By: Mr. Lu
Imagine if you were accepted for everything you applied for. Every college, you get in. Every job, you get an offer. Every sports team, you make. Every artistic event, you get a role. Every organization welcomes you. Heck, imagine if every person you meet accepts you as a friend. It may seem gloriously ideal at first, but eventually may seem indulgent and unchallenging after a while.
Unfortunately, the reverse is often true where rejection is commonplace and frequent. Many students have applied for multiple student leadership positions or organization or team roles in different years, only to be rejected by each one. It’s hard and it’s frustrating, and it makes you question yourself, and ask, “What’s wrong with me?”
We do know and understand that letting everyone make the team or making everyone a leader isn’t practical, and feels cheap and unsatisfying. An entire debate can be had whether this kind of competitive feel for positions is healthy or whether structures should be changed or whether people should take turns getting roles. All worthy of discussion, but it doesn’t really help in the moment when rejection happens.
In some ways, processing the raw emotion of the initial moment is the easiest part. Tears, anger, sadness, pity, and criticism all might flow, coalesce, and explode in a short period of time. But as the days pass, and you begin to reflect and think about it some, how can you respond?
Sure, there’s the practical part. Why do I think I wasn’t accepted? What can I do differently next time I’m in this situation? Who can I trust as a sounding board to discuss my thoughts and feelings? Did going through the process and trying make me a better person?
For getting through the heart part, sometimes pursuing the right goals might work wonders. I was talking to Tommy and Ben C. about some of their life goals, and I marveled at how wonderful, how reachable, and how uplifting they were. Listen to Tommy’s goals: Surf in Australia. Surf a barrel. Get a dog named Dave. Eat a nut from a tree. Watch a Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Competition. Hold a pigeon in his bare hands. Or Ben’s goals: Travel a long distance from point A to point B and then look back at all the different points to see where you’ve gone. For example, biking from London to Rome. These kinds of goals speak to the core, the essence, and the inwardness. They help heal. They are not distractors, on the contrary, they are focusers. They make you a bit more joyful, a bit more real, and make you realize not getting a position doesn’t mean a rejection of you personally.
Eli was going for a position, and he told me he didn’t vote for himself. “What if you lose by one vote?” I asked. He shrugged. “At least I voted for people I liked,” he said. It’s OK to want to go for something. It’s OK to have passion and a desire for something, but it’s not OK if you lose a bit of yourself on the way. Tying yourself to a title, or tying yourself to a resume item might confine you, and limit what you can or cannot see. It’s better to be free.
Rejection and disappointment will revisit us in some form or another throughout our lives. How that transforms us, how we react, makes us. Noah Kahan talks of the futility of always chasing. “You build a boat, you build a life,” he observes. “You lose your friends, you settle into routine. Where are you? What does it mean?” We can help each other out by not levying an expectation upon others and wrapping results in how much we see someone is worth. We can hold close those we appreciate for who they are, and not for what boxes they’ve ticked. Kahan continues, “If I get too close, and I’m not how you hoped, forgive my northern attitude. I was raised in the cold. If the sun don’t rise until the summertime, forgive my northern attitude. I was raised on little light.”
Rejection is hard, and it’s part of life. Working through a process, cheering that process in each other, reflecting on growth through process, is also hard, but when done right, it’s a great part of life.