Thoughts on Rejection
Ahhhh, rejection…why is it so hard to receive sometimes?
I had a dream last night where three different people rejected my love; I woke up with an emotional hangover and these thoughts on rejection:
I reject people all the time. Right now there’s a voicemail from Sunday that I haven’t even listened to, much less returned the call. When I am the one doing the rejecting, rather than being rejected, I understand that rejection has little to do with how much I value the other person, and everything to do with what’s going on with my life in that moment.
In fact, a big journey of growing up was learning when and how to say ‘no’, to learn how to give rejection…me and my sister talked about it as we both went through the same process of feeling our ‘no’ and expressing it in our late 20s and early 30s. This was often related to people wanting our help with projects of some kind.
We discussed how we used to say ‘yes’ to many people because it feels good to help people out; then we’d get overextended and not do a very good job. So by saying ‘no’ to some things, we were saving our energy to do better work for the things to which we were saying ‘yes’. And our ‘no’ opened up an opportunity for someone else to say ‘yes’ who would be a better fit for the project, with more enthusiasm and time.
Now I’m thinking that receiving a ‘no’ is the next step in the learning curve. Sometimes ‘no’s don’t bother me at all; sometimes they debilitate me for years…I think the ‘no’s are easy to accept when I don’t take them personally, understanding it’s not about me, and difficult to accept when I feel rejected as a person, that someone’s ‘no’ means they don’t see my worth or value me. Perhaps I’m even tempted to believe my projection of their assessment that I don’t have worth or value.
I just have to keep reminding myself that if I’m not right for somebody, then that means they aren’t right for me, either. For example, if there’s a guy who gets some sense of worth and self-esteem from having a hot girlfriend that impresses other guys, not only am I not the right person for him (given the times I don’t care about my appearance), he’s not the right guy for me (given my desire for a man who gets his sense of self-worth from something different than the opinion of others).
I have spent my whole life working at being the best person I can be. My idea of “best” is constantly shifting, so what that looks like changes over time, yet I know that in every moment I’m doing the best I can.
Sometimes I feel sad that not all people value what I value, or see my worth; it never makes me want to change who I am, though. All my impetus for change comes from the inside, not the outside. I would never change who I am in order not to be rejected; looked at that way, I guess I am actively participating in the rejection process.
One of my goals in life is to love a ‘no’ as much as a ‘yes’, both when I give it and when I receive it, trusting that whether it’s my ‘no’ or someone else’s ‘no’, it’s the truth, and the truth is always worthy of being loved and accepted.
