The Ring was heavy. That part wasn’t Gollum’s fault.

But Gollum carried it for five hundred years after it was gone. He kept the hunger. The grievance. The obsession. The Ring itself was lost; what remained was the weight he had chosen to keep adding to the original wound.

Epictetus was blunt about this: “Men are disturbed not by things, but by their opinions about things.” The pain is real. The story you build on top of it is yours.

Two arrows, as the Stoics put it. The first lands. You don’t choose that. The second is the suffering you layer on afterward — the resentment, the narrative, the refusal to let the wound close.

You can’t always set down the Ring. But you can stop choosing it after it’s already gone.

What are you still carrying that left a long time ago?