Cream & Sugar with that?

Rejection—don’t like it, don’t want it.  Unfortunately, I have no choice, because it’s not like I’m at a restaurant and when the waiter asks if I want my coffee refilled I can reply, “Nah, I’ve had enough, thank you,”; rejection ain’t coffee, and it looks like my cup’s getting filled to the brim, regardless if I want it.  As with certain brands of coffee, rejection leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.  Luckily, there are ways people can serve up rejection that make it more palatable… kind of like the way cream and sugar helps take the bitterness out of bad coffee.

I’m a bring-me-my-bad-coffee-ASAP kind of rejectee.  I hate waiting.  My dad used to get frustrated with me regarding my inability to be patient.  He’d say, “Dammit, when you want something, you want it yesterday.”  He was right; impatience has always been one of my most prominent character flaws, especially with waiting to find something out.  The most excruciating wait I ever had to endure was the wait for score results after sitting for each of the CPA exams. (Failing is just one of the many flavors of rejection.) If I remember correctly, it could take up to six weeks (or was it 12?) to get your results.  Most of the time, six weeks is nothing, but when you’re waiting to find out if you passed (or failed) an exam you spent months of your life studying for, six weeks feels like an eternity.  At least I could expect to know by a certain date if I passed or not… but I must admit, that didn’t stop me from checking the exam website about a hundred times a day, starting the day after I took each exam.

Before I went the Indie route with publishing my novel, I had to send query letters to literary agents.  In the querying process, you email an agent, telling them what your book is about, and then wait, and wait, and wait.  Days, weeks, or even months later, they reply with a “send me a partial manuscript,” or a “thanks, but no thanks.”  By the time I’d sent about twenty query letters, I would get excited when I received a rejection, as long as it arrived with expedience.  “Woo-hoo!  I got rejected, and it only took a week!”  I learned that agents don’t mind sending rejections.  They do it all day, every day, so it doesn’t bother them one bit to say, “Move along, sister.”  In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that some of them enjoy it.  Well, there were one or two nice ones who added a few kind words in with their turndowns—I like those agents.

The rejections that leave the worst aftertaste are the unspoken ones.  I was talking to/kinda seeing a guy one time; we’d been talking for months and hung out four or five times during that time.  After months of consistent communication, suddenly and out of nowhere, radio silence… not a peep out of this guy.  I waited (perhaps he’d had a family issue or something.)  After almost two months of not hearing from him, I thought maybe I (because of me being me) appeared aloof or uninterested, so I sent him a text.  He never replied.  No, he wasn’t dead or laid up in the hospital or anything like that—he’d met and began dating someone (thanks to her for tagging him in a Facebook post, otherwise I’d still be wondering WTH happened).  Did he think it was okay to never reply, leaving me wondering if I’d said or done something wrong?  With a one-sentence text, he could have proven himself to be a decent human being. I would have wished him the best, moved merrily along about my business, and today we’d be on friendly terms; instead, he opted to go ghost and leave me hanging, which I don’t consider a very friendly thing to do.

Rejection sucks and unfortunately, none of us can avoid it.  But if you read my blogs, you know my mission is to find something positive out of all the crappy stuff that life throws our way.  What positive comes from rejection?  Well, for me, after being the rejectee so many times and in so many ways, I’ve learned how to behave in the rejecter’s role:

1. Serve up the rejection as fast as possible.  Waiting for an answer sucks, and when you’ve waited forever and the answer is “no,” it sucks even more.
2. Be kind.
3. Even if you believe your “no,” may hurt someone’s feelings, say it anyway. Everyone deserves an answer, even when it’s not the answer they want to hear.

If you’ve been on this planet as long as I have, and if you’ve been on the receiving end of rejection as many times as I have, you’ve probably learned not only how to be gracious when you get rejected but also how to properly reject someone.

As you pour that nice, big cup of hot, steaming rejection, don’t forget to ask, “Would you care for some cream and sugar with that?”

And if it’s me you’re serving, please be sure to offer up a couple of shots of that caramel syrup I like.