Rejection

I used to have a “rejection file” in high school and college, as I called it. It was all the letters I had gotten in response to opportunities I tried for. I tried for everything that came my way – contests, jobs, internships, essay competitions, design solicitations, etc. I’ve always wanted to live life to the fullest, and I learned early on that rejection and failure go hand in hand with putting yourself out there in every way possible.

My file was thick. And it’s only gotten exponentially thicker over time, though now it’s logged in my head rather than on paper.

Some rejection is easier for us to take than others. Some we can offload within a few minutes, other rejection takes a lot of time to heal.

I thought I’d share with you all kinds of rejection I’ve experienced in case it can somehow help you if you’re needing to feel like you’re not alone.

Fortunately, life was gentle with me at first. I was born into a kind, loving, secure family that gave me a rock-solid foundation in love, confidence, and stability. Rejection and failure don’t easily rock a boat that’s sitting in a safe harbor.

My first rejections – the contents of that file – were easy to take. I had a binder full of nos – including nos to all kinds of things I dreamed up and proposed to other people that were axed. Nos like postcards from Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia, thanking me for the T-shirt designs I sent in but gently breaking it to me that they didn’t fit the look they were going for.

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I began to pride myself on the ever-growing thickness of the file because, in the big picture of life, those rejections didn’t really hurt. They only brought me closer to the possibility that someone might say yes to one of my propositions someday.

I applied for some really cool internships during high school that were accepted. One was at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachussetts for a 2-week, all-expenses-paid summer internship involving extracting shore and deep-water cores, then studying them in their labs. Eight of us high schoolers from around the country lived together in a house in Cape Cod and had a blast during every minute of that experience. My mom hoped I’d come back wanting to be a marine biologist. I came back knowing I did not want to be a marine biologist, despite the mind-blowing memories WHOI made for all of us.

A silly yes I got was winning third prize in a Clairol contest. The challenge was to write a winning 50-word essay about hair color. That’s about 2 or 3 sentences. I barely brushed my hair, much less colored it. I entered it for the first prize, which was a trip to some beautiful place that I don’t remember anymore. In the mail came news of my third placement and a large prize basket of all kinds of products. I used the brush they sent for about 20 years until it fell apart.

The first painful rejection experience I had involved a barrage of repeated rejections all day long for a whole summer. A sucker for adventure, I embarked on selling books door-to-door in New Jersey towns during the summer after my freshman year of college. The wildness of it sucked me in – driving across the country, going to a 1-week sales school in Nashville, and continuing on to the East Coast for a 13 1/2-hour-a-day, 6-day-a-week immersion in hot, humid, neighborhood sales one house at a time.

In sales school, they informed us that as long as we never stopped, we would average 1 sale for every 32 houses we visited. In other words, each of us would experience every form of humiliating, lonely-making, personality-questioning rejection from 31 houses until we made that one sale. Then we’d start the statistics all over again.

When you are rejected in every way – with wary looks, unkind words, slammed doors, and more – it hurts – in every way. I cried on curbs. I developed a rash. I got sick. But as the days went by, I knew it wasn’t me they were rejecting. It was the sales experience they didn’t want. I could live with that. I set about to be like a robot – to side with statistics rather than feelings, and just do the job I knew I had to do to attain the reward that came from it. I couldn’t stand almost every minute of it. I was alone all day every day, with no one to talk to until late at night, and unable to form any lasting relationships all day. Even the people who bought books from me had to remain strangers. I had to move to every next door with efficiency. I wrote about it at length here, and I will never forget it.

What kept me going was one thought: I never wanted regret. I knew that if I didn’t stick with it and keep going every single minute, I’d come home regretting my performance and feel the need to go back to redeem myself. I never, ever wanted to go back, so I set aside my displeasure and did it to the best of my ability. I came home afterward more grateful for every human in my life than ever before. And on the way home, I picked up the check I had earned in Nashville for almost $10,000. Two-and-a-half months of pain resulted in a pretty dang good payout.

A few weeks later, I got a little packet in the mail. Of the top 1,000 new salespeople that summer, I had ranked 32nd. I was stunned.

