4 Rituals to Help You Bounce Forward When Your Work Gets Rejected
The Power of Ritual to Cope With Professional Rejection
“No one is rejecting us. They are rejecting a sample of our work, sometimes only after seeing it through a foggy lens.”
– Adam Grant
What is academic quit lit, and why does it matter?
If you haven’t heard, there’s a burgeoning genre of academic prose called ‘quit lit.’ Especially now with the coronavirus pandemic raging, “The academic job market is still collapsing, but academic ‘quit lit’ is booming.”
In quit lit, academics deploy personal narrative to share publicly their private feelings of being squeezed out of, left behind, and rejected from a career path they’ve devoted an obscene chunk of their adult life to. While academic quit lit isn’t completely new, in the past decade, the genre has undergone a kind of Renaissance.
Quit lit’s sidekick is another fast-growing genre: how to get over academic rejection. As one ex-academic puts it, this new genre is “Part protest literature against our often inhumane profession, part lament over the gutting of higher education funding, part personal memoir and part advice column.”
In this new literary genre of quit lit, rejectees share their techniques, strategies, and rituals designed to enhance our skills for coping with an assortment of rejections we face inside the belly of academe.
And since rejection in academia often leads to ex-academics exploring pathways beyond the ivory tower, quit lit is also full of helpful practices and rituals to deal with a whole new kind of non-academic professional rejection: from failed job applications and getting your creative work turned down, to being denied promotion and/or fired.
In reading academic quit lit, I think there is much in this emerging genre of self-help literature that also resonates with handling the inevitable onslaught of rejection people face in professional life outside of the ivory tower.
Below are four useful rituals I’ve plucked from my reading of quit lit that proactive rejectees have developed to bounce forward when experiencing the sting of rejection. But first, it’s worth examining how rejection actually manifests in our lives, and how quit lit authors suggest dealing with rejection when it inevitably comes knocking sooner or later.
The 4 Stages of Rejection
#1 Rejection is inevitable
First, comes a basic recognition that rejection comes with the territory. Experiencing rejection is part of the game. You need to get used to it, and you shouldn’t be surprised when it happens.
# 2 Guilty Grief
Second, we hear the author’s personal accounts of grieving for their career combusting from the oxygen supplied by a growing pile of rejection letters. This isn’t any regular sort of grief, but a particularly masochistic version of grief popular in academia.
Erin Bartram’s era-defining quit lit essay gives expression to the feeling of guilty grief. She writes,
“I was sad and upset, but I didn’t even start to grieve for several weeks, not because I hadn’t processed it, but because I didn’t feel I had the right to grieve. After all, I knew the odds of getting a tenure-track job were low, and I knew that they were lower still because I didn’t go to an elite program. And after all, wasn’t this ultimately my failure? If I’d been smarter, or published more, or worked harder, or had a better elevator pitch — if my brain had just been better, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. But it had happened, and if I were ultimately to blame for it, what right did I have to grieve?”
#3 Post-traumatic growth
Third, from this guilty grief comes a new feeling: “if I can get through this, maybe I can get through anything?” In psychology, this feeling is called ‘post-traumatic growth.’ Success, of course, gives us a sense of personal strength, but hardship can too.
Psychologists find that the important point at this stage of rejection recovery is how you talk to yourself about your rejection.
For example, think about a time when your creative work or your job application was rejected. What did you say to yourself? “You suck!” “Of course you don’t deserve this, you’re just not good enough.” “You’re an imposter and they found you out!” I’ve said some of these things at one point or another to myself.
But research in psychology shows that what you say to yourself in these crucial moments of agonizing rejection is vital to your mental wellbeing, happiness, and future success (more on this later).
#4 Develop a Self-Care (or Self-Destruction) Plan
The fourth stage is where authors share all their great ideas about how to bounce forward from rejection: going to the beach, getting a massage, go drinking, and then drink some more. In sum, advice usually involves some form of self-indulgence to cope with rejection, and this indulgence can range from healthy self-care to unrestrained hedonism.
I’ve found all of this advice useful in one way or another. But if rejection is something we’ll all continue to face throughout our lives, I’d like to find ways that are more proactive than reactive.
4 Rituals To Cope With Rejection
#1 Take the one hundred rejection challenge
At the end of 2017, after experiencing a few gut-wrenching rejections from work, writer and comedian Emily Winter decided to embark on a rejection adventure as a New Year’s Resolution.
Her plan? Get 100 professional rejections in one year:
“I was just like, I have to create opportunities for myself. Trying to get rejected 100 times was scary and empowering. Like, I was sort of excited going into the year, because I kind of felt invincible, because it really does reframe things as a win-win. Obviously, a rejection is an asset when you’re aiming for 100 rejections. That’s a win, it goes on the list of rejections. So I made it my New Year’s resolution for 2018.”
Emily began by sending in writing job applications, submitting television scripts, and articles to newspapers and magazines. As a comedian, she also auditioned for gigs at comedy festivals. Throughout this experience, she kept score of her wins and losses in a spreadsheet detailing all the rejections she received. And with each rejection, she included a note about her thoughts and feelings the moment she received it:
“So in my notes column, I have, “Wow, this feels personal,” “Hello, I’m here and I’m doing the things. What do you want from me?” “OK, this woman has no idea who I am. Humbling.” “My feelings are very hurt today,” in all caps. “Awkward. I thought we were pals. Ow. Got rejected from a friend.” “I am crying.” One that just says, “K, bye!”
