Going All In – Recovering From Rejection

You know those seminal moments in life when it hits you over the head in a big way and crushes your spirit? Well I’ve heard it’s important to take stock in those times of what you can control and focus on how you respond to those things that are out of your control: like other people.

When you reach those times in life where it becomes a make-it-or-break it effort just to get out of bed, I’ve learned that doing the little things right and taking one step at a time can help to ground you. People will disappoint you, friends will abandon you, and places of safety you thought were “bulletproof” may become the source of rejection.

But even though people can take everything away from you, they can’t control how you move on and learn from it.

Take Stock

Allow yourself in the moment to truly feel and acknowledge your emotions. We’re emotional beings, and regardless of how “rational” we think we are, we really make many of our decisions based on instinct and feelings. Acknowledging those feelings and naming them can help you to understand what you’re going through.

What have you retained? What choices can you still make? These are crucial questions that allow you to remove yourself from the trapped feeling of being forced into an action or decision. Nobody can force you to do anything; they can only remove some of your choices.

“When we forget our ability to choose, we learn to be helpless. The essential truth is this: we are free to choose. We cannot control the options we are offered, but we can control how we choose among them.”
– Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Seek Clarity

My personality enjoys understanding how and why things work, and this isn’t limited to mechanical or electronic devices or even the universe; it extends to people and the decisions they make as well. I enjoy understanding why people make the decisions they do. In fact, sometimes I think I enjoy understanding that too much, because my questions can come across as being critical of their decisions, rather than seeking to understand.

I mention this because when you are in a place of rejection, you need to seek to understand what happened. What was your role in it? Why did people react the way they did? What can you learn from this?

The reality is that each of us are human, and even those who sit in judgement can make mistakes. Innocent people go to prison, and guilty people go free. The only one who truly understands your heart is you and God. When others make judgements of the heart, they are bound to make mistakes.

Find Support

“Hard times will always reveal true friends.” – Anonymous

If you’ve always been someone that others can lean on when they’re going through a tough time, this can be easier. But it’s never too late to reach out and identify those people who will stick with you through it all. Of course, everyone has there limits, and since friends are human (at least the ones who can talk back to you), you’ll discover that some of those who told you they’d be there no matter what forgot about all the different “whats” that could happen.

The key here is to be a good friend yourself, and let those friends who couldn’t always stick by you off the hook when they decide to come back. Grace shown to others results in grace shown back to you. Supplement your friendships with a good counselor as well. Even good friends will have a limit on the amount of grief and pity they can bear. And when you do feel down, try to think of the good things and ways to encourage yourself when you speak with your friends.

Finding Friends

A quick sidenote on finding friends: C.S. Lewis says, “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’” In other words, don’t look for friends for the sake of being friends. Go find a hobby and a passion, and you’ll find others with that hobby and passion who will grow into your friends.

Forgive and Release

Work towards forgiveness and release your bitter feelings. It is normal to be angry and hurt by rejection, and forgiving too soon can lead to not truly dealing with your feelings. But not forgiving can also lead to bitterness and resentment, which only holds you back from truly healing.

One of the toughest parts of truly forgiving and releasing someone is the expectation that they will understand your hurt and eventually ask for forgiveness themselves. It is a good goal to have reconciliation and validation in mind, but you may need to acknowledge that those who rejected you feel truly vindicated in their own minds and will never seek to understand you.

Becoming ok with that can be difficult, but it will release you from the hold of rejection.

Focus on Personal Growth

Each and every one of us has ways we can grow and improve every single day. James Clear in Atomic Habits says, “The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Here’s how the math works: if you get 1% better each day for a year, you’ll end up 37 times better.” It may be a mistake to hop out of bed the next day after a failure and run a marathon. But if you follow a plan to work up to that distance, a little at a time, you are almost certain to achieve success.

Gain Perspective

I’ve received The Daily Stoic newsletter for a while and a recent email newsletter quotes:

In the hilarious book In A Sunburned Country…Bill Bryson speaks of the joy of reading the news in Australia, a country many thousands of miles from his own. “It always amazes me how seldom visitors bother with local paper,” he writes, “I personally can think of nothing more exciting, certainly nothing you could do in a public place with a cup of coffee than to read newspapers from a part of the world you know almost nothing about. What a comfort it is to find a nation preoccupied by matters of no possible consequence to oneself. I love reading about scandals involving ministers of whom I have never heard, murder hunts in communities whose names sound dusty and remote, features on revered artists and thinkers whose achievements have never reached my ears, whose talents I must take on faith.”

Remember that your life feels very close and personal to you, but to those around you, their perspective is going to be more distant than your own. Their judgement less personal than you believe. Their gossip less important than you think. Gain perspective that you aren’t the first one in the world to feel this way, no matter what you are going through, others have been there before, and will follow you after.

Moving on sometimes means disconnecting and removing the old. Forging new ties and community can be tough, but it can also be relieving. Your past doesn’t need to follow you, and those who stick around should be those who won’t hold it against you. Look forward with optimism, because you’re on the earth in this time and place, and nobody has the opportunities and choices you have but you.