The pain of rejection is brutal.

As a caveat, this is probably not my finest piece of writing. I’m writing from a slightly battered and bruised place and I’m not sure whether this alchemises into beautiful literature so please bear with me as I do my best.

Rejection is something I’ve been experiencing recently with my search for somewhere to live, feeling utterly disheartened and bleak as doors keep shutting in my face. It turns out that a single freelancing therapist is a really unattractive candidate to rent to, despite over a decade of renting successfully without the slightest problem.

The pain of this rejection has hit me particularly hard today as I sit writing in my parent’s spare bedroom, the same sofa I sat on for nearly a year and a half during that time when the world went mad in 2020 and I watched from the side-lines in despair.

It feels slightly surreal, and incredibly discouraging, that I’m back here, yet again, at the same starting point, desperately trying to build my life back up.

Feeling rejection right in the core

Being an extremely sensitive person, I feel rejection deep to my core.

I can have days when I feel so proud of who I am and my accomplishments but when yet another anonymous person on the end of the phone sitting in an estate agency says rejects me, a torrent of bleakness and crushing disappointment surfaces inside of me and threatens to drown me.

I know I’m not the only one who is dealing with rejection but when you’re so in the thick of it, it can feel like a personal attack on the most vulnerable parts of who you are. It’s a really unbearable feeling and nothing you do can soothe how raw and painful it feels on the inside.

I know it sounds melodramatic but sometimes emotions land us in a theatrical place where we don’t know what’s real and what isn’t.

When we feel overwhelmed by our emotions, which is a very common thing to happen to us all, we can’t see the wood through the trees, we have absolutely no perspective or calming overview of our lives. Instead, we feel alone in our suffering in a doorless room with no escape hatch and no choice but to keep going round and round in circles of increasing overwhelm and suffering.

Taking rejection personally is our downfall

The pain of rejection isn’t anxiety, bred through fear, it’s a self-esteem wounding that has been triggered by a circumstance or situation. And it can feel completely overwhelming and unbearable until we get a grip on what it really is and start to break it down.

What I realised, as I wallowed in my pit of despair today, was that I was taking this rejection so personally.

With every person who turned me away, I felt my self-worth take a hit. Every rejection felt like an attack on who I was, what I stand for, the choices I’ve made and the path I’ve chosen. Even though I love the work I do, the decisions I’ve made that have led me to where I am and my choice to stay alone rather than be with someone who isn’t right for me, I felt personally attacked.

In their eyes, I don’t earn enough money, I don’t do an acceptable job and I’m not a desirable candidate to rent to. Understandably, my ego really wasn’t handling this rejection very well and my confidence was nosediving until I understood how I could ease my suffering.

Rejection has nothing to do with you

The realisation was that they’re not rejecting me for who I am as a person, they don’t even know me, they’re rejecting me because I don’t fit in their box. This box is like a container that you either fit in or you don’t.

The container of their box only accepts people with a certain income, a certain job and a certain life, and my life is way outside of those perimeters. My choices may not fit their box of acceptability but it may fit someone else’s.

This felt fairly mind-blowing for me because I realised that on this basis, this energy around rejection can be totally transformed whether it’s rejection around dating, jobs or anything else. 

No one knows who I am better than myself and no one knows you better than you know yourself. They don’t know my core values, what I stand for, the love I hold, the work that I do, the challenges I’ve faced, the belief system I live by, the fears I carry, the wounds I’m healing or or the dreams that burn brightly inside me. 

They know nothing about me. They haven’t rejected me because of who I am, they’ve rejected me because I don’t fit into their box.

The danger of tying your self esteem to external forces

It’s so ironic that I’ve spent years writing about the danger of tying your self-worth to anything external and I’ve fallen face-first into the trap of mistakenly believing that someone’s measurement of me and how I fit into their small box of acceptability is a reflection of my worthiness and greatness.

But, sometimes lessons have to be learned over and over again for them to really sink in. And a lesson worth remembering is that we don’t want to feed our self-esteem through external validation or measure our worth on the acceptance of others.

However, when we do fall into this trap, as we invariably will, we need to give our ego so much love and compassion.

Our ego is our emotional body and needs validation, assurance and tenderness. In the process of trying to rent a place to live I have had all my old emotional wounds ripped open; not feeling good enough, not feeling accepted, not feeling safe and not feeling heard. 

I now realise that when I speak to myself with compassion and love in times of rejection, knowing that the rejection has nothing to do with who I am but more to do with whether I fit into their box of acceptance and approval, I can begin to slowly recover.

All we need to remember in times of rejection is that it’s never personal - we are enough exactly as we are, no one is better than us and no one can dictate our worth. Only you know yourself and the absolute magnificent being that you are, no one can take that away from you. 

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