The Value of Rejection

Just as in monastic life, in which there are periods of candidacy and novitiate before the taking of vows, so in life, our calls and passions are tested. And one of the most stinging forms of this is rejection, whether you're going for job interviews and auditions, involved in online dating, or sending your writing out to editors (there's a reason they call them "submissions").

The mythologist Joseph Campbell called this part of the heroic journey "the road of trials," and on this road, you answer the elemental question of whether your commitments are real or imagined. And the ordeals on this path, the dragons that have to be slain over and over again, serve to test you and gauge your ability to prevail over setbacks—in mythic parlance, to transmute their flax into gold.

"On every fourth step, you are meant to fall down," says actress Naomi Newman in her monologue Snake Talk. "Not occasionally, not once, not twice, but on every fourth step. The ground opens up, the wind blows, a branch hits you in the head, you trip on stones, your heart breaks, you've got to fold the laundry, and they've closed the two left lanes. Here on the fourth step, all the forces gather together to stop you. And some people, when they fall down, they lie there for the rest of their lives. And some people learn how to fall-down-get-up. That is one move. Fall-down-get-up."

What you risk when you honor the demands of your callings is going beyond the limits you've set for yourself, toward the primitive fears of rejection and failure that are attached, like barnacles on a rock, to the idea of risk. You go toward the shadow sides of yourself that you try to hide even from yourself—the timidity and indecisiveness, the fear of change, the fear of being a beginner, your terribly tender heart that simply breaks too easily. You move toward the possibility of flawed efforts at risk-taking, and we don't like flaws. "God mend thine every flaw," goes a line from America the Beautiful.

Rejection by strangers is one thing—sending your writing or art out to editors and gallery owners—but rejection by those closest to you is quite another and exerts disproportionate leverage. All you want from them, all you ever wanted, was their love and approval, but when it comes to being true to yourself, this very need for love can turn against you, becoming the vehicle of your own subjection.

To ensure the continued flow of their esteem and attention, you may adjust yourself to fit whatever status quo they deem most favorable, paying, in the bargain, a steep price in individuality and power. "Fears about yourself dig into your ability to do your best work," say the authors of Art and Fear, "while fears about what others will think of you compromise your ability to do your own work."

Rejection is so fundamentally a part of the risk-taking involved in pursuing passions and callings—of success itself—that if you don't have a fairly high threshold for it (and aren't willing to learn from your mistakes), you're going to find yourself avoiding the challenges that lead to growth. The only way to avoid rejection is to stop putting it out there, though by doing so, you avoid rejection, but not failure.

I've been a freelance writer for 35 years—a profession which specializes in rejection that would stun a panhandler—and I've learned that although in most cases rejection slips are just people saying, "No thank you," and writers are counseled not to take them personally, this is way easier said than done.

It is personal. It's your writing, your ideas and visions, your heart and soul poured onto the page, your delicate shoots of optimism sent out into a world that wears big, dirty boots. To say that rejection is nothing personal, that editors are rejecting your writing, not you, is unconvincing. Most writers—like most anyone who sticks their neck out on behalf of a passion or calling—believe that their passion is them and don't want to cultivate the kind of emotional detachment that, say, doctors (supposedly) maintain regarding patients, lest they anguish over every relapse.

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And when editors hide behind standard rejection forms ("This does not meet our editorial needs"), which they do, understandably, for the sake of expediency, it robs us of the right to face our accusers, if not the chance to find out why our writing does not meet editorial needs, though we may not necessarily want to know.

The fact is, rejection and failure hurt. There's no way around it. And if they don't hurt, there's something fishy.

But I say, let it hurt—curse and pout and mutter about the indignity of it all—and then let it go. Get yourself right back out there, preferably the same day. Rejection by its very nature makes you feel out of control, and the best way to regain that sense of control is to send your work out to the next client on your list. Fall down seven times, stand up eight.

Besides, someone telling you "No" isn't rejection. Rejection is the conversation you have with yourself afterward! The way you beat yourself up, the flaws you believe that "No" confirms.

And take solace from history. It’s full of the miscalculations of editors/teachers/parents/judges/talent agents/admissions officers/etc. Here's a smattering of examples from a book I used to keep on my reference shelf during the freelance years, right next to the dictionary and the thesaurus, and which routinely helped me manage the rejections endemic to that line of work. It's called Rotten Rejections, a compendium of famous kiss-offs from literary history, many of them from editors who undoubtedly lived to regret it:

The Diary of Anne Frank: "The girl doesn't, it seems to me, have any special perception or feeling which would lift the book above the curiosity level."

Catch-22, Joseph Heller: "A continual and unmitigated bore."

Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence: "For your own good, do not publish this book."

Lord of the Flies, William Golding: "It does not seem to us that you have been wholly successful in working out an admittedly promising idea."

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce: "It is not possible to get hold of an intelligent audience in wartime."

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand: "It is too intellectual for a novel. It won't sell."

Mankind in the Making, H.G. Wells: "Only a minor writer of no large promise."

Animal Farm, George Orwell: "It is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A."

You may refuse to send your visions/passions/creative works out into the world, because you're terrified of rejection, believing you'll be devastated by it, and it will only prove your worthlessness. But you have to think through how your life might unfold, or fail to unfold, if you never take the chance, if you keep your gifts and passions locked in a drawer. You have to think through not only how you'd feel about yourself if you got rejected (and why you'd feel that way), but how you'd feel about yourself if you never tried—or if you got accepted.

For that matter, you're probably better off not even thinking in terms like failure and success. Rather, think like a scientist. Life is an experiment, and there are only results.

And one of those results is that there's often gold in them thar hills—nuggets of valuable feedback that you get along with the rejections, and it's important to recognize the good news amidst the bad. Here, for instance, are some examples of the advice editors have passed along to me in their rejection letters:

"We'd prefer you not pitch us big feature articles as an unknown writer [to us]. Try one of our columns first."

"A great story idea. So good we did it ourselves recently. Send more."

"Please read our guidelines before querying us again."

"Not new enough."

"Too controversial for us."

"The piece doesn't seem as funny as when you queried it."

And, finally, consider this: In her book When the Heart Waits, Sue Monk Kidd describes a conference she once attended, during which participants were given a sheet of colored construction paper and asked to tear it into a shape that represented their lives. While these were later being pasted on a bulletin board to form a large collage, someone came around with a glass bowl and collected the scraps of paper everyone had torn off and intended to discard.

The jar was then placed on an altar. Only by gathering up this "confetti of scars and torn places," Kidd says, only by embracing it and setting it on an altar can we begin to transform it.