Marcus Aurelius had a bad day too

Around the year 170, the most powerful man alive was cold, tired and far from home, in a military camp on the Danube frontier. At night, Marcus Aurelius wrote notes to himself. They were never meant for anyone else, which is what makes them believable. In them he reminds himself to get out of bed in the morning when he would rather stay under the covers, because there is work that is his to do. He warns himself that today he will meet rude, ungrateful and dishonest people, and that their behaviour is theirs while his response is his. Again and again he steers himself back to the same question: what, in this situation, is actually mine to do?

If the emperor of Rome needed to write himself reminders to cope with rude people and bad mornings, then needing tools is not a weakness. It is the normal condition of having a head. Which brings us to Tahlia.

Tahlia is in year 12, and she has just had a genuinely bad week. Monday, her chemistry exam comes back well below what she needed, and the mark is final. Wednesday, two of her friends fall out and both spend the week messaging her about the other, though she did nothing to start it. Saturday, her netball team loses the grand final by two goals after leading at three quarter time. None of these are disasters. Together, in one week, they are a lot.

Sunday night, instead of another hour of scrolling and replaying, she tries the sorting exercise from the Stoics lesson. Two columns. Not mine to control: the chemistry mark, which is final. Her friends' feud, which she did not start and cannot settle for them. The grand final result. Mine to control: how she prepares for the next chemistry test, and whether she asks her teacher to go through the paper with her. Whether she keeps relaying messages between two people who need to talk to each other, or kindly tells them both she is out of the middle. Whether one lost final gets to decide how she remembers a whole season. The week does not change on paper. But the list of things she can actually do this week turns out to be short, concrete and doable, which is more than the replaying ever produced.

She also tries the gratitude practice, mostly because it is in the course. Day 1 feels fake, and her entries are exactly the vague kind the lesson warned about. Day 2 is not much better. Around day 4 something shifts: writing that her brother made her laugh on the worst day of the week, because he noticed she was flat and did something about it, actually lands. By the end of the week she has a small, specific list of what held up while things went wrong, and she has sent one message, to the teammate who talked her round after the final, saying so.

The zoom out helps with the grand final most of all. From above, one under 18s netball match in one suburb on one Saturday is very small, and the season around it, the training, the bus trips, the team she got to be part of, is much bigger than the last two goals. The exam mark shrinks less when she zooms out, because it feeds into results that matter to her, and pretending otherwise would be the forced positivity the course warned about. That one stays hard.

Here is the honest ending. The tools did not delete the bad week. The mark still stands, the friends are still tense, and the premiership went to the other team. What changed is what Tahlia did with the week: a meeting booked with her chemistry teacher, an exit from the middle of a feud, one true thank you sent, and a Sunday night spent sorting instead of spiralling. Marcus would have recognised all of it. His notes never claim the day was good. They work out what is his to do inside it, and then he gets out of bed.