I had also come away with wisdom – I had learned that most people at their core are good. I had been treated with kindness along the way that I’ll never forget – the woman who invited me in to take photographs of me because she was a natural documentarian type; the Syrian woman who insisted that I come into her immaculate, white living room to serve me fresh baklava, as though I were royalty; the grandfather building a birdhouse who told me I was beautiful in the way my dad might say it.

Rejection isn’t always that way, though. My next rejection in life, however light it may sound, really hurt. It was the first time I was ever fired from a job.

I started working at 11 because I wanted to. I thought it would be fun to earn my own money, so I took index cards written with all of my cleaning services to neighbors and friends of my parents. I began washing windows and cleaning houses, being ridiculously underpaid thanks to my age. I remember one family that called me now and then to clean their house. It took me a solid 8 hours every time – I worked hard and was meticulous – and they always paid me a meager $10. Perhaps I shouldn’t have let them name their own price.

I worked every summer of my life after that – because I wanted to – and I always tried to do my best at whatever job I had. One year in college, I worked at a smoothie place. It wasn’t uncommon to end up with a little extra smoothie that didn’t fit in the cup each order, no matter how we all tried to master it. We were told to put the extra down the drain. I hate waste, so I always put any extra in a cup for later. We were also told exactly what proportion of frozen yogurt to fruit to put in, and I felt customers weren’t getting an honest fruit smoothie if it was almost completely sugary yogurt. I knew that when I bought a smoothie, I was expecting my hard-earned money to go more toward fruit than sugar. So I put a few more berries and a little less yogurt in the smoothies I made. Some of my shifts were at night, and because we were in a college town, we would close at midnight. While the other workers did their different roles, mine was to clean the orange juicer. It was always covered in stuck pulp from the day, and it took a lot of elbow grease to get it back to being silver. Every nook and cranny was gobbed up.

One night at closing, one of the owners took me aside. I had no idea what was coming. He fired me. Too much smoothie “kept,” too many berries in the smoothies, and too much time taken on the orange juicer every night I was on. I felt so horrible. I had always been an honest person and a hard worker, and I should have talked with him much earlier about the things I was instead changing of my own accord. I left the smoothie shop crying that night. A friend of mine happened to walk by and asked what was wrong. I burst into big tears and he hugged me tight, adding a few expletives about the owner of the place for having hurt me. That part wasn’t necessary, but he was being loyally kind to me in his own way.

Being dumped from Blenders in the Grass sounds almost goofy, but it chinked my armor that day.

My next firing was much heavier for my heart.

After graduating from college, I became a bike tour leader for Backroads. Thousands of people had applied to work for them that year, and the field was narrowed to 50 applicants who would prove their skills during a weekend wilderness trip in the Pt Reyes woods above San Francisco. I made the cut, and at 21, I was the youngest guide they had ever hired.

I loved the adventure of it; the stunning views we passed from the seats of our bikes all day; the competitive drive we had to muster in order to maintain a position as the lead biker in a pack of fantastically fit customers. Sometimes we covered 117 miles in a day on the Bryce/Grand Canyon/Zion trips. I also led trips through Glacier National Park and the California wine country.

At the end of the summer, I received a letter. It was from Tom Hale, the owner of Backroads. I had gotten average rather than stellar reviews from some guests on trips I had co-led, and he couldn’t keep a guide on staff who wasn’t consistently stellar. I called the owner to talk about all of it. I could barely hold in the humiliation I felt. After I hung up the phone, I cried. Hard.

The next rejection in my life was massive. It had to do with love. I loved someone with every cell of my being. I had spent almost 8 years of being on cloud nine. It was like a dreamy movie. I figured the bliss would last a lifetime since it was mutual. Apparently it wasn’t. One night, with no warning, it was severed. You can’t force someone to continue to love you. Bonnie Raitt knows it all too well. So all I could do was let go.

