A Meditation on Rejection

by Janet Levine

Stomach pains, a feeling a dread, the sense that everything is dull and dark. All the symptoms of gloom and doom.

I don’t do well with rejection. Most people don’t, I suspect, but while I can be empathetic about many things, rejection is just too personal. It is all about me, and it’s not a pretty sight.

When it happens, I try to remind myself that in a day or two, I will have gotten over it . Perhaps I will have recast the facts in my mind to make it feel less like a rejection of me, and more as if it were actually my rejection of it. Often, of course, it’s not that difficult. As rejections go, most are truly small potatoes. But still, when it happens, it hurts.

You’d think that someone who has spent most of her adult life asking people to do things they are most likely to trigger a response of no, would have a better perspective on rejection. Intellectually, I do. I spout all the clichés: If you don’t ask, you can’t get. No just opens another door. It’s not as if you lost anything…you didn’t have it when you asked, so a no just means you still don’t have it. And my favorite: It’s not personal.

But, you know, it is. It always is. I told you it was all about me.

It doesn’t generally stop me from getting out there and doing what I need to do, but it does take a lot of psychic cheerleading. And it has, over the years, caused me to take a variety of paths more to avoid certain things than to get somewhere I actually wanted to go.

I wanted, for example, to be a writer. With great joy, I would sit at my typewriter (ah, those were the days) and create. Then with anticipation, I would slip my manuscript or query letter into a manila envelopment along with the requisite SASE and place it reverently into the mailbox on my street corner. Remember those? They’ve gone the way of the typewriter.

Acceptance would bring a happiness I won’t even attempt to describe. They liked it. My article or story would see the light of day. But rejection, ah, that was a different story altogether.

I don’t expect anyone to be overjoyed when someone says no to something they’ve done. I, however, would go into a blue funk and for weeks could not bear to touch my typewriter. I could think of nothing but the fact that an editor said no. No. To me. Even though I knew from experience that another editor might just as easily say yes. All I had to do was re-type any smudged or dirty pages, re-do the cover letter and send my precious piece back into the world.

First, however, I had to pick up the pieces. It got so, that I couldn’t bear the process any more. Besides, I reasoned, there were already too many words in the world. And so, with a logic that still eludes me, I became first a salesperson and finally a fundraiser. What was I thinking? Did I think that I would harden myself against rejection and learn to love the word no?

If I did, I have to report that it didn’t work. I still hate no. I’ve never gotten used to the fact that not everyone wants/likes/cares/needs me, my product, my organization.

But, still, I persist in putting myself out there. Probably because no matter how bad rejection feels, there is nothing in the world that feels better than when someone says Yes.