waste of the rarest thing you have.

Forgive them because they don't know

• Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 7.6), citing Plato: every soul is deprived of truth against its will — wrongdoers act from ignorance, not malice.
• Jesus on the cross: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" — spoken under extreme suffering, making it a particularly striking model.
• Marcus in Book 2 of Meditations: frustrating people behave badly because they can't tell good from evil, not because they are enemies.
• Recognising shared human nature — "born to work together like feet and hands" — dissolves anger and the impulse to retaliate.
• James Lawson, whose mentor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, agreed to minister to the assassin James Earl Ray — because his own beliefs demanded it.
• Life has given each of us countless unearned second chances; we carry a debt of forgiveness we can repay by extending grace to others.