On Rejection

As we know, life is full of rejection, and writers opt into even more of it. All writers “struggle with” rejection, like we all struggle with aging or high housing prices; but for surprisingly many of us, it is debilitating, the core reason we don’t share our writing, or even write at all. In this essay, I’d like to outline some of these more debilitating contours as I’ve experienced them, in case any fellow sufferers find it comforting, helpful, or illuminating.

The standard advice to writers facing rejection is, “Don’t take it personally,” “Know it’s just part of the process,” and “Allow it to hurt but keep moving forward.” Also included is the template anecdote: “[eventually successful author] had [massively successful book] rejected by [two-digit number] publishers, with one saying [sweeping, vicious putdown that contrasts ironically with book’s and author’s subsequent success].”

I think, truly, the above is all there is to the topic. Handling rejection really is that simple, unless you’re too hung up on it, which evidently many people aren’t. I am, though, to the extent that I can’t use the above advice.

I believe how much one is hung up on rejection (or anything else) comes down to one’s personal trauma. I carry lots of childhood trauma around being rejected (in forms such as having been harshly reprimanded, bullied, and ostracized), which is severe enough to have resulted in at least one diagnosable psychological disorder.

When I experience rejection now, I find it bewildering, existentially confusing. I feel as if life suddenly had a voiceover, saying things like the following: “I don’t love you.” “Your imperfections are glaring and unignorable.” “No one cares about your well-being.” “You’re worthless.”

This is all a very intimate experience for me, the way I imagine it would feel to be told these things by a caregiver. In other words, I don’t feel as if life is impersonal, dead, or meaningless; rather, I feel like a child who is experiencing, and cannot process or understand, a complex mixture of care and rejection. The “parent” is life itself, as channeled through whomever is doing the rejecting.

So, for me, much of coping with rejection is struggling to understand. I am a parent myself, and I participate daily in the parenting mixture of pruning problem behaviors from within a broader context of unconditional love. But I don’t understand this mixture, and the simple grownup statements that describe it bewilder me. Of course we all make mistakes, and experience consequences that help us grow. But why? Of course finding our way through trial and error is a healthy and natural and inevitable part of life. But why? Of course we’re not born perfect. But why not? My daughter says, with conviction, “Mistakes are how we learn”: a phrase we taught her, but which, on some deep level, I don’t understand. Often she is saying it, gently but firmly, to me—to remind me.

Probably the issue is that, because of overwhelming past experiences, rejection hurts me far more than it should. It’s like being hospitalized from bee stings, and later asking (to puzzled others), “But why are there bees?” I do trauma work actively for these issues, and it does help me over time. However, within my still-unhealed current experience, what I feel I’m missing is some understanding of what rejection is for—or, equivalently, of what broader structure rejection is part.

An analogy is a single cell inside the body. When a cell dies, it faces total rejection as a cell: cellular thriving means maintaining a coherent structure, generating energy, reproducing, and so on, and it loses absolutely all that. However, the cell’s life and death also happen within a larger context. The cell’s function isn’t to live forever as a solitary unit, but to support the body, the broader structure of which it is a part, including to cease functioning as also suits that broader structure. From the standpoint of the body, the cell’s story, including its ultimate “rejection” from cellhood back into raw materials, is clear and whole. To the body, the cell did its job perfectly, including by aging, failing, and dying; there’s no issue.

The question is what kind of body we’re part of. Asking this means contemplating the broader world—which, no matter how we contemplate, does provide perspective of a kind, simply by shifting our focus from just ourselves. Even if you view the world as a meaningless, impartial set of physical processes, when you face rejection you can “comfort” yourself that the deterministic laws governing the universe simply don’t include the wished-for outcome for your particular quarks and gluons. (I suspect that far fewer people actually hold this particular worldview than think they do, despite its appealing intellectual simplicity.)

For this broader context, I turn to spirituality, especially Buddhist practice; and I have had brief glimpses—unstable, like when one is still in the process of falling off a tightrope—that feel like they might at least suggest a resolution.

