On Rejection
‘Don’t take it to heart, move on and find something better’
Everyone keeps telling me that rejection is ‘character building’ or ‘making space for what’s meant to be’ in life. Cynthia Erivo recently said something similar in an interview with a young girl who missed out on the role of her character’s younger self in the Wicked film adaptation. I was honestly surprised by how willingly my brain took this advice, given how hopeless I feel in the face of rejection. Was it Erivo’s natural charisma and presence? Her phrasing? The fact that she is a fellow queer person?
Rejection is something I have always struggled with, hated even. And being the fat, gay, nerdy kid at school, I was always picked last for teams in PE. You would think I wouldn’t care, given how much I hate sports, but even in that situation I became an embarrassed, ashamed wreck.
The last 18 months have been… eventful, to say the least. I got ill, dropped out of my master's, broke up with my partner, fell out with my uni “friends” (if you could call them that). And that was just the beginning. I've had and left my first paid job, chatted to multiple people thinking that we would get somewhere romantically (and been proven wrong for various reasons), been on holiday to Derbyshire, Ireland, and the Yorkshire coast (twice) and, following a break of also around 18 months, started writing again. I also started submitting work to various presses/journals/magazines once again.
And opened the rejection floodgates once again…
When you get a reply from a job you’ve applied for or a literary press/magazine you have submitted work to, you often see phrases like ‘we’re sorry but on this occasion we won’t be progressing your application further’ or ‘thank you for trusting us with your words, but we are unable to take your work’. Now, don’t get me wrong, this is much better than not getting a response at all, which is something that happens far too often when an automated response takes two minutes to write and a button press to send. However, these do sometimes come across like the popular, rich, blonde girl from a 2000s Disney Channel show (see Gigi in Wizards of Waverly Place; Lexi in A.N.T. Farm) ‘apologising’ in the loosest possible terms. ‘Sorry’ with a grimace and an internal monologue of ‘that I ever had to acknowledge your existence’ following it.
It is incredibly hard not to let these situations get you down, as we are so often told not to do. This comes under the same category as ‘have you tried not being depressed?’ and ‘cheer up, might never happen’ in the filing cabinet of things to say to people struggling with low mood (the category being ‘please shut the fuck up unless you want it to be the last thing you say to me ever’).
