Rejection- that awful nine letter word that makes all human beings- not just writers- cringe. It’s the number one fear of most human beings, something we will do anything to avoid even if it means giving up on our dreams.
I had a front row seat on the Rejection Train growing up. I was, after all, the youngest child by a country mile. Seven years separated me from my next oldest sibling, and when my sisters came to visit in the summer they would join my brother and take off in a pack to do all the things that cool kids in the 80s did. I would trail behind, wondering why they didn’t want to play with me and feeling so…. Rejected!
As time went on I began writing only to discover a new can of worms that included showing my precious work to someone who (cringe again) might not like it! I was terrified by the idea of strangers reading my stories. Didn’t they know these were my babies? And surely they wouldn’t throw a baby out in the cold with no food, clothing or shelter?
Unfortunately, the people I chose to share my work with didn’t see my stories as actual children, and throughout the course of my writing career (which included 4 years at Western Michigan University) they had plenty to say about what I was (and wasn’t) doing right.
I had my fair share of criticism in those days at WMU, but I also had something else… hope, because for the first time it wasn’t just my mother saying I was talented because she was contractually obligated to do so. Here I ran into professors with impressive track records- a fiction writer who had won an O.Henry Prize- a playwright with an Off-Broadway show in production. These people looked at my stuff and (gasp) liked it.
Rejection was the sword that had helped me sharpen my craft into something I felt worthy of putting out into the world. And so I did… sending away poems and short stories to literary magazines I found in the classified section of Writer’s Digest. After months of a monogamous relationship with that hated nine letter word, I finally got a bite. A poem I’d written about my family cottage was featured in a now defunct publication known as ‘Main Channel Voices.’ Sure they thought my name was ‘Linda’ instead of ‘Laura’, but things were looking up. Other publications followed, as well as more rejections, but something was changing in me.
I began to recognize the place that all the ‘no’s’ had been leading me towards, and that sometimes rejections were actually protecting me from something. How often do we use the old adage ‘Hindsight is 20/20?’ Not just in our writing careers, but life? ‘ My way’ wasn’t always the best way, and even as my controlling nature railed against it, something deeper told me to sit back and relax. Everything happens for a reason- even the rejections that take the wind from our sails and whisper in our ears that we will never be ‘real’ writers. Rejection is here for a purpose, and it’s not going anywhere as long as writers and teachers and nurses and insurance salesmen all have the courage to step out into that big scary world, babies (or books) clutched tightly to their chests.
We need to live with it, learn from it, and maybe even embrace it as a guidepost that keeps us in the moment - because that’s exactly where we’re supposed to be.