I can best describe these moments as feeling that the fabric of life is uplifted into a smile: that life itself is not flat, but smile-shaped. There is a feeling of some kind of unconditional love that, while loving, is also impartial—the way an audiobook narrator might read both a story’s happy and sad parts with the same kindness in her voice.

I have no idea whether this is true in any important sense; and, even if so, I still don’t understand, at a basic level, “But why must there be happy and sad parts?” This entire mode of inquiry is also far more fragile than the utterly simple, actionable, and true proverb (also from Buddhism, specifically Zen), “Fall seven times, stand up eight”—which, among other things, is the way to actually move forward your writing career.

Still, this is where I’ve felt a glimmer of context around rejection. There might be some sort of love that is not bound up in the happenings of life, including in our particular glories and humiliations. If so, maybe this is how it could be okay, how there might be something warm on the outside of life’s strong, final, bewildering “No”s. I hope so, and I hope this exploration has been helpful. If you find out more, I’d certainly be happy to hear about it.

Craft Suggestion: Interior Decoration with Paragraphs

Stephen King said, “I write to find out what I think.” This is the approach I took to write the essay above—with an emphasis on “write,” into type I could then read over, rather than “think,” “talk about,” or even “dictate aloud.”

My experience of rejection is fragmentary and uncertain, so any essay from me on the topic will need to reflect these qualities. At the same time, the essay should have some coherence, and not read like a set of disconnected diary entries.

I started by speaking my thoughts into voice memos in an automatic transcription app on my phone. This often works for me to get material out into words (I love that I can do it while I walk, for example), and it did bring some material to the surface. However, I also found that it wasn’t cohering: no matter how many memos I dictated, I kept feeling like I was starting over.

Instead, what really worked was to type out each primary impression I carry as its own paragraph—”commonsense advice is enough for most people,” “I’m confused,” “I wish for greater context,” and so on—without a clear initial sense of how these paragraphs would fit together.

Then I looked among these paragraphs to see how they stitched together. Is there a conceptual structure like “A but B,” as in “this advice works for others but not for me?” In that case, those two paragraphs can go together. Did one paragraph seem to want another paragraph extending it, as in “So for me, it’s a struggle to understand”? In that case, I wrote the second paragraph. And so on.

As I wrote, I consulted back and forth between these paragraph-level decisions, and an evolving overall structure based on consideration of the reader’s needs. The reader will need to know how this essay relates to him or her right away, so that piece must go first. For the reader’s sanity, I’d also like to first describe the challenge of rejection in detail, then describe how I’ve grappled with the challenge, then culminate by offering anything I feel I’ve learned, rather than going in some other order. That means that “how and why people experience rejection differently” must go before “the details of my own bewilderment,” which must go before the discussion of “broader context” and spirituality.

This broader structure was like a room which I needed to decorate with furniture, and the paragraphs themselves were like the furniture. The initial voice memos were something less concrete than either: notes about furniture, sketches of furniture. The issue was the work still needed to translate them into the final product (“copy-paste the voice memo transcription, edit out the transcription errors, and cut the parts that meander or repeat themselves”) meant that everything remained floaty and indeterminate. You can say “the couch will look like this; just order it off Wayfair”—but still, it’s not actually here.

So what made writing this essay possible for me was beginning to get furniture—actual furniture, not notes or sketches—into the room. Writing a paragraph was like actually carrying in a chair, and seeing how it looked next to the walls, the floor, and the other pieces of preliminary furniture. It was concrete and grounding in a way I needed for a topic on which my own thoughts are so indeterminate.

Based on this experience, my recommendation to anyone trying to find your way through a topic—especially a complex, difficult, or contradictory one—is: start writing. The writing itself will condense clouds of thought and feeling into moveable chairs, lamps, and coffee tables, and you can start to discover how they go together.

I especially recommend writing paragraph-wise, with each paragraph saying something fully, even if you don’t initially know how the paragraphs will connect. In this approach to writing, the paragraph is the unit of conceptual furniture: it’s good to get them into a room together to see what themes develop, and it’s also better to be working with full items than with just a cushion or a light bulb.

Good luck!