Featured Article: The Curious Blessing of Rejection

Author and blogger Tanya Marlow writes for the Mud Room about her journey to publication, and the ways that rejection has been a blessing. I have found her experience to be very true for myself. If anything, I am grateful that so many of my grand plans and efforts were thwarted during the first five years of my writing career!

However, I’m also grateful that I kept writing and showing up at writing events even when I felt like a failure. Here are a few highlights from Tanya’s article:

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I’d always dreamed of being a writer as a child, and now this was my chance – my one chance. Now I could achieve something – not only that, I could prove myself and get the respect from others I craved; I could show to the world that I was actually qualified to do the work I’d already been doing for the last four years. I didn’t just want this book to be published, I needed it.

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We put so much of ourselves onto our goals, our projects, our dreams, that it can feel like our identity has crumbled when those projects aren’t realized.

The danger is, too, that we take the words of a rejection as a prophecy over us, taking them deep into the core of our personhood. All they had done was reject my idea for a book: I had taken it as a sign that I would never be a writer.

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The truth is those words of rejection don’t get to define us. We know not what the future holds, and it is a mistake to project the ‘now’ onto the ‘not yet’.

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Read the rest at The Mud Room.

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