Penetrate within, into their governing selves, and you will see what critics you fear, and what poor critics they are of themselves.
For a long time, one of the most powerful forces in my interior life was the perceived opinion of other people — whether people I barely knew, friends, or family. This force could apply to people whose names I would not have been able to recall a year later, but whose imagined disapproval could keep me awake at three in the morning, replaying a conversation I had failed at, hosting an audience I had assembled from strangers in my own head.
I tortured myself; I would mentally walk across glass for the chance to receive a little positive attention.
When writing about one’s own depressive stretches, we tend to either dramatize them into a redemption arc or to scrub them clean for public consumption. Neither is honest. What I will say is this: there were periods when the volume of the imagined judgment was loud enough to silence almost everything else — goals I wanted to accomplish, calls I should have made, mornings I should have gotten out of bed.
The mechanism was not complicated. I had built, somewhere along the way, an internal courtroom in which I was perpetually on trial, and the prosecutors were a rotating cast of people who were often not paying any attention to me at all. I had given them seats and microphones in my own mind. They were destroying me without knowing they were in the room.
What changed it was not therapy, though therapy helped. It was not time, though time helped. It was the slow, unglamorous work of the inner retreat — the practice, sustained over years, of going inward and staying there long enough for the noise to settle. That work brought me, on its own clock, to a place I had been moving toward without knowing what to call it. Marcus named it.
Penetrate within, into their governing selves, and you will see what critics you fear, and what poor critics they are of themselves.
— Meditations 9.18
I had to read that line exactly once for it to click. Marcus is doing something specific and counterintuitive in it. He is not saying your critics are wrong about you. He is not saying you should ignore their opinion. He is saying: look at the inside of the person whose judgment you fear. Look at how they assess themselves when no one is watching. You will find that they are bad at it. They cannot accurately read their own conduct, their own motives, the size and shape of their own failures. The instrument they are using to measure you is the same instrument they use on themselves, and it does not work on themselves either.
The first time I applied Marcus’ clarity and direction to a situation in my real life, I was thinking of a specific person whose offhand dismissal I had been carrying around for the better part of a year. I made myself sit, the way Marcus would have, and ask: what does this person actually think of themselves when they are alone. What is the running assessment in their own head. What are the things they have not forgiven themselves for. What are the parts of their own behavior they cannot bear to look at. What is the gap between the version of themselves they perform in public and the version they encounter at three in the morning, the way I encountered mine.
What I found was not contempt. What I found was recognition. They were doing the same thing I was doing, in the same broken courtroom, with the same unreliable prosecutors. The harshness with which they had dismissed me was a mild, almost gentle version of the harshness they were directing at themselves on a daily basis. The opinion I had let crush me was an opinion produced by an instrument that could not even read its owner.
It is fair to ask how I can claim to know any of this about another person’s interior. I can’t, not directly. Whether a given person runs the precise courtroom I have described — the rotating prosecutors, the three a.m. audience — is almost beside the point; that picture is mine, drawn from my own room. What I am claiming is narrower, and harder to argue with. Everyone fails. Not only the failures of weakness or bad luck, but the small self-protective ones: the defensive lie, the thing said to manage how one is seen. You do not tell that kind of lie unless some part of you is already at war with another part. The lie is not a window into their courtroom; it is evidence that one is in session. I do not need to get inside a person to know this. I need only to notice that they are human, which is to say fallible, which is to say already losing some argument with themselves I will never be shown. The few who never fail would have no such room — and there are almost none of them. The Stoics had a name for that person: the Sage.
The wrong takeaway from this practice is that your critics are weak and you are above them. That is the contempt move, and it is, in its own way, as poisonous as the courtroom. Marcus is not giving you permission to dismiss anyone. He is giving you a more accurate picture of the mechanism, so that you can stop being crushed by it.
What the practice produced was freedom. The imagined judgment had been crowding out my ability to reason… the work of going inward made room. What I could hear underneath was something I already had: the capacity to see that the person whose dismissal I had carried for a year was carrying their own dismissal, from themselves, with no one to help them put it down.
I am obliged to articulate why this matters as a practice and not just an insight. Insights wear off. Insights wear off fast. I have had this realization maybe two hundred times in my adult life, and approximately one hundred and ninety of those times I reburied it within a week and went back to the imagined courtroom. The faculty Marcus describes is not an insight. It is a habit of looking. It is the willingness, in real time, when the judgment lands, to ask: who is the person doing the judging, and what is the state of the instrument they are using? It is a question I now ask myself almost daily. I am not consistent. The question still does not always arrive in time. The three a.m. audience still convenes occasionally. But the share of my interior life occupied by it has shrunk meaningfully, and the share occupied by something quieter and more accurate has grown.
The comfort, in the end, has come from somewhere I did not expect. It did not come from concluding that my critics were beneath me. It came from realizing that they were beside me. We are all using broken instruments to assess ourselves and each other. The only durable response to this is not to win the assessment. It is to lower the stakes by recognizing what the instrument actually is. To look inside the person whose opinion is shaping your day, and to find, instead of the imposing judge you assembled in your imagination, a fellow human, doing what they can to get through the day.
That recognition is not freedom from judgment. But it is freedom from the weight of it, which is a different thing. The first is just information. And information cannot hurt you.