Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist in Vienna, was deported with his family in 1942. He lost his parents, his brother and his wife in the camps. On arrival he also lost the manuscript he had worked on for years, taken along with the rest of his possessions. What he was left with he described later in Man's Search for Meaning: that everything can be taken from a person but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. He saw it around him: people who gave away their last piece of bread. Few, he wrote, but enough to prove that the choice existed.
There is a limit where the teaching stops being theory and gets tested: can a person still be something of himself when literally everything has been taken?
The camp, the guards, the loss of his family and his work: beyond any power he had. What remained was the narrowest strip there is, and precisely the strip the Stoa had pointed at two thousand years earlier: the attitude you choose. Frankl was no Stoic and called it something else, but he independently confirmed the same boundary.
What in your life feels like compulsion, but on closer inspection is an attitude you choose?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases