Getting Banished from a Mountain Helped me Change a Fear of Rejection into Self-acceptance
Nature shows you what works, and what needs to go. Even when you don’t want to hear it.
“We really enjoyed reading your story, but we’ve decided to go another direction.”
It felt like they’d stolen one of my organs. I had just submitted one of my essays to another literary magazine, the piece that my professor called ‘brilliant’, and ‘gorgeous’. This was the seventh rejection I’d received.
I edited like a psychotic surgeon. By the eighth draft, I thought I’d finally written something that publishers would accept.
When I read the conclusion back to myself, I wanted to vomit. Through impulsively editing my work into something I hoped others would like, I had sacrificed my own authenticity. The essay flopped. Soon, it fell into the forgotten reaches of my OneDrive, banished to multi-draft obscurity.
They rejected one piece of my work, but it felt like they had rejected me. And because I had been rejected, it felt like they had rejected the very way my mind works.
My next essays reeked of imposter syndrome. It became difficult to even finish first drafts. For a couple of months following, I wrote only after drinking enough beer to shut my inner critic up(and my writing sucked even more). I stopped submitting in order to shield myself from disapproval.
And that’s what makes the fear of rejection so deadly — that we stop expressing ourselves because of it.
The fear of rejection strangles our voice because of three assumptions.
- I’m not good enough.
- I am my writing.
- My writing is my mind.
The first assumption required therapy for me. But the other two? Those can be cut quicker.
Other writers will tell you to just keep writing, submitting, and facing rejection, and it’ll become easier. That’s solid advice. You should follow it.
But if you’re leaving drafts fester on your computer because they’ll never be good enough to publish, or your editing ends up killing them, or you’re suffocating under the desire to “please an audience” that you don’t even want to truly talk with, then you’ll want to explore other options.
Backpacking is one of those options.
While there are certainly more, backpacking in wilderness provides the experience for a humility so intense that it’s hard to find elsewhere. Learning to face rejection by nature helped eliminate the assumption that I am my work, and taught me to use rejection as an opportunity to understand myself, and improve my work.
Two friends and I arrived at West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest only to find that the road was closed for the season. Our trailhead (and the state) was flooded with three inches of rain. We trudged four miles up the flooded path in four hours. By the time dusk fell down on us, fifty degrees and rain had turned to fifteen and snow. More than a foot of it. We set up camp in the swirling, snowy fog, and proceeded to eat our three-day supply of food in just thirty minutes.
My jeans (yes, jeans), sweatshirt, and cotton socks were soaked with sweat. I had removed all extra clothes from my bag just minutes before we made the drive down. Ultralight. I sat on my dad’s old sleeping bag while meltwater seeped in from the tent door, soaking myself, my bed, and my extra underwear, the only dry item I had left.
We lurked in our flooded tent near the top of a despaired mountain, smiling stupidly at each other under dying flashlights, all of us nearly naked, sweating and shivering and gobbling down a pound of beef jerky. The same terrible realization ran through our heads — we had failed.
It was not the cold, the raging blizzard, the icy silence, or the lack of clothes, food, or sense of direction that made us leave, but the collateral sense of impending doom that resulted from a heart-wrenching, forced upon vulnerability. We planned to be six miles into our trail by now. We hadn’t even made it up the road. We could push on and get hypothermia and probably lost. Or we could quit.
We conducted our walk of shame in the lonely dark, with fog and sideways snow shielding visibility to just a few feet ahead. Less than five minutes into the four-mile hike back to the car, I glimpsed a black bear standing, and staring at us, just off the trail. It must’ve woken up from hibernation and smelled the beef jerky.
My identity had shattered. I realized that I was not the ‘hiker’ I told others I was on Instagram. I didn’t know shit. I couldn’t start a fire, set up a dry camp, pack enough food, or even bring the proper clothes to survive longer than six hours. I had failed massively. Dangerously. And I had never felt so pathetically aware of my own inadequacies than I arrived home two days earlier than planned with my wet school bag in hand. My identity had been questioned and answered all in one night. I was a fraud.
I craved redemption. A friend and I hiked into Wayne National Forest that summer and we ran out of water five miles into a fifteen-mile hike. In August. The creek was colored in rainbows. Oil-drilling run-off. Lovely. Dehydration robbed our ability to speak, perceive time, form thoughts. Reality slowed. My vision blurred. We past out at 7pm, covered in mosquito bites and broken spider webs. We managed to hike out that next morning.
The second trip wasn’t much better than the first. Instead of getting too wet, we got too dry. But we still completed our course. When I returned home, I felt incredibly humble. A little stupid, yes, but smarter. I had failed to prepare adequately yet again. But not everything went wrong. I positioned my tent on flat, safe ground trees. I’d packed enough food. I wore the proper clothes. We effectively navigated a difficult trail.
By suffering through that second trip, the sense that ‘I’m a total failure” turned into “I didn’t plan for dirty water.” And as I continued to backpack more over these past two years, each mistake became an identifiable problem that I can at least try to fix.
That’s the first thing about rejection that backpacking taught me. Through experience, the feeling of complete rejection transforms into awareness of specific slip-ups in your work that you can pin down, work on, and move past.
Once I became aware of specific flaws in my approach, I could actually handle them. The conditions didn’t get much easier — I’d just gotten more capable.
By slowly improving individual aspects of backpacking, I no longer felt like a total failure. Whenever something goes wrong on the trail or in camp (which it will), I know that it isn’t me that failed. It’s my tent stakes. Pant zippers. Bag weight. My ability to tie reliable knots. All of those things are my creations, in some way. But my creations are not me. My words are not pieces of my mind. They’re representations of it.
Note to self: you’re not being rejected. Your representations are. Don’t take it personally.
And they’re rejected for specific reasons. Maybe your story is boring, or the characters are cheesy, or your poem tries too hard to rhyme. Maybe you wrote that essay in third person when the journal specifically asks for first person narratives. People have their reasons.
This is all well and nice, but to be honest, none of this takes away the disappointment I still feel when I read that passive aggressive “We really liked your story, but…” email. And that’s the coolest thing. Rejection hasn’t gotten any less hurtful. I’ve just gotten more resilient. (Or I just don’t care as much). I know that I need to keep writing, editing, and submitting.
To improve your writing, you need to write.
But when the fear of rejection threatens to extinguish your voice and stifle your submission process, maybe it’s time to sleep outside for a couple of nights. It might just wake you up.