By the end of 2018, she had accumulated 107 rejections and 43 acceptances. 8 months into the project, she was wondering if she had gone crazy: “I looked at my rejection list in disgust. Why had I spent eight months clinging to defeat? What a stupid plan! It suddenly felt as though I’d spent the year cocooning myself in a comforting blanket, and just realized the blanket was made of worms.”
To answer her question, she sent a letter to Dr. Angela Duckworth, the author of Grit: The Power and Passion of Perseverance. Duckworth explained to her that what she was doing wasn’t crazy, but a common strategy for coping with rejection. Psychologists call it ‘exposure therapy’: exposing yourself to opportunities to fail so you no longer fear failure.
In the end, Emily says her project helped her bounce forward from rejection, rather than ‘standing still.’
In sum: make a rejection spreadsheet and shoot for a hundred professional rejections in one year, whatever those rejections might look like in your line of work.
#2 Build a rejection wall
Another coping ritual for rejection is to build a ‘Wall of Rejection.’ Nick Hopwood, Associate Professor of Education at the University of Technology Sydney, first got the idea for a rejection wall in 2017. His tweet was seen over 250,000 times, and now, he says, it “seems like the thing I’m best known for is being rejected.”
What’s the value in creating a rejection wall? In part, it’s to shine a light on a part of academic life that is often tucked away in the shadows. It’s like ‘hiding all the out-takes,’ Nick says. It also shows others pursuing an academic career that the path is not smooth, but filled with potholes, roadblocks, and detours. But most importantly, says Nick, “There is a pedagogy here”:
“not only normalising rejection, but also potentially modelling ways to deal with it. I’m no masochist. I don’t find rejection fun. I fear rejection. Of course I do. Everything I’ve had rejected has mattered to me, reflected hours of work and emotional input. But I don’t let fear of rejection stop me from trying in the first place. And I don’t let the experience of rejection prevent me from keeping going.”
For a whole bunch of other great ideas on coping with rejection, see Nick’s essay, Reclaiming rejection from the shadows of silence and shame.
#3 Grow a Rejection Garden
I love the idea of a rejection garden. I first heard about it from Max Perry Mueller, who, after receiving a rejection one day, decided to go buy a rejection plant at his favorite local plant store. Max explains his reason for this green ritual:
“Rather than focus on the sunk cost of all the effort gone into the job not won or the journal article not published, I visualize the small plant before me that, with nurturing, will sink deep roots into its soil and grow tall branches, leaves and flowers reaching toward the sun.”
Citing cutting-edge research on happiness, Max says that the key to a happy life is compassion for others. So, after his rejection plants grow a bit, he gives them to others. While his rejection ritual may not suit everybody, Max says,
“the idea of creating a ritual, one that we turn to each time we are rejected, I hope might be useful to others. Such rituals do not let us escape the real pain of rejection. But they can help us establish a path to move through when rejection inevitably arrives in our email inbox.”
So go buy a rejection plant. Or better yet, go plant a rejection tree and watch it grow!
#4 Write A Consolation Letter to Yourself
In all of these rituals, there’s one key factor they all include: self-compassion. As I mentioned above, research shows that how you talk to yourself about rejection matters for your physical and psychological well-being.
For example, In research on the role of self-compassion in facing challenging experiences, one experiment asked participants to recall an event that made them feel bad about themselves. This could be a rejection from work, a time when they failed at something, or an experience of humiliation.
Participants were divided into three groups:
- The first group was asked to write about their emotions.
- The second group was asked to do the same task, but to write specifically about their own positive qualities of competence and value.
- A third group, however, was assigned to write a letter to themselves as if they were writing to a close friend, expressing kindness, compassion, and understanding of their situation.
The first group just wrote about their emotions. But the second group was assigned to write something to boost their self-esteem. In the end, however, the self-esteem boosting strategy didn’t prove to make group 2 any happier than group 1.
While there were no differences between the first and second groups, the changes in the third group were astonishing: their anger disappeared and their happiness increased dramatically.
The psychologist Adam Grant says that this study reveals the power of self-compassion:
“Self-compassion is recognizing that you’re only human, and everyone makes mistakes. It allows you to take responsibility for improving in the future, without beating yourself up for the events of the past.”
The takeaway: whether writing notes of self-compassion to yourself in a rejection spreadsheet, communing with others around your rejection wall, or buying a rejection plant to nurture for yourself and others, self-compassion should be central to whatever rejection ritual you choose to create.
Create your own rejection ritual
The notion of ‘ritual’ can trigger thoughts of religious ceremonies, momentous life occasions, or monks humming to a meditative chant. But in his new book The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities Into Soulful Practices, Casper ter Kuile suggests that any daily activity we already do can be transformed into a powerful ritual.
Any ritual, Casper writes, should be built on a foundation of three core principles:
- intention
- attention
- repetition
Whatever you find your rejection ritual to be–walking your dog, going for a surf, re-reading Harry Potter, gardening, watching Netflix, singing karaoke– remember:
“We just need to be clear about our intention (what are we inviting into this moment?), bring it our attention (coming back to being present in this moment), and make space for repetition (coming back to this practice time and again. In this way, rituals make the invisible connections that make life meaningful, visible.”
– Casper ter Kuile, in The Power of Ritual
