Well hello lovely readers! I thought I’d start the New Year
off by posting something nice and cheery.
The topic of this post… drumroll please… is rejection!
Why are you qualified
to write this post, you may ask? Well, surprising but true: I have been
rejected from many things in my life: literary magazines, universities, boyz,
jobs (gosh, a whole lot of jobs actually! Talk to me about last November some
other time… Trying to find a job in London is pretty brutal!). Hec, I’ll probably be able to add agents and
publishers to the list once I start submitting my manuscript later this
year. Rejection is practically an
occupational hazard of being a(n aspiring) published author.
If you’re anything like me (that is, your skin is the
thickness of rice paper and Achieving Things is very very important to your
fragile ego), REJECTION SUCKS. Some
people brush off rejection, as they are bigger than that. I commend those people. I am not bigger than that. In fact, many times, I find myself on the
floor, beating my fists against the carpet, moaning, “Why me? Why me?”
(#toughfirstworldproblems). At the end
of the day, though, I peel myself off the floor and keep going. Why? Because rejection is a side-effect of
the journey to do difficult/awesome things.
It’s a sign that you’re doing something right, because you’re putting
yourself out there in a challenging landscape.
It’d be worrying if you never got rejected, because either you're the
most awesome person to ever be born and better than everyone else (unlikely,
but if that’s the case, congrats!) or you aren’t pushing yourself. Rejection is normal, part of the process of
getting where you want to be, and it happens to basically everyone.
But does rejection still suck? YES.
So, I asked you - my fellow bloggers, readers, and Facebook and Twitter buddies - to weigh in on how
you cope with rejection. The response
was overwhelming – I don’t think I’ve ever had so many comments on a post!
Rejection is such a universal experience that everyone had something to say
about it. (And by the way, thanks to
everyone who wrote back. You’re all
superstars.)
So what did you all have to say?
