Rejection: getting to yes
I thought I was good with rejection
I've often told people I'm good with rejection. I genuinely don't mind asking out a stranger. They might say yes! They might say no in a sweet and obviously slightly regretful way! (The last time this happened, it not only gave me a lovely ego boost but was also, by a roundabout route, the means of connecting me with another person who changed my life.)
Even if they return a flat no, it doesn't hurt because it doesn't feel personal. Enough people say yes that I know the issue is one of taste and not of my basic attractiveness.
Because there's very little at stake for me in asking someone out, and potentially a lot to gain, I do it more or less whenever I feel moved to. This used to happen quite a lot, and the resultant adventures and encounters have endowed me with many delightful memories. And while it's been months since I wanted to hit on a stranger, I still carry my name and phone number around on a piece of paper in my jacket pocket just in case.
"Being good with rejection allows me to live richly", I would think to myself in a fairly smarmy self-congratulatory way.
Turns out I'm not good with rejection
Turns out I was shit with rejection where it would feel personal if they say no. Asking someone in any way important to me for something I wanted from them - a favour, an object, especially their time or attention - was historically so hard for me that I mostly just didn't do it.
I tended to view this as "finding it difficult to ask for help". I saw it as a form of almost pathological independence, driven by a fear that people would let me down. I'd tell myself that they'd not be able to deliver to my standards, and it would be a muddle and a pain, and it was easier to just do it myself.
As my love and care and esteem for myself have increased, I've realised it is deeper and more emotional and sensitive than that. Sure, sometimes I don't ask for help because I think the person will fuck it up. But often I don't ask because I'm afraid they might say no, and that this will show me what I am really worth. That their rejection of me will reveal a cosmic truth about my value as a person, wounding me in a way I just could not sustain.
And that fear was so primal, so scary and profound, that, until recently, if I thought I might get a "no", I wouldn't let myself realise I wanted to ask. As I've written before with reference to my marriage, often I wouldn't let myself even acknowledge I had a contrary preference to how things were. I have only just put the pieces together and seen this self-censorship not just as a way to "keep the peace", but as a form of fear of rejection.
And suddenly it is so clear to me how my fear of rejection has resulted in me engaging in a form of proactive, pre-emptive, "safeguarding" self-censorship – a powerful self-rejection that has repeatedly sent me profoundly damaging messages about myself. Little darts of poison, over and over, from me, to me.
My therapist once said to me, "You get rejected 100% of the times you don't ask". What I would now add is: And you do it to yourself. When you don't ask for what you want, from a person or from the universe, just because they might say no, you are saying no to yourself before they even get the chance. You are telling yourself, "It's not safe for me to ask for something I want and be rejected - but it is safe for me to just go without".
This is deeply paradoxical. The belief that it isn't safe to hear no from someone else, that their rejection will tell us something meaningful and unwelcome about ourselves or our value, makes us so vulnerable in the act of asking. It hands over our wellbeing to others, externalises our locus of control. And the solution? To internalise that locus of control, to protect our wellbeing, by proactively depriving ourselves of the thing we wanted.
If you want to make sure no one else can abuse you in a way you don't deserve, become your own abuser first, so that you stop believing you deserve things.
I'm getting worse with rejection - but in a good way
A while ago I made a pledge to my inner child (who at this stage is really just all versions of myself up until ~10 seconds ago) that I was committed to treating her with the same care and kindness and respect and compassion that I try to show to all the people I love. That I was going to love her as a verb, choose her, protect her, back her and believe in her. Treat her like she mattered.
I'm doing so good at this! And one of the things it's made me realise is how often in my daily life I am, in effect, asked to choose between the certainty of rejecting myself, and the risk of being rejected by someone else. Between asking for something I want from someone whose opinion matters to me and accepting they might say no; or saying no to myself by not asking at all. Between, in essence, privileging someone else's opinion of me as a determinant of my psychological and emotional safety, or privileging my own.
I'm getting worse at rejecting myself. And it's great! Privileging my own opinion, treating my own positive self-valuation as robust and reliable, feels so good. I've always basically liked who I am, but Jesus, the way I'm (ugh) blossoming at the moment? It's intense.
Because there was this person I always wanted to be, right? She was a bit kookier and weirder and more confident and more creative and more in touch with herself and the universe than I was. She was more connected, more vulnerable, more powerful, less afraid. And I feel like I am becoming her.
And almost by definition, the more I become the person I feel like I am, in some nebulous cosmic sense, supposed to be, the less I care whether I hear yes or no from other people. The more deeply I accept and understand and live true to myself and my values, the less I fear rejection. The less I fear rejection, the more I ask for. The more I ask for, the more I receive. Not just from people, but from places and things and the universe. Sure, someone might say no to me sometimes, but what does it matter when my bones resonate with yes Yes YES of all creation?
And the more I receive, the more I can give back. I have always been a giver, but I have also often been exhausted, depleted and depressed. In learning how to receive, I believe I will learn how to give more powerfully and sustainably. I believe I will also learn – nay, am already learning – how to form the deep connections that are only possible when you let yourself be genuinely cared for.
Reciprocity, tauutuutu, is shifting for me from a moral concept to an embodied practice. It is a seismic shift.
Getting to yes
In A Room with a View, Forster wrote the line: "[B]y the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes—a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.” In the 1985 Merchant Ivory film adaptation (an important part of my sexual awakening), this becomes the much more emphatic, and to me beloved, line: "[B]y the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes! and a Yes! and a Yes!".
I believe it. Ask and, at least sometimes, ye shall receive, right? Amen to that.