The Sting - Dealing with Rejection

A wasp

I recently saw a post from a young artist talking about the sting of rejection.  She’d just had another email or letter or conversation.  As she spoke I completely understood what she was talking about as she pointed to the centre of her chest, “It just gets you a little bit right in here.”  I understand that feeling.   When something feels like it’s been taken from you and the hit goes right to your core.  It’s in your chest,  in the pit of your stomach, at the back of your throat.  It whispers or shouts: “You’re not GOOD ENOUGH.  YOU’RE not good enough.  YOU’RE NOT GOOD ENOUGH”.

I want to reach  out to that young creative and say, “But that’s it.”  The sting and where it sits, how it feels, what it means to you and what you subsequently do with it. That’s it. Sometimes the sting is even more important than getting the gig.

A writer’s life can be full of rejection. That doesn’t mean the sting gets any better as a career progresses, but so far, in my writing journey, rejections, although they sting each time,  have also been some of the most important and defining moments of my writing career.

Many years ago there was a TV writing scheme I really wanted to go on.  I wanted to go on it so badly.  It was going to help people new to TV writing to get into the industry.  There would be the opportunity to be mentored, to develop your own idea,  to workshop it, to be in a writer’s room.  So invested in this scheme was I that I’d even put the process in place to take off the relevant two weeks or whatever it was from work.  In my head I was already on that course. I was jumping ahead to the opportunities it would create, the choices I would have to make, and then the email came:

 “Unfortunately….” 

Oh how it stung.  And not only did I get the initial sting, but then alcohol was rubbed into the sting with:

“….and by way of feedback, this is how you spell xxx,”  I’m paraphrasing but you get the gist.

Now, all these years later,  I know why I didn’t get selected for that scheme.  My application just wasn’t good enough.  That’s not always the case. Sometimes you put your very best work forward, you put your heart and soul into it,  and you don’t get selected and you can’t understand why.  But in this particular case I probably wouldn’t have selected me based on my application.  That’s not to say that my heart and soul wasn’t in it, but what ended up on the page was a half-baked idea, and yes I hadn’t proof read it.   It  wasn’t because it wasn’t important to me, it was so important to me that I was almost too scared to engage with it. Does that make sense?

Many years later, I was at a drinks reception talking to a creative who was kind enough to speak with me when I didn’t know anyone in the room.  She told me her name and I thought umm that name sounds familiar.  Where do I know that name from? “Were you one of the people that used to run a scheme  to get new writers into TV?”  Yes, she was!  

She said something like, “I was tired of not seeing black writers in the writer’s room, so I helped to set up a scheme. I stepped out of what I was doing to try and do something about it…for others etc.” WHAT!!! It was AMAZING to hear her speak about how generously she’d given her time to develop THAT scheme.  It gave me a whole new perspective on it.

I’ve been raised to believe that everything happens for a reason.  Yes, that rejection happened for a reason; yes, my meeting this person years later also happened for a reason. 

I took her details, we met for coffee a few months later and she agreed to act as a bit of a mentor for me.  D’you see?  That’s the thing.  That sting became me putting more of my energy into the pursuit of a different type of writing  – not TV but playwriting and then novel writing, and led to a mentoring relationship years down the line.

My reflections on rejection:

Value the “unfortunatelys” . They are part of the journey too.

They have helped me not to take anything for granted.  Nothing is a given particularly I feel in this creative world.  It’s really good to take a moment to remember that as I sit here in my debut year.  

When I think about rejection, I think about how I felt receiving that email.  That feeling in the pit of my stomach;  how a kind of anger develops and how easy it is to catastrophize.  And maybe you just need to go there as part of the process of getting on the other side.  But also you do get out the other side.

The conversations that you have with yourself after rejection are really important - Why does it sting so bad? Is it because I know I could have done better or because I don’t know what more I could have done? Is this really what I want? Why? If I really want this thing what version of it do I want and why? Who can help me? Is there another way? What’s in my control? What’s not in my control? What will my want require and how much am I willing to give for it? What will this rejection look like in ten years’ time?