Rejection Notice
(February 2017)
I have long felt both burning curiosity and trepidation about how I would deal with the eventuality of rejection—I could daydream all day about how I thought I would react to both praise and dismissal, but there is no substitute for the real thing. As someone who aspires to have an artistic career, such things were inevitable, and I needed to prepare myself for one or the other—but it’s also pretty clear that in many ways I’ve been intentionally avoiding the process of finding out, which is to say, I make things and then never share them with anyone. It’s very hard to advance your aspirations for an artistic career when you never let people see your art, but I never said my decisions actually make any sense, not even to me.
It’s not like that behaviour was new or unpredictable, either—withdrawing and hiding has been my default response to everything for as long as I have been self-conscious. It’s what a lifetime of low self-esteem does to you: you become afraid of outside judgment, and get the idea that all but the vaguest hints of your actual personality or interests will disgust everyone around you. It’s better to never be noticed than to be noticed and be judged lesser. So yes, in actual fact, I have a deeply embedded fear of being rejected—but as an adult, I try to go outside myself a little bit and see that fear as the irrational thing it is, and internally argue that it doesn’t apply to all places. Which is why I can then daydream about how I would treat judgment related to my chosen craft, rather than just assuming I would react the same way as before—when it comes to people reading and giving feedback on my writing, it is strictly professional, and no one is saying there’s something wrong with me. University helped me in that regard, because I was able to form a rapport with many of my professors, and I learned that I should take in their evaluations without making it personal. I could learn from it, or even laugh it off. I had hoped that my eventual foray into writing for the world outside academia would be similar. On the other hand, the most important rejection I think I’ve ever received—not getting into a graduate program—pretty much broke my brain, possibly permanently. So, I had evidence that my emotional response to rejection could go in diametrically opposed directions.
When I started writing fiction, I gave myself some breathing room—there were no immediate plans to seek out places to submit these things (although I did some initial research on the topics of story submissions and eBook publishing just to give me a head start), I just wanted to write things I wanted to write and see where it went from there. Writing about whatever I wanted, on my own time—whether it be book reviews on a blog or fiction or silly things on Tumblr—became the major bright spot in my life. It just felt so invigorating, to finally force myself to put all my ideas to text after years of brainstorming without end—whether or not I thought the end product was good or not, there was an end product, and I made it. I can see that enthusiasm just by looking at how much I was writing in the first year or so after I made my first real efforts—sometimes three different pieces of fiction (of varying styles and lengths) alongside my blogging a month, which seems impossible to me now, but I guess I had all these pent up ideas that just sorta streamed out over months of furious typing. Most of that material ended up being thrown in the metaphorical drawer for good, but I did the work, and used it to learn and improve, even without sharing any of it. This was my activity, for me, and just having it be that for a few years gave me a chance to freely create, and to build my confidence in what I was doing.
But I feel like, by early 2017, I was really starting to yearn for the next stage of the game, to do something with all the work I had done. Nothing would ever change unless I changed it. I had built up a catalogue of stories that I hadn’t yet dismissed as totally irredeemable, and had found that there were possible venues that would potentially be interested in looking at those stories (not easy, considering that there aren’t that many places of a certain genre persuasion that have open submissions anymore—I missed the age of the short story magazine by about, I dunno, a decade or more?) Considering that the stories were already written, and just needed a few more revision jobs, why not take the open offers that I found? The process was smooth, even with a deadline, and despite all my years of anxiety, I sent the file and the cover letter to the publication and found that it was…painless. All the fear melted away, and suddenly I went from a isolated hobbyist to someone who could potentially become a published author. A little action was all it took.
Thankfully for this rookie, the turnaround was only took a week or two. It was a Sunday, and I looked at my phone and saw an e-mail from the publication in my inbox. They rejected the story. They gave me a sentence or two where they mentioned what they liked and didn’t like about it, and then wished me luck with my future submissions. I can’t say that I didn’t spend the previous week or two building up the idea that this could be my big break, but when I read that e-mail, I felt…elated. Validated. Someone read something I wrote, and then had an opinion about it. I was so excited, I was shaking. It’s all I ever really wanted.
This added a whole new dimension to my writing—now my work really did have the possibility of being read by someone else. I wasn’t suddenly tailoring my stories for submission, but I did keep in mind what the polite slush pile-reading volunteer had said. I would submit the same story again to someone else, and be rejected there, too. I would submit a different story to the first place the next year, and that would be rejected as well. Nothing I’ve submitted has been picked up by anyone, and I couldn’t be happier, because my work is being read, and they were often describing my own story back to me from the perspective of someone who didn’t know me and could just react to what was on the page, and it was interesting and gratifying to read. After years of being terrified of judgment, it suddenly became my joy—after all, for every story that was rejected, I knew there was another chance to try again, and one day, I may just have what they want. The possibility is always there.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 