*DISCLAIMER: Certain names, places, and situations have been changed to protect the innocent from harm and the guilty from embarrassment.*
What do a blog about overcoming infidelity and a book about freelance writing have in common? An important answer to the questions “What must I do to be ready to date?” and “What must I do to become a paid writer?”: “Be able to handle rejection.”
How, then, does one practice how to handle rejection? I considered going into a Republican Facebook group and declaring my love for Hillary Clinton while, at the same time, going into a Democratic Facebook group and declaring my love for Donald Trump. However, that is not so much learning how to handle rejection as it is learning how to handle death threats. 😉
Rejection is not something any of us like to deal with, but all of us have to face it at some point. It’s similar in its stigma to failure, except where failure means we did something wrong, rejection sends the message that we are something wrong.
Several years ago, I was in the process of both trying to find paid writing work and putting myself out there to meet people when I stumbled upon this article from TIME—make rejection a game! Jia Jiang spent 100 days asking strangers for things like special-made doughnuts, driving a police car, and playing soccer in someone’s backyard. He asked for small but unusual things every day in order to build up his resistance to getting rejected. He said it helped him greatly in cultivating the courage to start his own business which, like starting out in writing or the dating scene, requires the ability to hear and deal with “no.” And dealing with rejection was something that requires regular practice.
I decided I wanted to conduct a similar experiment, and the first week or so I was surprised at how often my requests were granted. However, I soon learned, as a single guy friend who was afraid of re-entering the dating scene told me, “The worst someone can do is NOT say no.”
I confided in someone I trusted, someone with whom I had a lot of history, about some ongoing struggles I had experienced. No cross words had ever passed between us, and I had always felt secure in my relationship with this individual. It turned out I could not have been more wrong.
This person responded to me with a lifetime of venom and contempt towards me, as if this individual had been storing it all up for a special occasion when I was vulnerable to unleash it. This person had never before criticized or spoken angrily to me. And in one moment, all the security I felt in my relationship with this person went up in smoke. It destroyed our relationship, and we’ve not spoken since.
There are some experiences that wound us deeply, and then there are some that are so traumatic and unexpected that they cause an internal paradigm shift. This was the latter.
I became afraid of opening up to anyone. Even asking for little things of others became a Herculean task for me. I began to question every long-standing relationship I had, wondering if the other people in my life were going to turn on me so violently and without warning.
Fast forward to 2019, and I faced a similar situation. I agonized whether I should open up to someone else, and for several days, I had crippling flashbacks of the previous incident. When I prayed about it, the Scripture that kept coming to mind was John 14:6: ”Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
I realized something important: sometimes the truth is ugly. Sometimes we find out the person we thought loved us really didn’t. Sometimes we find out life isn’t as easy as we’d hoped it would be. Whatever the hard truth is we discover, though it may sting painfully at the time, it will ultimately be liberating to us in the long-term.
In my case, I found out someone I loved and thought highly of didn’t reciprocate that esteem, and it hurt for a long time. However, I needed to know this about this person. Had I not found out, the betrayal could have come in another, more intense form later. In the long run, I was liberated because I no longer have a covert narcissist in my life messing with my head.
I also discovered a hard and painful truth about me: that I was not the judge of character or healthy relationships I thought I was. This, too, though, turned out to be freeing, because it forced me to take an intense look at how I relate to others, and to realize that an absence of conflict in a relationship is not an indicator of its health, but rather how well the two people handle the conflict when it arises.
Avoidance of potential rejection is a Sisyphean undertaking, because it requires us to sell our souls again and again to denial in the name of comfort, and the pursuit of comfort is an ultimately cruel and insatiable taskmaster. Making knowing and living the truth at all costs is the only way to live. Not everyone will like us. Not everyone will believe in us. Better to find out sooner rather than later, because if I am entrusting my life and relationships to God’s control, I can rest assured that getting rejected on the outset is God’s protection of me down the road.
In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis said, “In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth -- only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.”
I need not fear to know the truth about anything, how someone thinks of me, or even the ugly parts of me that eventually rear their ugly heads. One of the Names which Jesus uses for Himself is the Truth, and if He lives in me, there is no freer or safer relationship.
THE END
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