Rejection

Rejection. It’s personal. It’s painful. It’s agonizing how deep it strikes the core of who we are. Like someone reached in and took out your most intimate scary bits and shook them around in your face saying “how does it feel to fail?”

I never thought of myself as the type of person who would have to try so hard to be accepted. But there are many kinds of acceptance. In my case, it is regards to graduate school.

As I sit at my desk, my cheeks are painfully red, hot tears pouring over my eyelids. I have tears that are falling from my face to my leg and sliding down to my ankle. The sadness and pain roll over me, just like the tears over my cheeks. I can’t remember the last time I cried from such a vulnerable place.

Grad school application #2 – rejected.

I would love to say that I cried a few tears and then wiped my face and made my next plan of attack. But I haven’t. I did that last time when I was rejected from another school. Now, fate seems to be throwing me a curve ball I don’t know how to interpret. Keep going or change course? Buck up and keep fighting? Find the will to prove them wrong and apply again?

There is no will to try again.

I have no energy in me to hope. Not yet anyways.

Pain like this feels like there a viewing gallery in the heavens, where there must be more people watching me fall apart than I can see. I feel that exposed the emotion so near to the surface that it is literally on my surface in the form of tears. God must have invented tears as a way to let the pain to get out. There is no biological way pain of such depth could remain inside the body.

Maybe you have to feel like shit before you can feel better about something so painful. And it’s only painful because I wanted it so badly. I found the perfect program. I would be able to do my degree without moving, I could study and travel, I could get the education I so desperately desired.

But that’s the thing about desire. It’s a drug that takes ownership of our confidence, of our hope. And when the possibility of it is eliminated, all you are left thinking is “Where the fuck do I go from here?”

I just so desperately want to prove to the world that I am good at writing. It seems like the universe has been pulling me towards trying. As if I have found my mission in life and no one I try to convince believes in me enough to help me make it happen. And feeling like I am all out of "try" (at least for today) is more crushing than the disappointment.

Rejection makes you question everything. “Why am I not good enough? Why didn’t they want me? What could I have done differently? Is it worth getting this upset about if I could pick myself up and make a new plan tomorrow? Should I even try again?”

There is light for me, even if I can't see it today. But damn this shit sucks. And I have never been ok with things being shitty. But acceptance, the final stage of grief, is looming around the corner, a very BIG corner. So I am going to continue not being ok till I have no other choice but to be ok.

I have never been fond of “no” and it has now been cemented as my least favorite word. Nor fond of possibilities eliminated.

I am in the emotional place equivalent to laying on the cold concrete floor in a parking garage ten levels underground down where you can go down no more.

I guess I should see that as positive right? If you can’t get worse, you can only get better from here.

And old hair stylist and I once decided that all great stories start with someone on the floor. Here’s to my great story to come.