odious - adjective - extremely unpleasant (Google)
Depending upon your point of view, there are few things more odious than rejection. Why? It takes a nasty bite out of the ego, leaving you with a sour residue in your mouth. And that's only if you are strong and somewhat used to repeated spurns. What if you're not? Well then, the metaphor gets more injurious. If you are a neophyte, then repudiation is more like a swift kick in the groin. If you are the sensitive type, it may be so debilitating that you may stay prostrate on the floor for a long time, forgetting all about the purpose of the initial quest. When you finally recover, rise, and totter away, the dream that motivated you in the first place could just be left behind.
Rejection for me is very commonplace as I pretty much experience it everyday. Okay, okay. It is my fault because I put myself up for the daily whipping. I am not only a singer/songwriter, trying to get my music heard, a nearly impossible feat as there are millions of other singer/songwriters trying to do the same thing, but I am also a writer who has just finished a novel. Which is getting lost in myriad databases of literary agents all over the country, again due to furious competition. According to Google, I have a one in one thousandth chance of finding an agent to represent my writing, meaning I may have to query about a thousand agents before one even bats an eyelash of interest. Yikes! I'm only at 43.
I am up for the challenge, though. Why not? I believe that Ray Bradbury, the sci-fi author responsible for the classic Fahrenheit 450, was rejected about eight hundred times before some really smart publisher saw his worth and took a risk on him. I could use Ray as inspiration, and I will.
Putting myself aside, though, my heart goes out to those of you (like my daughter) who are pounding the cyber pavements daily in search of a job that pays a living wage. The employment rate may be up, but positions that pay100K or more are few and far between. For most of the MBA recipients out there right now, there isn't much. My daughter was one of 600 applicants for an opening at Hulu. After a month of chatting, going back and forth with various corporate heads, she wound up in the number one spot just before they told her they had changed their minds and couldn't use her. An odious rejection? You betcha. But as Nietzsche once penned, "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger" or something like that.
And then there are Kamala Harris, Tim Walz and the rest of the Democratic party. Nope. I'm not going there. Sorry. But no doubt, they are all feeling the pugilistic pangs of rejection as well.
So just how do you cope with painful snubs? There's always hope, hope in the reality that everything will turn around, which is not blind optimism; it's common sense. Life is a balance, a series of dualities. What goes up must come down. What is at its nadir eventually rises. A slow market sooner or later speeds up. If you never, never, never give up, you will most likely get what you have always wanted. It just takes a lot of effort, time, and patience. Hard? Yes. But nothing is easy.
To borrow Nike's slogan, "Just do it." Good luck and Godspeed.
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