Now that I have hindsight to help calculate it, it took me a two-and-a-half-year rebound relationship and about 12 or 13 years of marriage to fully get over it. It was actually easier right at the beginning. Maybe a mix of shock, denial, and hope softened the blow. I didn’t think about it the first many years of marriage, but it surfaced again when I didn’t expect it, and I had to continue to work through it. I learned from experience that when the heart is damaged, complete mending may not happen until a ridiculous amount of time has worked on it, no matter how much leeway you feel you’ve given it.

In the vein of love and rejection, I hurt my first love at 13 without meaning to cause such harm, and he never let me forget it.

There’s nothing like the first person who tells you how amazing you are; how much they feel for you; how attractive they find you. It’s a stunning, heart-pumping thing, and I still have the letters he wrote me more than 30 years ago. Why would you ever get rid of something like that?! I felt equally attracted to him – his intelligence, his abilities, his looks, his eyes, how they looked at me, etc. But I just wasn’t ready to be a girlfriend. I assumed he would want to continue moving ever-forward in the physical department, and I wasn’t ready to dive into all of the physical things kids were doing around me. I would have gotten boring really quickly in that respect, or so I figured. I didn’t have the words to articulate all of those thoughts and feelings. Instead, I broke it off with few words, which probably seemed cold and unfeeling. He must have decided to never speak to me again, because he didn’t. Four years of high school in a tiny school and not a word. His feeling of rejection led to blocking out my presence at all times. I would have been the best friend he’d ever had, but that’s not what boys at that age wanted. We didn’t have the tools to articulate anything, so we both lived out each other’s rejection every single day. That was a sadness for me well beyond college, even though I never really saw him after high school.

Sometimes painful rejection doesn’t leave us alone. My husband and I will soon celebrate our 16th anniversary, yet most of those years were filled with terrible rejection in the form of neglect. The fact that I can write about it now is big. I couldn’t have several years ago.

He never meant to hurt me, but he did. Every day. Nothing – not my presence, my conversation, my love, my joy for life, my interest in him, or my excitement to share life as one – fueled his interest in spending time with me. He always had things to do – rides to go on, sports to watch, plants to water, anything but enjoy life with me. I came last in his priorities, so my number never came up. The most tedious chores were of more importance than I was. He preferred talking about paint drying over enjoying each other’s company. I wanted to love, to laugh, to talk, to cuddle, to happy our way through life together. Somehow, even with vows he’d promised to me, that wasn’t his plan. Love was of no interest to him. Actually, it’s more like love seemed foreign to him for some strange reason, which has been one of life’s biggest mysteries to me. He never realized how hurtful he was.

It took me a painfully long time to understand that he might not ever be interested in love in the way most people are. That he might actually love me the most he’s able to. Painfully slowly over the years, he’s gotten better at being a companion. As of a few years ago, daily neglect and rejection fizzled away. Benign nonchalance took over, and just recently I’ve been feeling some genuine care from him, more than I ever did in the past. That’s lightyears beyond how he used to be. It’s still lightyears behind the kind of love that I know is possible.

Don’t get me wrong, my husband’s provision for us has been cosmic. I am ever-grateful to him for the life he’s given us. And his help with parenting has been wonderful – changing diapers, bouncing babies, attending performances, snuggling in bed with them at night. As much as he’s done good things for my well-being, relationship with me in just about every way was always excluded from the equation, as though love were a silly notion.

Sometimes I wonder if this history of rejection is preparing me for the next big thing in life. Have I been honed to be strong, patient, or ever-hopeful for some great task? Will I need to count on myself and no one else at some point? Or on the contrary, will I have some wonderful relief or release of some sort? Some great joy that diminishes rejection’s impact and fills all of the little holes made by loneliness? Thank goodness I’ve had the wonderful love of our children to wallow in all along in the meantime.

Character seems to come primarily from difficulty, and I fight the temptation to allow resentment to take character’s place along the way. I don’t always succeed, but I intrinsically know that if I choose the right attitude in hard times, I will come out wiser and stronger on the other side of it all.

I’m still patiently waiting for the other side, which is why I write to you. It’s the only way I can figure to make something good out of something hard. If you feel alone in your challenges or in rejection of some sort, know you are not.

I hope this helps.