Rejection is tough, and part of the artist’s journey. For every ‘yes’, you will hear many a ‘no’. Some people get lucky. Others are just that brilliant. But for the majority of us, rejection is a familiar presence. And in my view, it comes in two forms: overt, and ambiguous. Neither of these is easy to manage.
On overt rejection
When I get rejected from things, it often arrives in the form of a generic email. In other words, a journal or a competition rarely tells me why I have not been selected for something - it’s usually a general email to all parties to say things like ‘we had so many great submissions!’ Or ‘this choice is totally subjective!’ Well, of course it is. That’s art. For me, my eyes now gloss over these truisms that litter rejection emails. Despite feeling like you’re just being brushed off in the most low-effort way, a comfort here is that you do have an answer.
When you start receiving personal replies, people in the writing business say this means ‘you’re close’. Close to what, exactly? I’m not sure. In one of my more personalised rejections recently, I was told my novel was ‘one of the best [the agent has] come across in a while’. They still said no. How can I be so great if you’re not interested? This is not much more effort made, usually, than the previous, more generic answer - it’s still pretty generic, with lots of appeals to subjectivity.
A great counterpoint to my experience, however, is that of actors. I used to work alongside actors a lot and can say with confidence that I am not sure I’d survive very long as an actor myself. Much of their rejection gets ugly, direct, and highly personal. I’ll never forget attending a workshop with female-identifying actors who were discussing some of the things they’d been told by casting directors, right to their face. Things like: “She told me I was too black for the part, even though it called for a black woman.” And: “I was told I wasn’t feminine enough because my hair is a bit short.” And: “He said because I was blonde that I looked like I should really just be playing the bimbo.” (Apparently this word was still used to people’s faces in the year of our Lord 2018). Or: “I was told I was too heavy, and my nose was too big.” And so on, and so forth. I’m not sure how I’d deal with someone telling me that my appearance is ‘too stupid’ for a role, or my skin colour is incorrect despite being from my actual race. I suspect not well.
So is specificity any comfort? Maybe not. Perhaps better to simply receive the tired truisms that are rolled out again and again for these occasions. What occurs to me is that rejection is a totally different beast to criticism, which can be useful. Criticism, while hard to take, can help me improve on my work. Rejection rarely comes with useful critique - making it all the harder to know what to do with it, other than to park it somewhere in the back of your mind and try to move on with your day.
On ambiguous rejection
Overt rejection is painful, but it is a kind of closure. A long silence - or ghosting - on the other hand, is a kind of limbo. You eventually have to assume the answer is no, but how do you know for sure? In the writing world, there isn’t a very good reputation for hearing back from submissions at any level of the process. Many journals and agencies alike will say something along the lines of ‘If you haven’t heard from us in X weeks, assume we have passed on your submission.’ This sucks. I get why it happens, but it sucks. Plain and simple. It makes getting the blanket email with generic one-liners seem like a big improvement. Especially because many of these submissions take hours of work and attention. Is a basic courtesy response so hard to give? Even worse, there is a bit of a culture in many artistic avenues, I think, to act like you’re just ‘too busy’ to deal with the artist in question - that this somehow proves a status. This is straight garbage.
I think many people on the same journey as me become accustomed, eventually, to long silences. When things are good, it feels like you are being sought out somehow - you’re in demand. Emails come in. But when things don’t go as well, silence follows. It’s even worse when this comes from someone who has agreed to work with you. After being ghosted by someone who was meant to be on my team for literal months, I can say for sure that it never gets any easier. Just as you would not want to tolerate being ghosted from someone you’re in a romantic relationship with, you shouldn’t have to tolerate it from someone who’s meant to have your back.
But as with all long silences, you do have to wonder eventually how best to let go and call it a day. The silence, the rejection, doesn’t give you complete closure, though. For me, this process has felt like a kind of grief that has been hard to explain to people. I’ve come to think of it as a kind of disenfranchised grief.
On the nature of grief
There are supposedly many different types of grief: Anticipatory, Complicated, Traumatic and Ambiguous. Ambiguous grief is the kind that occurs when a loss doesn’t have emotional or psychological closure - I’ve called the above rejection ‘ambiguous’ for precisely this reason. You get no real reply. Grief moves from ambiguous to disenfranchised when other people don't recognise the relationship that existed, the loss experienced, or the pain and feelings of the person who happens to be grieving.
Dealing with months of silence that culminated in a big rejection (which was still rather unexplained), it felt for a second like my writing might be over. I started to mourn the loss of my book, and all the hope that had come with making it. Every act of art-making is a hopeful act, and to have this ignored and rejected felt like serious heartbreak. But this was tough to explain to people, especially since it’s not something a lot of friends of mine have experienced (though it isn’t uncommon in the writing world). From the outside, it seemed like nothing that serious had happened.
