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In my twenties, every rejection letter I received sent me to a dark place of doubt and self-loathing. I'd slouch around in this morose state for four or five days at a time.
In my thirties, I got my rebound time down to forty-eight hours. This was an improvement, but still, two days per rejection adds up when you're trying to send out work on a regular basis. Too many beautiful, ordinary days turned sour and bleak on account of some puny little three-line email.
When it finally dawned on me how much of my life I was squandering in this way, I came up with a strategy. It's a pretty good system that still works for me to this day, reducing my post-rejection blues to a reasonable five or six hours.
More on this method in a minute, but I want to stick with the emotional dangers of rejection just a little longer.
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Disappointed Soul - Ferdinand Hodler (1891)
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Feeling blue or depressed about rejection is normal. We're social creatures, after all, and getting rejected by our fellow humans in almost any context tends to take its toll. So how to accept these bad feelings and move on?
My advice is to be incredibly protective of your own writing practice. Meditate on the importance of that practice in your life. Because it's likely—if you've read this far—that you take it pretty seriously. So feel the feelings, but protect the thing at the heart of your practice. Protect it from your own ego. Protect it from social forces. Protect it from form letters and editors and reviewers and publishers and random strangers on the internet. Protect it from any "well-meaning" naysayers in your life and from iffy workshop critiques. Because the more you allow rejection to hurt you, the more likely it is that preemptive worries about rejection will negatively effect your writing.
This dynamic can manifest in many ways. You might experience writer's block. Or you might be so afraid of rejection that you stop even trying to write. Or you might keep writing but somehow never quite finish what you start. More subtly (and insidiously), you might, in hopes of avoiding rejection, attempt to make your work conform to standards or conventions that seem like safe bets. But if these conventions don't actually align with your vision, voice, or internal truths, you will forsake something important at the heart of your work.
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Wise embroidery by Louise Bourgeois
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The trick, I think, is to accept the pain of rejection, but not succumb to it. Meditate deeply on why you write in the first place and keep that truth close to your heart. Also, it doesn't hurt to have a good game plan ready to go, for when you do, inevitably, get rejected.
Here's my method:
1. Before sending something out to Magazine A (or Contest A, Agent A, etc), I get everything ready to send the same piece to Magazine B (Contest B, Agent B, etc), including contact name, email address and cover letter draft.
2. In the event that Magazine A rejects my work, I send it immediately (within an hour or two) to Magazine B. This helps alleviate the sting because I'm not just passively accepting bad news, but am doing something about it. Also, sending something out always rouses a bit of optimism.
3. Finally, if time, space, and situation permit, I do something nourishing and real, preferably of a physical nature. My most reliable standbys are yoga, baking, and walking. But anything will do. The point is to get out of my head and connect with my body, which helps me process the emotions and move on.
Coraggio!
Kim
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