Rejection is the most important hurdle any creative person will have to endure to forge toward his or her destiny. It’s the battleground of war to test one’s fortitude and courage to preserve. Rejection can be a friend or a foe, a good thing or bad thing, useful or useless. It’s inevitable that a person will receive plenty of “no” replies, empty venues, limited attendance and an ample supply of ignored messages and lines of communication. But, it’s what a person does with rejection that makes them a person, an artist, a creator, a champion.
Rejection comes in all forms and comes in all different directions. It may come as early as when you just got started. It may come in several decades into one’s work experience. Rejection can be a late-night email, a ghosted job opportunity, a cold call out the blue. However way it comes it invites the person to that fork in the road. The inflection point on what is truly desired and what eventually gets manifested. Some rejections are smaller than others. Some rejections leave big impacts on a person mentally and even spiritually. Rejection is more of what it symbolizes than what it actually refutes or bars.
Rejection is necessary for any journey into one’s passion and dream. It weeds out the mediocre, the weak, the lazy, the distracted. It forges a core element in a person that creates the muscle of fortitude needed in any ambitious pursuit. Rejection makes real the disconnect between truth and falsehood, real and fake, even hard and easy. Rejection is the illusion of time; the static embrace we give to doubt, anxiety, and fear. Rejection reminds us of what’s real. Rejection is about survival. It meets a person at the crossroads of his or her destiny and the free will that brought him or her there. Rejection reminds us of this temporal journey of the human form.
Once treated right, rejection redirects motivation and substantiates inspiration. It comes in the meeting ground of present action and future awareness. Where belief and certainty can meet and dance with each other. Rejection can build way more than it destroys. It can create as much as it dismisses. It can establish as much as it delivers.