Humans are terrified of rejection. I’d like to pick on Americans in particular, because our entire culture seems to revolve around peer acceptance and image upkeep. Earlier this year, I watched a couple documentaries about the cycle of mass media influence on youth, and the message keeps coming back to haunt me. Our country is obsessed with acceptance. It’s not as if we can just switch it off, though—everyone experiences this at some level. Even if we are consciously aware of negative influence, it can be infuriatingly difficult to squash the urge to view ourselves objectively. I do it all the time. It’s part of being a young adult female in the modern United States. Everyone is telling me different things about what life should be, and I can’t help but hear them.

Now, the problem: I am a writer. (Come on, you knew I would tie this back to writing eventually). Rejection is the single most steadfast thing that will ever happen to an author, unless you’re Ernest Hemingway, in which case it might be alcohol. Which is not entirely beside the point because alcoholic writers are the stereotype, after all. But the main point is that the writer life invariably involves going out to the mailbox (or inbox) and seeing the words of greatest dread: “We’re sorry, but…”

Sometimes it is crippling. I submitted my first novel for publication when I was sixteen, and received a well-deserved rejection letter a few weeks later. I still have it, tucked away on a backroom bookshelf, and I haven’t touched it in years. I also haven’t submitted another novel since. I haven’t given up on writing—my passion demands as such—but my active efforts toward publication ground to a complete halt. I have been branching out more in the past year, but there’s a big ole gap in my timeline. All because of a single sheet of half-filled paper saying thank you, but try again elsewhere.

Is it really that bleak? I asked the same question last week when I read a chapter in Bret Lott’s book, "Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer's Life". We have been reading it over the semester for my nonfiction writing class, and we finally got to it. The rejection chapter. Lott says it with punchiness and grace: “…you will get rejected. Period.”

Ah yes, I thought to myself. Time to be discouraged.

And I was discouraged for the majority of the chapter. I even confessed as much in front of my class because it is the truth. Lott describes in empathetic detail how utterly humiliating it feels to have one’s face ground into the metaphorical dirt of rejection. And why? Because our writing is the deepest, darkest, most well-kept secret of who we are. Baring it to the world is frightening enough thanks to our inferiority complexes, and having it thrown back at us with little more explanation than ‘it’s missing something’ can drive us into eternal, self-depreciating retreat.

Yikes.

Thank goodness Lott doesn’t stop there. He continues to be rejected even after publication, and he makes that clear (597 rejections and counting, my goodness), but his main point is hardly about writing at all. It’s about humility. I think the last time I mentioned Lott was about the same thing, too—utter humility. Knowing nothing. Accepting, after a brutal struggle with the self, that crumbling under rejection is just a subtle cover-up of pride. I wrestled with the idea after finishing the chapter. I didn’t want to acknowledge that my self-pity was really pride. Legitimacy of emotion is important, and trivializing it does nothing to solve a problem. Sometimes it’s okay to cry or pout when a publisher says no. But a real, honest analysis of my fear tells me I need to stop taking it so personally, utilize any available critique for the valuable resource it is and start the next round of querying. If my passion is authentic, I won’t let rejection punch it in the gut and just walk away. I will punch rejection back, if only by saying ‘all right, I can still do this.’ Only then is the win truly mine, even if I still haven't achieved my goal.

In the long run, I don’t expect to magically rise above reproach and tell my inner dialogue to cut the crap. I expect to fight with my pride every single day for the rest of my writing career—which, if all goes as planned, will be forever. It’s a work in progress, much like the rest of life. Let’s stop treating rejection like the end-all of existence and start treating it like a tool for progression. Even if you become the next bestseller today, you will still write something better tomorrow.