Rejection

Submittable, you remind me of bones bleached against the gypsum sands of New Mexico, where time and wind mark the passing of the hours, days, weeks, months since I submitted my creative nonfiction personal essay to The Gettysburg Review.

How heavy I felt when one of my professors noted that I hadn’t applied anywhere else. Why had I only applied to SUNY Purchase? Didn’t I aspire to be an actor? And the truth is, no. I aspired to keep existing.

Let me start by acknowledging the fact that I never thought I would be this upset by an angry mob storming the Capitol. I mean, isn’t that the ultimate American dream? Name one person in this country who has never at some point in their life thought to themselves, “Ya know what we oughta do? We oughta go down and storm the Capitol. Show those lawmakers who’s boss.”

If you’re an independent artist, you have no choice but to roll with the punches. Things change. Things fall apart. Venues close down their business without telling you…and then you find out through their Facebook status update (yes, this actually happened).

Now, because of one man, there is hope for me and others like me throughout the country yearning to work jobs they have previously found themselves barred from simply because they have no experience. Who is this Chuck Yeager; this Jackie Robinson; this Harvey Milk of the inexperienced?

Art is not a eugenics program. We’re all mongrels with our own unique deformities, and that’s what continues to keep artists and the arts in general interesting.

Keshet’s Carolyn Tobias asks: How do we water the seeds of failure to have that pain actually produce something valuable? Learning is a verb; an action; a continual process. Learning from failure is actively choosing to see each failure as the beginning, and not the end.

Fear can be empowering, it can be welcoming, it can even be wanted. Fear is that strange vibration in the cavity of your torso, a buzzing pad of energy that occasionally whispers “You could fail.” And on really bad days it says, “You could get eaten alive out here.”

Guest Blogger Jessica Boudreaux shares: “If a person feels annoyed, frustrated or put out by you sending a genial and to-the-point email asking about an opening slot on a show, then they’re probably not someone who would be very fun to work with anyway. Or their Mercury is in their asshole’s retrograde that day.”

Guest Blogger Judy Miller Silverman says: “I am trying to save you from that fate of wasted time and money and full-tilt depression. Go DIY before you DIE. You are not alone in having the proverbial doors slammed in your face while trying to build your project.”

I have read a lot of inspirational quotes about failure and most of them have to do with Tom Edison and he gave us light and stuff so I think I’ll be okay too.

This is a lesson you have to keep teaching yourself if you want to be any good at all. And the thing about it is, you have to think you’re better than you are, before you can realize that you aren’t.

I’m at the point where I love rejection. I crave it, I want it.

The quality of the work is either there, or it isn’t, and no amount of resume padding is going to change that

Yes, writers are querying literary agents—not the other way around. That doesn’t give agents the right to treat writers with less respect than a barista.

I feel that envy. Because I want what you have. Now you may think this is all deeply unhealthy, but I know a lot of artists who thrive on it.