Hello Miranda,
I hope you are doing well! We wanted to reach out to you and thank you so much for submitting to____; we greatly appreciate your interest and enthusiasm.
We have received several impressive submissions, and after reviewing several exceptional applicants, we have decided to move forward with other candidates at this time. We did not make this decision lightly and value the time and effort you have invested in the submission process.
We will keep your name on file and encourage you to submit it again in the future.
We wish you luck in your other future writing endeavors.
Regards,
Rejection comes in many forms, and it can come from a well-thought-out written letter of rejection from a recruiter, an automated response from a large company, or my personal favorite, the phantom. The phantom of rejection is never known, you send your voice out into the void, and in its silence, it releases the phantom of rejection. It looms over your head, and in the moments when you find that you are at your most content, it wraps its chilly arm around your shoulder and whispers into your ear. “They didn’t want you.” The cold that encases your heart and sends you into a full-body shudder, and suddenly the peace is gone. It is all you can think about. You sit there and agonize over what you said, what you wrote, what was it about you that led someone to cast you aside like day-old bread and move onto the next best thing. The worst thing about the phantom of silence is that, more often than not, it tends to sound a lot more like you than the automated response.
And in many ways, that voice hurts me more than that of the friendly A.I. bot kicking out an automated response a month later.
With every rejection, you believe that your skin grows thicker. You have become desensitized to the following words at the beginning of an email, stating, “We regret to inform you….” I have grown numb to many rejections because knowing if I took every single one personally, I would have probably lost my mind years ago. Or maybe I already have because others would wonder why I would keep subjecting myself to the constant rejection of being a writer or pursuing a career in a creative field.
Like many others, last year, in 2020, I lost my job. However, I also had the opportunity to finally the time to invest in the tasks I kept saying, “If only I had the time for.” I threw myself into wholeheartedly, taking time to read more books that I had put off, working more on my novel, as well as branching off into outlining more ideas for stories I wanted to create, and a whole lot of baking! Although through all of this, my mind was also a constant reminder that I needed a job and money. I had rent to pay and expenses that could not go unpaid.
Of course, I had a plan. I spent a certain amount of hours every day fine-tuning my resume for potential jobs I wanted to apply for, writing new cover letters, getting my writing samples together, and then plotting out the other half of my day to write.
I would edit bits of my novel or work on a short story. I tried to make up for the fact that since I was not working the same 40 hour work week, my family and friends were working that I needed to work twice as hard to combat that.
"I would not be rejected if I worked hard," I would tell myself. I would not be rejected if I had this array of work I could present to someone to showcase my ability to adapt to their work environment. I would get this project done if I just kept working. At the end of the day, if I was tired, it was because of my work and knowing that I did something. I tried to fill my days as if I was still running into an office every day.
Jonny Sun mentioned it best in his book Goodbye Again, which I will paraphrase here. That he often found himself anxious about not always being busy, that even in his moments of rest, all he could think about was his next project and how during his free time he would also be jotting down notes or thinking of his next project, which is what led him to write the same book I read this summer and had a more than visceral reaction in a parking lot of McDonald's while I was trying to eat some chicken nuggets in peace.
( At least he apologized for it )
The swirling feeling of my gut of am I being productive enough? What is wrong with me that people cannot see my skills? Am I even as good as my friends, family, and colleagues have told me in my life? Why won’t anyone pick me? As a writer, I know I have developed a pretty thick skin, but I think also there is the expectation that with the onslaught of rejections, we are always expected to bounce back from it fairly quickly. I never gave myself the time to mourn the potential of what could have been. Sure there were also plenty of things I applied for that I might not have had an interest in in the first place, and when I would get rejected, I handled those a bit better.
There was my fair share of jobs and other things I had really put my heart into applying and even progressed through to the second round of an interview only to be dealt with a very crushing rejection. I always found the ghost the worst. I would wallow for a few days internally. What did I do wrong? Was I that bad that they couldn’t even bother to contact me again?
The phantom in its dreary-looking cloak, sounding a lot like me after a horrible night of sleep, would usually affirm my worst fears that I am not what someone wants.
How do I battle this? How do I exorcise the phantom from my life? Well, in a lot of ways. I keep working on the things I love because I suppose I am a masochist deep down despite it. I still love writing. I still love sharing my stories. Even if a publisher might not care for it or a recruiter reads my writing and thinks I’m not a good fit. That hey maybe, someone somewhere will. Many of my favorite authors, filmmakers, and artists all deal with this same fate, and yet we still keep trucking along. There is freedom in creation. Although frustrating at times, I find it so surprising when I learn something simultaneously as a character, or I go back and read something I wrote and find that a particular mood is reflective of a time in my life that I maybe don’t think about too often.
Your phantom will always be there, I think you learn to yell at them in a much stronger voice to shoo them away, but other times, you embrace them. Full-bodied and hold onto them until they pass through you like they would any other solid object.
Rejection always hurts, but know that I am rooting for you if you ever need anyone in your corner. Maybe one day when it’s okay, we can meet together for tea and cake with our phantoms. Drop us a line when my phantom isn't hanging around. I am pretty easy to reach on Twitter @mirandatorys.
given the most recent ghosting i had i relate to this so hard... it's just so awful to Not Know, to Not Get Answers, and have to work out the conclusion yourself... like there's easily nothing worse than that and i'm sorry that the months shaped themselves this way :( i often think about an author i won't name saying that it's always the hunger vs the fear, and not to let the fear outweigh you... and it keeps me going when it comes to writing. somebody will connect to it, somebody will see it, and it'll make all so worth it... that's how i think! thank you so much for this piece and thank you for writing it <3
whenever you get one of those rejection e-mails, automated or not, just remember that i would literally hire you on the spot if only the atlantic didn't separate us. rooting for you always!!