The Beauty of Rejection

If you’d told me five years ago I’d be writing this blog post, I would have thought you were mad. Mad because there’s nothing beautiful in rejection. Rejection is a punch to the throat, a silent enemy who can crush even the most talented of artists. And especially for folks in the Neurospicy set like myself, it can trigger a full-on psychological meltdown that’s very hard to pull yourself up from.

Rejection after rejection after rejection was part of what sent me to trauma therapy a few years ago; learning how to face the fact that I could be good, but “not good enough” (I’ll come back to this) was one of the hardest things I ever confronted. Writing has always been easy for me. I think more clearly when I write than I do even on my best days. Thoughts click together. So how could I “not be good enough”? How can I still “not be good enough”?

I’ve been rejected a lot since I tried my hand publishing. I had almost 200 query rejections by the time I signed with my agent; I’ve had 240 short story rejections (at the time of posting this here blog post) across 6 years of writing short fiction. I’ve had novels submitted to publishers and have no book deal (yet!) to show for it. I have even had offers on my novels that I realized weren’t right for me and had to walk away from—rejections of their own and very difficult choices to make.

And it took me until this year, talking to a friend who was feeling beaten down at the prospect of more rejections, that I had a realization—the sort of reframe that gets you an A in therapy:

Rejection is, in fact, a gift. Not because it doesn’t hurt to have your story rejected when you long for someone to publish it. Not because it doesn’t hurt to have hours, months, years of hard work get dismissed with a firm (and hopefully kind) “Sorry, not for me, but I can’t wait to see this one out in the wild one day!” (all the more painful when that publisher was perhaps that story’s last hope to make it out in the wild). Not because you don’t deserve your dreams, or haven’t worked hard.

Rejection is a gift because you still get to have your dreams. Your ideas are “good enough” (because, it turns out, you are the only one who gets to decide if your work is good enough. Everyone else is just part of the journey.) Your time remains your own. Your commitments are to yourself and yourself alone. 

Don’t get me wrong, I want that book deal, but man am I excited to work on what comes next in my own to-do-list if I don’t. I’m excited to make my brain cook up more ideas that are entirely mine, and whose eventual creation isn’t distracted by other professional commitments made to other stories. I remain excited by the prospect of having those distracting professional commitments; I wouldn’t be trying to publish if I weren’t. But I’m holding on tight to these days when I still have control over my favorite part of all of this: making the story a reality.

There are definitely artists who have the dream of being noticed and arriving at success on their first shot; the rest of us have learned how to navigate, and perhaps even embrace, our rejections.