I received my first letter of rejection as a writer a few weeks ago. Months before, I submitted one of my favorite things I’ve ever written to a literary arts journal for the first time. I don't know if I was expecting anything to come of my submission, but regardless of my chances of acceptance, it definitely stung to see the title of my piece next to the words “was not chosen.”
As a burgeoning writer, I knew that rejection was something I would inevitably have to deal with in my career sooner or later. But, also as a writer, I often think my work is a lot better than it is, and at times, fail to see that I have unrealistic expectations for it. Nonetheless, I’m a person who is embarrassingly easy to crush, and so I should’ve been more prepared for the blow. It’s over now, though, and as the great sage Sheryl Crow once said, “the first cut is the deepest.”
I’m not going to tell you how to deal with the rejections you’ll get as a writer, because I myself have just barely begun my journey of submission; I haven’t yet experienced the glory of acceptance, and I don’t necessarily know if my pursuits as a writer will ever pay off in the real world. And, to be honest, I think I dealt with my first rejection in a pretty destructive way—you shouldn't take advice from me. What I will try to do, though, is help you feel less alone if you’re in the same dark, hopeless place of what feels like infinite inadequacy that I was in a few weeks ago.
It’s a shame that everything is digitalized nowadays, because we can’t exactly make shrines out of our piles of rejections, tack them on the wall like Stephen King did, and make it our motivation to prove we’re worthy. Instead, we just get emails now. Digital, impersonal rejections whose mere essence feels like it undermines the soul you poured into your work.
When I first opened the email that informed me my piece wasn’t accepted, I immediately fought the tears filling my eyes, hot with disappointment. I think that was my first mistake. I pretended like it didn’t hurt—in fact, I played it off like I was almost happy about it. I texted my mom and told my friends as though I was proud, just because breaking the news to people was the last thing I wanted to do—like playing it off as though it wasn’t a big deal would make it matter less to me. In short, it didn’t work. In terms of the stages of grief, I was in denial.
The next day, I was in shambles. At first I cried, and then I got angry—at myself, at the people who rejected me, at my essay for not being good enough. I felt like a failure as a writer, and so I wrote. I sat down with my laptop and vented everything I was feeling to the blank document. It’s an odd thing, doing the act you think you’re incapable of in order to feel better about your incapability; I’m not sure it helped.
In the end, the only thing that really made me feel better about my rejection was the passage of time. As the present gets farther away from the day of your devastation, it gets easier to see things more objectively—I've realized since then that maybe the essay I submitted isn’t representative of my best work any longer.
And so, I’m faced with a question: Abandon my piece, or somehow make it better? I still haven’t made a decision as to what I should do, but the question of revision versus desertion has forced me to analyze my writing in a new way. I realized that I had written the piece I submitted for myself—it does what I always wanted it to do, and it conveys the feeling I spent hours trying to communicate. This essay was one of the first pieces of writing I, on my own, felt entirely motivated to improve. I knew I was onto something meaningful as soon as I began to write it; the words flowed from someplace new, someplace where they didn’t feel contrived, but instead unusually genuine. I loved and will continue to love that essay, regardless of its rejection.
This is also when I realized something I’d been told before but hadn’t really considered: I don’t have to write for anyone but myself. Writing isn’t just a career choice or a casual pastime for me, it’s also a form of self-development. I love to make my life into art, to find significance in the mundane, to give voice to the ineffable. No rejection letter will ever take the power of prose away from me.
