The R word (no, not that one)

I wasn’t going to blog.  At least not for quite some time. Sometimes I do wonder about it, all these words endlessly, pointlessly spewing.  I decided to shut the fuck up.  But then – ho ho – I got a direct message:

Just out of interest, have you ever done a blog on the fear of rejection? Sep 30, 7:56 AM.

Have I?  No, I don’t think so, not directly.  I answered – but didn’t get a reply.  So I figured maybe I should. Write a post, that is. Cos I know a lot of people who seem to let the R word drag them down, stop them reaching for the stars.

I dunno. As a freelance journalist, rejection is so familiar, it could be my mother, sister and aunt all rolled into one.  You pitch ideas – they’re turned down. Sometimes you don’t even get an email saying ‘no thank you.’ As a book writer, you get it in shedloads too.  I have files upon files on my PC of unpublished books – proposals lovingly worked and reworked; some progressed into chapters over weeks, months.  Only to be rejected.  It’s par for the course.  You have to keep trying; you can’t always expect to get it right first time. Sometimes you look back and you think, ‘Yeah, that really was shit; what the bejesus was I thinking?’.  Sometimes you look back and think ‘Feck, that was fabulous; why didn’t it sell?’ 

Funny thing; the ones that really get me, time and again, are the ‘nice’ rejections, as my agent calls them.  I’ve had a bucket of those for Samael, my YA novel.  The ones that go on about how wonderful the writing is, how gripping the plot, how different and exciting…blah blah..except…there’s always an except.  And a rejection, however nice, is always a rejection. Except…hmm…not always.  ‘If you ever rework this, do let me have another look.’  And, yeah, sometimes you need to rework; to shift things slightly and then try again.

What do you learn from it?  Bottom line? Keep trying.  If it’s worthwhile, don’t give up.  You have to be honest with yourself. Maybe it isn’t right, maybe something needs to be changed, to shift. Or maybe the timing is wrong. Or maybe – hey - it’s just bad luck, Fate, the malign universe, whatever.  But you have to keep trying. I know a writer who won’t submit his work because he’s scared of being rejected.  Well, okay, his approach means he won’t be rejected but he sure as hell won’t be published either, will he?  It’s like the lottery – the odds may be high but if you’re not in it, you sure as hell can’t win it, can you?

But I suspect my shy DM friend isn’t thinking about work.  I imagine she’s thinking about relationships.  And, ah, that is slightly different.  But, come to think of it, not that different.  Fear of rejection is, bottom line, fear of losing face, right?  And, honestly, is it so very awful if you lose your face?  What is a face after all?  A construct, a mask we present to the world. Is it the *real* us?  No. 

People bang on a lot about relationships. About ‘the rules’ and so on. About having to ‘play the game’ - like a relationship is a game of chess. And, on some levels, yes it is…(who was it that said it was actually war – was it Ovid? And, of course, chess is civilised war) but you have to start playing in the first place.  If you don’t lay your pieces on the board, you ain’t going nowhere…except back to Spider Solitaire. 

So, to those who fear rejection, I would say…don’t.  Embrace the possibility. What’s the best that can happen?  The other person will say ‘Yes!’  What’s the worst that can happen?  The other person will say ‘No.’ And then you will either lick your wounds and move on, or wait and try again. 

I wrote this a few days ago but this morning I was thinking about it again and wondering if this post would be any way helpful to my shy querent. So I thought I’d ask my oracles for some clarification. iPod oracle said this: except, hmm, it's not on YouTube... and this...and, grrr, neither is Kathryn Williams, Up North.  

But this is:

"Does it really matter, 

As long as you're not afraid to feel?"  

And that's the bottom line, really. You have to feel. Or you're dead. 

But I still wasn't sure this was enough.  So I turned to the Beagle oracle and he wagged his tail like it would fly off and hurled himself at me and covered me in licks and snuggled up so tight there wasn’t an atom of space between us.  Hmm. “If you love someone, tell them so - in no uncertain terms.

Hades' bride

I intended to be productive today. I was going to sort out my admin and then crack on with my rewrite of Samael while the boys were at rugby. But my overzealous PC clean-up had deleted the wrong cookies so I couldn’t pay my bills and, while I was hunting through my desk for the codes, I kept crashing up against the past, time and again.


Letters from Therese, who died last year. A booklet on ‘handling grief’ given to me by the hospital when Mum had just died. And then an envelope full of bits and pieces of hers – her scratchy writing, little notes, bills, a signed blank cheque. And I just started sobbing all over again. Thankful that I could, that there was no-one to hear my sobs turn into howls, apart from the dogs.

I have been thinking about my parents a lot lately. Since I became ill, to be precise. My chest infection came seemingly out of nowhere. I had no cold, no sore throat to presage it. As usual it worried me. I have had weak lungs since childhood; bronchitis and I have been on first name terms; I’ve been hospitalised for pneumonia.

It runs in the family. My father died of lung cancer; my mother of pleural empyema. I tried to write about it the other night but could only come up with disjointed words (hence most certainly not a poem).

Both my parents died
betrayed by breath.
Father courted cancer,
inhaled the Cell Shifter,
hugged it close;
permitted the past to eat his future
Consumed by sadness,
rejection locked deep within

Mother hoarded secrets:
a dragon’s lair of loss
Betrayal and sick seduction,
passion bruised,
shame locked tight to ice.
No movement.
Nothing moves in winter’s hold.
No breath.
Lungs harden,
a carapace
too weak, heart broken, to break out.
Flesh turned shell, then stone.

My sad (inhe)rit(anc)e
(b)eaten black and blue.
Blue of ice,
black of decay.
(Dis)inte(g)r(ation).
Stagnation.
Legacy of fear.

Can we change our patterning? Researchers into PNI (psychoneurimmunology) think so. But what if we’ve made a deal? If we’re already signed the pact? Can we renegotiate? Can we renege? That’s what I’ve been worrying at this last week. Because, see, I think I accepted the pact a long, long time ago. I nodded and took the hand of the Dark Lord, sad lost Persephone in a sea of poppies, feeling life was over anyhow so nothing of value was lost.

Now I take a deep breath and lift a knight.