Writing Woes: A Tale of Rejection
Writers are like anyone else; they don’t like rejection. People seek to avoid rejection, which means they will also avoid opportunities and people that could have made a lasting impact on them. Whether we like it or not, life is a balance and, in that balance, there is pleasure as well as pain.
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The Beginning
In the middle of the night, I sat among the shadows of my
room with my lamp’s light focused on my desk. My laptop lay open before me.
It was expected of me to go to university. Luckily, I was a
good student with good grades, and I felt I had always known which path to take
in my life. I had applied to and been accepted by one high school; I had
applied to three colleges (already knowing which one I was going to attend) and
was accepted by all three. University should not have been any different.
But the bloody words on my laptop’s screen said otherwise. I sat, frozen by them while hot tears blurred my vision and shock split my self apart.
I hadn’t been accepted into my Creative Writing program.
The Turmoil
In the next moment, I was sitting on the subway, unconcerned
for and oblivious to how I had gotten there. This was my time to sleep and to
create fanfiction that usually featured Wolfina as the heroine while I travelled
to my destination. But, she and the stories had receded into the farthest
corners of my mind. I couldn’t find them in the darkness because of the
repeating questions: “Was my letter of intent too weak? Were my story
samples not good enough? How could an authoritative entity reject me when
people had always said my writing was so good?” I sat there fully realizing
the state I was in: I was beside my self with the horror that I couldn’t write.
* * *
I sat in class, observing the other students as they
listened to the gesticulating professor who was moving their mouth and pointing
repeatedly to the projection screen. I looked out the window. I felt outside of
Time. I didn’t have a future. I couldn’t write.
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Before art class began, I confided in my teacher because he was familiar with my writing and had been one of many to tell me how good it was. He took me aside during the break where we stood parallel to the flow of students in the hallway. With my arms around my self, I listened as he tried to comfort me with logical, external reasons for my rejection. I agreed that I may not have been accepted because the program was already full. He confessed to being a judge of applications in the past and had witnessed the bias other teachers had for students who submitted visual portfolios over written ones. Whatever else he suggested could have been true, but it was cold comfort. The damage had already been done.
The Recovery
I wrote to a dear friend, hoping he could put my self back
together somehow. In his email, he wrote (among other things):
“Follow your heart regardless of what others think and
say. It is an arduous path because only the bravest choose these paths. But it
is yours and it is where your heart belongs.”
From then on, I could hear the white noise of my
surroundings again: the scraping of chairs, the babbling of students, the
chirping of the birds. By this point, some time had passed since my initial
rejection, and I was accepted into the same university, but for another
program. It wasn’t what I wanted, but it was what I would use to better myself
in writing. Now, at least, I could smell the books in the library and feel at
home there again. However, my recovery was not yet complete; I needed some sort of
glue to stop my self from splitting apart the next time.
It came to me months later when I was in my room and writing
some essay for school while listening to music. Suddenly, my mind picked up on
something vital that had been said in the song “Fate’s Wide Wheel” by Scott
Bakula. Stopping everything, I replayed the song and heard the key phrases:
“But Time divides what we might share / And sends us a
way no one goes [...] The me I am, is all that’s real to me.”
A faded memory sprang to my mind, and I rummaged through my old
high school papers. I found the worn photocopy of “The Road Not Taken” by
Robert Frost that I had kept for years without consciously knowing why I
had to keep it. But now, I knew why:
“Two roads diverged ‘ in a yellow wood / [...] I took the
one less travelled by, / And that has made all the difference.”
It all came together now with my friend’s words, the song
and the poem. I had rebuilt myself—a better, stronger version of myself. I could
write. I could create stories. I could make people feel emotions through my
writing. It was now my core belief, cemented into my being. I am a writer and
no one can take that away from me ever again.
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The Takeaway
When we’re rejected, most of us assume that we are, in some
way, the reason for the rejection: our writing wasn’t good enough or we just don’t
have the skills or the brains to be a writer. We put so much value on what
others think, whether it’s a friend or an establishment. Just because someone has
made a name for themselves, it doesn’t’ mean everything they think or say is
gold. Just because a known establishment rejects you, it doesn't make them right. We have to find it within ourselves to do what we love and defy what “haters”
say. But bear in mind to keep an open mind when it comes to constructive criticism
that is truly meant to help you grow and hone your craft.
After my epiphany, I had the courage to submit my poems and short stories to various contests. Occasionally, I still do. I haven’t been published by any of them, but it doesn’t have any effect on me anymore. I just move on to the next one and keep writing in the meantime
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