This is precisely what makes the grief hard to process - we know rejection is meant to be par for the course in an artistic endeavour, and from the outside the significance can be hard to explain, and so it feels as though it's not really okay to mourn the loss. You’re meant to be hustling your way back into your next big thing. Because of the uncertainty factor in the artist’s journey, it can be very hard to know what exactly you’re meant to be doing next or how to ‘solve’ the problem.
There was even the suggestion made amongst some that I know that I would understandably want to disappear and stop engaging with other writers - that I should, in some way, hide. I know that this suggestion doesn’t come from a bad place, but rather a sense that this is how anyone would deal with that particular pain. Withdraw, reevaluate and reemerge when things are better. But on the other hand, this does mean that you are in pain alone and silenced.
I’ve mentioned before that I think artists get a little superstitious about failure, and some people in this world are inevitably very status-driven - if things aren’t going well, distancing themselves from you serves as a kind of ‘protection’ against the failure bug that sometimes goes around. Finding the people who know there will be ups and downs and aren’t judgmental about this becomes ever the more important in these moments.
What do we do about it?
I propose the following, which have helped me:
Give yourself the time you need.
Pushing myself to submit more, do more, be more, doesn’t always seem to help. I go through a cycle: first I just need to be sad. Then after an appropriate amount of wallowing, I will invariably start to feel restless. This is the good stuff, right here. When I’ve wallowed for enough time to start feeling bored and tired with my own wallowing, I know then that it’s time to act. And I’ll act with more energy and determination than I would have if I'd skipped the sad part. Be a blob. Go to bed early. Eat chocolate. Do whatever it is you have to do to get right in deep, into that sadness.
Personally, I removed all my book planning off the wall of my office and threw it in the bin. That felt good. The wall was clean. And then when things started to feel better, I was excited to fill that blank space again.
Lean on the right support. Let it be cheesy, hyperbolic, or ridiculous if needed.
Acknowledging the pain, and not hiding your grief, are essential. I think you have to pick your audience carefully on this - it’s not going to be your status-obsessed peer or anyone who has ever thought you were wasting your time on making art, or hasn’t ‘got it’ in the past. Don’t go there. Sometimes in self-flagellatory moments this can be tempting. Please, for your future self’s sake, don’t go to that person who is ready to help dig the grave. You need to find a person who is your cheerleader, no matter what. The person who really believes when you can’t.
I am very lucky to have a very supportive partner who also understands how hard this process is. He will tell me I’m one of the most talented and brilliant writers on the planet, that I’m one of the smartest and most capable people ever, any day of the week if I need him to, and let’s face it: it hardly matters how true this is, or how true I think it is. My brain might say, ‘Well that’s ridiculous.’ Sure, maybe. But his conviction creates enough of a gap in which something like self-belief can start to grow again. If he believes it, I want to prove him right. I want to be those things for him. People make a big deal about how everything has to come from you - that’s impossible. Sometimes, I am going to need other people to get me motivated again. Sometimes you just need someone else to say it. Simple. That can be enough.
Find your rituals. Practice them with devotion.
I really believe that rituals make life into something special. To quote Robin Wall Kimmerer:
It marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine. The coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle…
Personally, I am suspicious of anyone who is such a materialist as to say there is no spiritual or higher component to the rituals that make up our lives - does ignoring spirituality really make a person morally or intellectually superior (as is often suggested by such folk)? Because that makes no sense to me. I would argue that you’re never going to outsmart anyone by denying your humanity. But I digress. You don’t have to be religious or woo-woo to know that human beings respond to ritual and ceremony, regardless of belief structure. To quote Elizabeth Gilbert:
We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet.
I have heard people try all sorts of things, from meditation to bell ringing to practical techniques learned in therapy, like the positive data log, through to walks and other forms of exercise, the careful brewing of a coffee or lighting of incense. It doesn’t really matter what it is. It can be that mundane.
I keep journals, have done since I was six years old. If I can’t write down how I feel, I don’t often fully process what I feel. My diary is a sacred space. I also consider moments of commune with friends, especially over dinner, a sacred space. Whenever I get my hands into some soil, this is an important ritual. I make many of these perhaps very obvious parts of life into something special because that is what gives me the strength and courage to keep going - to process the feelings, remember my place in the world, get a new perspective on things, and feel connected to others and to nature. None of this is to be underestimated. All of it is essential.
We need the right to mourn our failures aloud.
We need time and space to mourn, we need to be able to acknowledge how we really feel and what’s really happening. We need to give ourselves the closure after a big denial, because that closure isn’t always offered to us by those who get to decide. We need to find our way back into the work again, when the time comes.
In the immortal words of Octavia Butler:
Kindness eases change.
Love quiets fear.
And a sweet and powerful
Positive obsession
Blunts pain,
Diverts rage,
And engages each of us
In the greatest,
The most intense
Of our chosen struggles.
I’ve been sharing little weekly extras at the bottom of these emails each week, but I wanted to propose an alternative: sending a little ‘re-fueling’ dose mid-week, as a short sharp extra to these longer, deep-dive topics and reflections. What would you prefer?
Until next time,
Be well.
CCx