Selectivity

I know brains do not always agree with this perspective, but try to imagine that to get the right job or school or opportunity or relationship you actually need rejection. It’s a thing that keeps you safe and helps you value your own wants and needs. It’s a tool that lets you find what you want. It hurts like hell sometimes, but it’s a thing you need.

Being rejected from a thing where you won’t get what you need is better than being selected and wasting your time. Regardless of the accomplishments or qualifications or recommendations you have, no matter how hard you’re willing to work, not matter what you earn or deserve, if your supervisor can’t or won’t support you – for reasons good, bad, or indifferent – it will end up as a bad match. You’d rather know that as soon as possible and not after shifting your life to accommodate them and giving up other opportunities.

It feels safer when we can arrange to be the one rejecting, and often that’s a good plan. It can be empowering to say no to something that won’t work for you. But you’re an independent human being with their own goals and needs and you want to be rejected from things that would ask you to give up yourself, even if someone else notices first.

You could fit yourself to any job or any life. You are smart and resilient and persuasive and able to learn what you need to meet your goals. You are willing to accommodate so deeply that you can help people with their dreams. But you also deserve to have dreams of your own, and to live a life where you can make choices to keep and value them.

I love you and I hope that neither rejection nor anything else gives you too much pain. But I also love who you want to be, so when you can be brave and embrace rejection, even though it hurts. The pain was always present, and as it fades there will be space for something new, something that better fits the life you want to build.

ZiB