We’ve all faced gut-wrenching rejection before. That devastating, discouraging feeling immobilizes you. How are you supposed to push through when you’re rendered immobile?
As a UC Berkeley student, one of the most common forms of rejection my fellow students and I experience is rejection from clubs. A massive chunk of the clubs here is incredibly competitive, the perfect embodiment of the stereotype of UC Berkeley as a cutthroat environment. You spend hours of time engaging in recruitment events, falling in love with the organization, and building connections, only to receive an impersonal rejection email that makes you feel like nothing.
Rejection has a bizarre representation in American society. We live in a country addicted to working, where your professional successes define your worth. We’re taught to believe rejection is a testament to our character, that we’re too lazy or haven’t done enough.
In a romantic context, rejection has a history of being portrayed in American media in a really odd way. You observe your classic heterosexual female and male lead with the same formulaic heteronormative trajectory of rejection. Boy meets girl, girl rejects boy, and despite her insistence to be left alone, he continues to pursue her and eventually wears her down. This storyline is romanticized as the beautiful hard-to-get story, but if you step back from it, you realize it’s actually really creepy. In this context, rejection is a clear indication of a boundary, one that should be respected.
My point is our social understanding of rejection is part of what makes it so painful. We interpret things as personal that often have little to do with us. One singular club, job, person, or anything in between can not define the worth of a profoundly complicated and beautiful human being.
We’ve all heard the phrase “redirection, not rejection” before. It’s a cheesy expression, but it has some merit. Having something taken away from you puts things in perspective and forces you to evaluate its true meaning. For example, being rejected from a club makes you think about why you actually wanted it, whether it be the organization itself or some other desire you projected onto a club, giving it life in the form of personification. Unlike creepy persistence in a rom-com, if you’re rejected from an organization or job, you can always re-apply.
There are more opportunities in our lives than we have the capacity to comprehend. We don’t have the bandwidth to analyze every possible choice we can make. Rejection does us the favor of narrowing things down a little. Maybe I’m delusional, but I think rejection can actually contribute positively to our lives.
When we face rejection, in whatever context that might be, there’s an initial blow to our self esteems. We blame ourselves and tear ourselves apart, giving power to all of our insecurities.
This initial pain has the potential to become long-term internal change. When I notice my self-esteem depends on something as arbitrary as a club selection process, it forces me to consider my sense of self’s stability. I’d be lying if I said rejection hasn’t made me feel terrible about myself, but that feeling of misery pushes me to consider if I deserve to feel that way. Sometimes rejection forces you to search within yourself for your positive characteristics and an outlet for their application.
So next time you get rejected, I encourage you to consider how much your feelings of despair come from the immediate interaction between you and the entity you’ve been rejected by or if social and societal expectations might have infiltrated your understanding. Rejection is not the end, and the more you’re willing to be bold, put yourself out there, and make yourself vulnerable to rejection, the more you’ll be accepted and the less devastating individual instances of rejection will be.