I Surrender!
I have taught myself to deal with rejection.
I have developed a robust philosophy to handle disappointment.
But no previous training prepared me for the shock delivered by this crushing message from a literary agent:
“I have a story from a client that’s way too close to [yours], so I’m going to have to pass.”
As an inveterate ‘catastrophizer’ — akin to Nostradamus — I immediately conjured images of this “client” stealing my thunder at a crowded book-signing event and dealing a death blow to more than a year’s worth of painstaking work with a triumphant flourish of his pen.
I give up! was my knee-jerk reaction.
With a dry clap that sounded as irrevocable as the final closing of a coffin’s lid, I slammed my laptop shut and stormed out of the house to seek respite in my habitual early-dawn walks in nature.
Oddly, just a few days earlier, I had mailed my monthly letter to my patrons talking about the subtle but crucial difference between seeking calm and preserving equanimity, or an even spirit. In the letter, I quoted Alain de Botton, who posits that angry people are just horribly optimistic… that their greatest furies spring from events that violate their sense of the ground rules of existence, and, lacking faith in their own capacity to survive frustration and recover…
