Today was a big day. I got promoted. I went to a new open mic for the first time. The cashier at Trader Joe’s told me that I was his weirdest customer of the night.* I bought a new pair of pants.

_{*My cart consisted only of a jar of crunchy peanut butter and a bottle of white wine. I am a simple woman.}

However, amidst all of these exciting experiences, the highlight of my day came from not one, but two rejection emails.

Let me explain.

For most of my life, the perfectionist in me has been terrified of failure and has fled from any situation in which rejection is possible. This attitude has dissuaded me from applying to jobs that look interesting, raising my hand in class, reaching out to friends in pain, the list goes on and on.

Though I’ve heard that the road to success is paved with failure and rejection (probably on a poster somewhere in an elementary school), I’ve never quite allowed myself to embrace this maxim. Rather, I’ve simply participated in the things that come naturally and avoided those that don’t. I’ve never joined a choir. I’ve never tried out for a sports team. And I’ve literally run away when asked on a date. The vulnerability required for such ventures was simply too much for me to handle.

Until recently, the voices in my head told me that unless I was the very best at something, I was pathetic and inferior, that I was a fraud if I pursued a dream or a goal that wasn’t within my imminent grasp. They told me that to even consider an endeavor where the probability of success was less than approximately 98% was laughable and embarrassing.

However, I have slowly begun to see that rather than protecting me, these voices have been trapping me inside a limited reality defined by fear and shame. As I tired of constantly bumping up against the rigid boundaries of this confined existence, I sought out alternative perspectives that challenged these familiar melodies that had written and conducted the soundtrack 2 my life.*

^{*In no way am I comparing my life to that of the great Kid Cudi, it’s just a great song.}

 As I began to reframe rejection as an objective necessity on the road to success rather than a shame-inducing punch to the gut, I started to see how avoiding it was the primary way I was holding myself back in life. The fact that I was eluding rejection didn’t mean that I was already at the top of the ladder, too high for anyone to possibly tear me down, it meant that I wasn’t even willing to step onto the bottom rung and begin to climb.

This reality hit home for the goal-oriented achiever in me. I don’t like the idea of being on the bottom of the ladder or even in the middle of the ladder, let alone anxiously squirming in the dirt down below. Therefore, viewing “putting myself out there” as a necessary part of the journey towards success allowed me to take it on as a challenge to engage with rather than an assault to avoid.

Taking this step on a cognitive level was one thing, but I knew that actually believing it would require tangible experience so I decided to start actively pursuing situations where rejection was possible. Although I started small, (asking if I could get off the plane first to make a tight connection or if my roommate could pick me up from the mechanic) I began to realize how much anxiety and discomfort I felt whilst engaging in these daily trivial interactions. 

However, I also started to notice that my feelings were often the worst part and as my tolerance for rejection expanded, I found my values and desires, rather than my fear of failure, taking over as the motivating forces driving my life. Dismantling the barricades of judgment and self-doubt that typically constrain me has allowed me to begin to uncover the specific areas where failure and rejection are not only worth it, but, dare I say, desirable.

For me, that has been writing and comedy. Although these are inherently vulnerable pursuits, I have found that my desire to become better at them, and my belief that I could be great at them, is slowly eclipsing my fear of the inevitable rejection that will come along the way. And rejection, while still disappointing and not the ultimate goal, is starting to provide inklings of hope. Because I now actually believe that all these noes are just necessary steps en route to eventual yeses.

Which brings us back to the excitement of my day. Being the weirdest customer at Trader Joe’s is indeed an accomplishment (especially in Silver Lake - the hipster Mecca in which I reside), but the email that said “thanks for your submission but we’d like a rewrite” was invigorating. It meant that someone I didn’t know had read something I had submitted and valued it enough to give me feedback. This wasn’t even a straight up “no”, it was a “not quite”. And “not quite” is more than enough to keep the spark of hope alive.

The other email I received today was from a favorite comedian of mine. I had concocted a rather thorough email proposing that I open for one of his upcoming shows, knowing full well that I had no business making this request. This was something I did with a 100% expectation of rejection. 

As the days and weeks went by without hearing from him, I became self-conscious and thought that perhaps I had gone too far. I started to regret the vulnerability of the proposal and felt myself turning on him for not responding. How dare he continue to live his life and make his podcast without acknowledging me, a random fan he doesn’t know?

However, the email I eventually did receive from him was the best response I could have imagined (short of him saying “yes, please come open for me on this tour I've been planning for months, random girl I’ve never met or seen perform live”). He thanked me for my email and said “I watched a couple of your clips and there’s some good stuff there” and then proceeded to reference a specific joke and tell me that we are kindred spirits. I was STOKED.

My writing was not published. I will not be opening on tour for said comedian. On the outside, nothing has changed. And yet these emails inspired a renewed sense of passion for my craft and belief that what I have to say is worth sharing. Rather than feeling discouraged that I’m not at the top, I’m motivated by the lengthy road ahead and all the potential it holds. And the genuine excitement I feel about these initial steps affirms that I’m moving down it in the right direction.