Resolutions for Rejection
In the inbox, all you can see is “Thank you for submitting…” you hold your breath as you click the email fully open and then your heart takes a polar bear plunge as you read the rest of the sentence, “although we will not be publishing…” No matter how many rejection emails I have received (and there have been a lot), I still feel the sting.
In a way, I’m glad I started the year off with a fresh rejection letter from Ploughshares on January 3. Last month I sent a handful of poems to them with the hopes of having one published this coming year. 2024 promises to be a year of even bigger rejection as I send my little poetry book out to contests in search of a publisher. The utter loss of control in this portion of the process is revealing. I can do nothing more than what I have done, and that is good enough. A groundedness in deeper realities about my art and life is being offered to me. Here are some ways I am meditating on my current state of unknowing and the rejections to come…
Rejection is not failure. This one is a mantra I have on repeat. We are ingrained to view “success” in simplistic and binary ways. Our worth (even our dollar amount of worth!) is based on whether people accept our personhood, our work, and our ideas. When so much hinges on acceptance, of course we feel immediately threatened by rejection. In my mind, I am reworking rejection to simply be information. Rejection is information. Information that I can do with what I will. I think there’s a way to experience rejection with alacrity—a sense of, ok, good to know! What’s next? Let’s go!
I realize that some days this will sound much too chipper, and that I will need to grieve my failures and feel my artistic wounds in order to keep growing as an artist. Rejection can still hurt but doesn’t need to give my work less value.
My art has intrinsic value. I value my life as an artist. I value the art I create. I do not need to wait for anyone or any system to give my work value. I get to declare it valuable. I declare it valuable by tending and honoring my work. My creativity is so much bigger than a single poem or one book.
There are no obstacles.
One morning, while I revised a poem, I watched this squirrel defy gravity as she tried again and again to get to the bird feeder I had hung in the middle of my large living room window. Other squirrels had attempted in the weeks prior and given up—didn’t this one get the memo? Over and over the squirrel failed, falling violently to the cold ground, and I thought, “dumb squirrel,” with irritation about the little paw prints I would need to clean off the glass. Of course there was nothing dumb about this squirrel. She was learning.
By the time she got to the feeder, she had mastered a myriad of unique squirrel jumps, dangles, and reaches, and her confidence was unmatched. Even if she hadn’t succeeded, she still would be the most persistent and most creative squirrel in the yard. She stayed hungry and found a way to fill her belly. So here’s to a year of rejections and the hope of an eventual feast!
