HOW TO GIVE REJECTION the elbow

It’s not always easy, but you can learn how to cope with the pain of a knock back, writes Yasmina Floyer

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Rejection stings. Actually, it can do more than sting, it can feel devastating. Working within a creative industry has made it essential for me to learn how to become accustomed to a certain type of rejection. At the start of my career, my inbox was filled with emails rejecting ideas I'd sent out, and whilst this happens much less frequently these days, that is not to say that it doesn’t still bother me when I put myself out there and am told ‘no’, especially when it is in the pursuit of something much longed for. Whilst I may be somewhat inoculated against this mundane type of rejection that I encounter by virtue of being a writer, there are other types of rejection that I have felt more profoundly. Years ago, I was pregnant again when my first born was just a toddler. Given that it wasn’t planned, and that it was over almost as soon as we had found out, I was not expecting to be floored by my early miscarriage in the way that I was. It felt something akin to rejection, in that I wanted the pregnancy more than I realised but was ultimately not able to have it.

Examples like this had me thinking about the role that desire plays in rejection, the times that we are left winded by it, and how the pain of rejection can expose a deeper level of yearning for something that perhaps we haven't yet admitted to ourselves. The inverse is also true, however. Sometimes we experience rejection, and it doesn’t affect us half as much as we believed it would because it becomes clear that what we have been rejected from is not something that we wanted as much as we initially thought.