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Rejection

See also: Fear of. To say it out loud, with meaning, it carries some weight. To say it over and over 50 times will empty the word of its meaning. At that point it’s just a jumble of phonemes.

For some people, rejection is a way of life. A baseball player’s life is based on how much he fails. A salesman makes more calls than sales.

But when I put myself out there and the response I expect doesn’t come back at me – I call it rejection. Basically, you want to believe in yourself. You pump yourself up with words and phrases that inspire you to be the best person you can when, ultimately, it’s another’s opinion that unravels the whole sweater.

Why do we do this to ourselves? I think it has to do with expectations… we expect that people are going to like us and accept us. We don’t want to do anything to upset the delicate balance we’ve built with them – the intimate trusts that bind relationships together. When they finally do reject us it’s as if that trust has been broken.

It’s the build-up, the filling in of the gaps that get me. When we first come upon someone unknown to us, we learn certain things about them. They learn certain things about us. There are many gaps in what we know about them so during the ‘away’ times, we fill in the gaps with what we WANT to be true about them. We make assumptions.

From where do we pull this information? Where are we getting these assumptions? For me, it’s about people I’ve known in my life. This person is JUST like someone I knew years ago. THAT person liked black and white movies so this new person should like them, too. But it doesn’t work like that. I’ve just made an assumption that isn’t true.

Then we recede back into our expectations. We expect them to walk, talk, and do other things in a certain way. When our expectations don’t work out, what are we left with?

Rejection. Ultimately, we have doomed ourselves believing this person was something they turned out NOT to be. We can’t believe it – were we really that blind or ignorant? Did we not see the signals? Are we not schooled enough in the fundamentals?

It boils down to a crapshoot. Someone who rejects you has their own reasons. They made expectations of you. They jumped to their own conclusions – about you.

In our minds, we build a roadmap. We know where we want to end up but not how to get there. People are good for knowing what they want but not how to get it. I want to end up in a relationship with a kind, decent, caring woman. I just don’t have the tools or the skill-set to know how that’s done. I want things to be easy. I DON’T want things handed to me… I don’t mind working for them.

It’s kind of like an artist who is great with mixing colors and brush stroke technique – but who has no idea what to paint on the canvas. I can’t sit back in life and have somebody always tell me what to do all the time. I need to have my own vision. I need to do what’s best for me. I need to figure out what that is.

I need to accept a certain amount of rejection.

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