#169: The Rejection Letter
Finding hope in a hopeless place…
Dear _____,
we regret to inform you that on this occasion your application was unsuccessful…
The dreaded letter. Most of us will have read this phrase, or something similar, at one point in our lives. The outcome of university applications, job interviews, and funding bids. It may be a small, one-sided A4 piece of paper, but it is an object weighed down with expectation, trepidation, and that terrible sinking feeling in your stomach.
I myself have received a few of these in my short life so far, and I am sure there will be many more to come. Not to put a downer on things — I believe there will be positive letters too. But one can’t be successful at everything. I have recently received another of these such letters, and whether they be made of white, folded paper, or pixels on a laptop screen in the form of an email, they carry the same emotions: sadness, despair, and a (temporary) loss of hope.
How do we respond to such objects? When the letter first arrives it may sit unopened on a desk, maybe shoved aside to be dealt with at a later time when you have space to yourself, without the need to interact with anyone for a good few hours afterwards. Or maybe, like me, once it arrives (something you have been waiting for eagerly, in simultaneous hope and negativity) you open it as fast as you can, because the waiting is worse than the knowing.
And after opening, then what do you do with it? What do you do with this offending object, declaring that you are ‘not good enough’ for whatever application you have set your hopes on? Some may tear it up or burn it. Others may file it away, or let it get lost in the bottom of a pile of papers. Some may simply recycle it.
But after you remove the object, which has weighed so heavily on your mind in anticipation, the rejection remains. That heaviness of suspense may have been lifted, the object may be filed away, but it has been transformed into a sinking feeling in your heart and your stomach, and you aren’t quite sure what to do next.
But as with all things, time is a great healer. Over the following days new possibilities come to mind, some more realistic than others. Perhaps this letter, while a rejection and a closing of one opportunity, is also a guiding light in the darkness of indecision. ‘When one door closes, another one opens’ — or rather, when all the other doors are shut, then try the one that isn’t.
There is something worse than a rejection letter: the absence of one, and of any other communication on the outcome. It may be a weighty, despised object, unwelcome in the present moment. But it is also a welcome relief, an end of suspense, and a chance to take a breath and start off anew once more, moving onto new horizons, ever-guided by our failures just as much as our successes.
