THE ART OF REJECTION

By El Ochiis

Can rejection be an art?  Can it ever be acceptable? 

The first time I was rejected for a piece of writing, I curled into a fetal position and subsisted on a diet of kale and oatmeal for, well, five days.  I love kale but, at three meals a day, that’s just gross.

When I look back, I don’t feel so much like I had failed as much as I had submitted something that was not ready to be published. I had dated this guy whose sibling was a famous New York agent.  He was impressed by a piece of writing I had published in a publication.  In hindsight, he was trying to impress me with a connection to a world that I had dreamed and I, for some unexpected reason, wanted to impress him with my writing talent, which was silly because I really wasn’t crazy about him.  But, I figured if his connection to the tough world of New York agency could get me a fast road to acclaim, maybe I’d come to love him. 

Of course, I heard my grandma mah’s voice in an ethical chamber of my head: “Never use people for your own gain.” 

Firstly, grandma mah was not living in an empty loft on Varick Street in NYC with a view of an entrance to the Holland Tunnel, to New Jersey, no heat and an empty refrigerator.  To be fair, I couldn’t afford electricity so there was little need to put food into an unplugged apparatus that was supposed to keep stuff cold. The point was, rejection still sucked.

Recently, I’ve read about a movement, in NYC, whose members have come to embrace rejections like they were awards. Some writers were aiming for their one hundredth rejection slip.  Who has skin that thick? One writer even parlayed her rejections into a teaching gig at a workshop and college.

Then, I heard that voice of grandma mah again: “Turn your lemons into lemonade, my child.” 

I am not even that fond of some yellow, bitter fruit in a glass of water with sugar. However, I must admit, they might have been right, both granny and the writer with a centennial of rejections.  Still, I’ve always found it difficult to grow titanium skin. So, with my second rejection, I took to a more pronounced fetal position and played blues songs for twenty-one days straight.  This rejection took my guts from behind my rib cage and played bongo drums with them.  I had turned down an offer for a piece, I deemed a literary masterpiece, because the producer’s creative vision was for a cable show in some foreign market. How dare he use my literary musing, that rivaled Tolstoy, in my opinion, as fodder for a commercial endeavor – oh the horror. 

It was my “awakening” when an editor reminded me that Tolstoy was dead. Um, now was that a metaphor for my writing? I checked and she was right, figuratively, literally and metaphorically.  Damn you Russian men who shaped my view of how to pen stories. Was I blaming someone else for my own failure?

Never mind, I heard your agreement there granny.

But, undoubtedly, we have to learn to accept failure – well that was what I would told my offspring to make them feel better.  Without failure, there is no success – Michael Jordan said he missed hundreds of the shots that he threw – look at his career. Writing is not basketball; writing is sitting down and ripping out your intestines, putting them back in again and describing it so that a reader would, not only understand the process, but believe it.

Couple that with solitude, poverty and anxiety. 

Who would apply for such a job?  A writer would, that’s who.  That’s why rejections, though they suck, have to be tolerable. 

How many times did I use the word “Suck”?  Crap, this is so going to be rejected – I’ve assumed the fetal position.