Getting Over Getting Rejected

They sent a straight to the point email: You've been rejected. I didn't even get to be IN the contest. I guess they knew what they were doing. Still..



I went to the site to have a look at submissions that managed to meet their exacting criteria of expressing three essences: energy, forward momentum, and (the) positive. More than a few expressed them JUST by putting the words on screen. Really.

I felt a little stupid for telling a story.

I wasn't alone, though. One story that made it past the praetorian guard was set in a slum/depressed neighborhood. A 20-something's drinking from a can of the beverage in question and generously shares with a po' little urchin, who shares with a second little urchin, who shares with yet another. Energy, forward momentum and positivity ensue.

I couldn't have cooked up a better satire if I'd tried.

And then I was over it.

Except that it made me think about rejection. I've known some who were crippled by it. Some are crippled by the thought of it and do as much as they know how to avoid it.

You can think what you want about rejection, but I just can't invest too much in the stuff. I can say this with confidence, having enjoyed loads of the things under different names. They're easy to experience when you put things out there.

Of course, losing something you've got years into - a job, a shared life - is certainly harder than, say, losing a role at an audition. But ...the actual rejection, that piercing moment when we're told no, when we're denied or eliminated for subjective reasons (those always seem so unfair), when someone else is chosen - that moment punctures the same size of hole.

We, in our endless quest to find the most pain there is in life, can poke our mental fingers in and root around til we've got ourselves something gaping.

I can imagine people insisting that the amount of pain we suffer is equal to our investment in whatever we just got rejected from. In my experience, this is less than true. What is more true is that the pain is equal to our investment in the story.

And for me, that's the BEST way to get over rejection: it's a fact. Don't make up a story about it.