A few years ago, a few months after a rough breakup, I sat in a coffee shop studying for a grad class, hoping to meet the love of my life.
I saw a woman standing at the counter, and knew she was the one. I went up and ordered my coffee, black of course, like a doctor, and tried to spark a conversation. Words, when uttered under the extreme pressure of convincing a total stranger that you are charming and handsome, are a hard thing to grasp.
“I hear coffee is good with creamer.” That was my opener, a noble attempt, yet disastrous. She physically reacted to my words as if I had taken a swing at her. My coffee comes out, with decidedly no creamer, as she continues waiting for her more complex concoction.
The unthinkable happens. She throws me a lifeline. “Well then, why do you drink your coffee black?”
Now the answer to that question is actually kind of interesting. I started drinking coffee in my early teens. And most of my earliest consumption occurred at the home of a friend’s grandfather. Whenever someone asked him for milk or cream, he would get a wistful look in his eye, and tell us that in Vietnam, they didn’t have time for cream. That in his house, the coffee would be black. That man’s grandson, and the rest of us that tried to play as men in front of that giant, will be taking our coffee black forever, thank you very much.
But I didn’t tell her that. What I said, the actual word out of my mouth was, “Vietnam.”
She had no more life lines left to throw. Sometimes you leave a man behind when he is drowning, for fear he will drag you into the current with his thrashing.
She turned away, stuck up her nose at all that could have been as it fadedinto the smell of cinnamon powder and vanilla syrup. I hung my head, and tried to regather my dignity. As she avoided my direction, I uttered the phrase, “Nice meeting to you.”
You read that right. Nice. Meeting. To. You. She stifled a laugh, and I turned tail, packed my things, and never, ever, returned to that coffee shop.
Most commentaries on rejection as a subject are based on an idea that eventually, failing will teach the failure to not fail. It’s the Michael Jordan quote, the one where he details all the ways he did not live up to his idea of himself as a basketball player, all the shots he had missed. He says, “I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
It sounds good. But is it true? Is failure, rejection by a much less sweeter name, the reason for success when it comes?
Michael Jordan was one of the most physically gifted athletes to play the game. And he worked hard. Some will cry, “But his mindset! Failure gave him a winner’s mentality.” If you have seen the documentary on his latter finals appearances, Netflix’s The Last Dance, you know that it’s probably more like narcissism and addiction that gave him his famous winning attitude. This isn’t MJ hate, or an elevation of Lebron. I am just not sure whether failure can be to blame for his claim as the greatest of all time.
But we latch on to rejection as a mechanism for our progress. Some of us use it as motivation. Others of us pick through the debris of our shattered dreams and try to find the cause of it, something we can fix so that we never have to feel it again.
But is rejection the best motivator? Our politicians and athletes would have us think so. Every public figure has a story of constant rejection, or failure, resulting in success. Those that don’t have the story in reality, often invent it in their own mind and the public consciousness. Elizabeth Warren. George Santos. Rachel Dolezal. Raquel Saraswati. All searching for rejection, or victimhood, the holy grail of political influence.
Athletes are the same. Getting cut from the high school team used to be enough. But in the current cultural moment, our athletes read books during public workouts so that we know their plight, whether those feelings are manufactured or really felt. Their physical reading, and our reading of who they are as person, never surpasses page one.
This is not unique to Lebron James. Colby Covington, an elite fighter, has made a brand of being the Trumpiest face-puncher in the world. This can be seen as a marketing tactic, but it could also be read as an attempt to make hay off of stories of rejection by people groups with which one is only loosely affiliated.
Rejection is failure is victimhood. When a public figure runs out of rejection narratives, or failures of their own making, they escalate the cause of their struggle. They are no longer motivated by a critical high school coach, a missed shot in a finals game. They craft a narrative that the system is against them, the whole of society rejecting them for their identity.
Of course, we know that this isn’t true from sheer observation, and yet, rejection is too valuable a commodity to let slip away.
The capitalization of rejection is an asset to those who desire the public to idolize them. It forces us, those who live lives of regular proportions, to see them and identify ourselves in them.
But we are not them. I love to play pickup basketball, but I have never been accused of being Michael Jordan or Lebron James. I too have missed a lot of shots, turned the ball over in key moments, been trusted to take the game-winning shot in the waning seconds of a game that was untimed and disturbingly lacking of offensive prowess. And yet, those failures have not made me into anyone. I have been in fistfights. And I come from a part of the country where Trump is fast becoming a patron saint, or whatever the protestant version is, since Catholicism in my hometown bears its own fruits of rejection. And I have failed in fighting. I once asked a childhood friend not to hit me again during a particularly brutal episode of a fight club my friends and I staged as a search for manhood and excitement in our adolescence. And yet, I have never challenged for a world title.
I never married that girl from the coffee shop, and my wife can attest to the fact that the rejection I experienced that day did not make me any smoother in pursuit of her.
So it cannot simply be rejection or failure or victimhood that makes a hero.
I write fiction as a passion project. I grew up with secret dreams of becoming a modern Hemingway. When I started drinking, I chose whiskey as my vice, because it reminded me of the great writers I love.
The fiction market is a strange one. You start by pitching short fiction to journals, then novels and collections to literary agents and publishers, then you get solicited by the large journals and publishers, if you are lucky.
I keep all my rejection letters. I hang them on the fridge, though they are now too numerous to be contained by one magnet. Sometimes they are humorous, such as the judge who told me he “burned his tofu” while reading my story, but felt that the ending was no good, a sloppy bowtie on what was a great story until then. Sometimes they motivate me. “This story is interesting, though typically not what we publish. Submit more of your work, we would love to read it.” Most of the time, the letters are generic. “Your work is not right for us,” or “thanks for sending,” “doesn’t fit our readership.”
When I get an acceptance letter, which is rare, I gather up all the rejections for that story and pin them underneath the acceptance. I figure they will be cool to have when I become the great American novelist.
I have to ask myself, are the rejection letters doing the legwork of success? Well, no, of course not. For one, I haven’t had much success. And second, I have done too much work, too much writing, to credit the ideas of critics. Or poorly written sentences. Or times when I flubbed the requirements for submissions. My failures and the rejecting thoughts of others are not the reason why I have succeeded. It isn’t the famed “hate” that my generation considers the magic fuel of success.
I wake up in the morning, I make my coffee, and I write. Or, on nights like tonight, when it is late and I haven’t had time to write all week, I am up, typing away. The opposite of rejection is not acceptance, nor is success the opposite of failure.
The opposite of rejection is responsibility.
Michael Jordan took his incredible talents to practice. As does Lebron. Colby Covington punches people daily before he laces up his gloves for fight night. Rejection may be a motivator, but what makes those great is not that they have failed, but that they showed up to practice before their worst failures, and that they continued to show when the lights went out. They have done their duty.
My father wasn’t great at being my dad because he had failures in his past. He showed up, he provided. That was his duty as a man. Mine as a writer is to write when no one is watching. Your responsibility is your own.
Failure, rejection, victimhood. These cannot make us great. But we can be great in spite of them so long as we show up to do the work on our own.
Eventually, the letters on the fridge have to result in action, otherwise, the magnets begin to trickle down due to the weight, and the papers fall to the floor like anvils and unmet needs.
that opening line. hooked. rejection is weird with how it makes us desperate or maybe it doesn’t make us desperate but strips away our faith in ourselves and leaves whatever is behind. i guess you need substance underneath or else we cling to the stripping agent as our only hope.
You write so well. Great content and always enjoyable. Thank you!