Rejection is hard. I've been rejected more times than I can count. From men, from literary magazines, from colleges, from jobs, from social cliques. It doesn't scare me. Rejection is as real to me as life and death and change. It's inevitable. It's painful. And ironically enough, it's where my struggle lies. In inevitable pain. In accepting those things that are unavoidable but hurt.
These cataclysms often throw me off balance. And really, I think that everything boils down to balance. And moderation. And hopefully, eventually, acceptance. It all comes down to learning how to "be" in a world full of things that you can't control.
I just got rejected actually. Like, five minute ago. It was dressed up as an email. But if you take off the red bow of compliments what was really inside was a nice way of saying, "we don't want you." As human beings it doesn't surprise me that rejections are exceptionally hard to understand and even harder to accept. At least that's where I'm at.
This one was particularly rough. It was about a job, that I really, really wanted. It was my light at the end of the tunnel..that I didn't envision going out. Which is why I'm sitting here crying, trying not to get tears on my wireless keyboard, because if that broke, things could get really dark. So anyways I'm sitting here, telling myself to handle this gracefully. To accept the pain willingly. To forge on, to keep trying, to not give up, to work harder to be the person who acts from a place of contemplation instead of emotion.
I know that it would be easier to give up. It would be easier but I don't think it would be less painful. Which is why I will keep going.
But.. I'm emotional. So I'm going to cry, and clean, and experience the pain authentically. And now that I've done that, I'm going to move forward. Because if there is anything I believe in more than the pain and suffering one must go through in every capacity imaginable as human beings on this earth, it's resilience.
We don't owe anyone anything, but we do owe it to ourselves to put an end to our own suffering.
So this is a message to anyone out there who is in pain; anyone who is suffering, who is feeling rejected, who doesn't see a way out. You're not alone. You possess the same resilience that all humans do. Every single one of us that is able to survive something painful is paving a smoother road for someone else.