Rejection Isn’t Personal

Even when it sounds very personal, try not to take it personally.

Woman Fleeing Fear Itself (1980) by Dorothea Tanning

How other people feel about you often has nothing whatsoever to do with you. The vast majority of dismissive reactions you receive in the world are purely a manifestation of the culture’s current norms, most of them utterly arbitrary and formed in hopelessly restrictive, defensive, or hierarchical microcosms. It’s not that these norms don’t function smoothly to maintain the status quo or keep people feeling relaxed and comfortable in their roles. It’s just that they have very little meaning, when compared to the dark brilliance of the human soul or the free-wheeling glory of deep connection.

The most negative reactions you get — the ones that feel the most personal of all — often spring from the most raw, tumultuous, or guarded parts of another person. In other words, surprising or unexpected rejections are often a very personal expression of someone else’s fears, anxieties, prejudices, and bewilderments.

Rejection isn’t meaningful, and shouldn’t be taken personally. When you gather data and tell stories about how your past rejections mean that you’ll continue to be rejected in the future, you’re using a meaningless road map to navigate your life. The joy of drawing your own peculiar map and enjoying your own winding path of discovery far outstrips the rewards of seeking approval and love at any cost.

Obviously, the pain and hurt of being ignored, avoided, or rejected in the same ways over and over again can feel like SEEING PROOF that you’re doing something wrong. But there are many people in this world who back away the second they see the slightest hint of something that many others would consider enchanting:

Vulnerability

Honesty

An ability to state what you want directly, without blame

Confidence

Complexity

Self-awareness

Swagger

Imagination

Intensity

A charming habit of overthinking the smallest things

Pride

Resilience

Realism

A sharp wit

Intuition

An ability to see through other people’s pretensions and status anxieties

Open-mindedness

Generosity

A love of discovery

Shyness

Exuberance

Every single amazing trait you have, every single dimension of your glorious, conflicted, ever-shifting self, has the ability to turn people off immediately. Why?

Because many if not most people don’t like to spot anything unusual or out of the ordinary in another person. You might be tempted to guess that they only dislike unique or interesting qualities at the very start of a relationship. But lots of people HATE TO ENCOUNTER ORIGINALITY IN THE WILD whether they’ve known you for three minutes or three years. Out of the blue, a secretly fearful or rigid person can decide that you’re not attuned enough to their particular needs, or you’re not muted enough, not regular enough, you don’t nod along enough, you’re too insecure, you’re too much of a show off, you’re too weird, you’re too honest, you say too much, you do too much, you think too much, you’re too much.

If you get rejected after three years of a seemingly healthy relationship in which no major conflicts have been addressed, what you’re usually seeing is a deep fear of intimacy. You’re aren’t too much, you’re just too OTHER, too NOT ME, too OUT OF MY CONTROL. For a person who can’t tolerate intimacy and closeness, merely being a separate person starts to become an insult and an inconvenience. “I would never do it that way,” they’ll tell you, not understanding how absurd they sound. “I want you to do it my way instead.”

***

It probably sounds like I’m describing a certain kind of EXTRA, a bold and daring woman or a delightfully sensitive man, a neurodivergent artist or an outright freaky alien from another galaxy. But I’m also trying to remind you that the most smooth, average-seeming, careful, outwardly conforming humans are also rejected repeatedly for reasons that are entirely unavoidable, random, and unrelated to any truly negative trait they possess.

Every day, people are rejected for just existing — making sounds, taking up space. For being incredibly helpful. For having a sense of humor. For being so lovable that they make another person feel unlovable. For being so imaginative that just by talking out loud, they make insecure acquaintances feel like a bucket of rocks.

And here’s what’s really sad: Many, many people in this world are terrified of real connection that unfolds in real time. This means that anything that makes you seem real will set them on edge. They would prefer a painted backdrop, where they can mouth the same lines and get the same predictable responses from everyone they meet. They don’t even realize that they prefer this. They simply feel WEIRD or AWKWARD or UNCOMFORTABLE around a real human. And they back away.

Or they want someone’s views, behaviors, emotions, and thoughts to match theirs perfectly. Because they have trust issues and loads of shame, they experience DIFFERENCE as alienating and unsettling. I used to be like this, so I understand how powerful it can be. When you don’t love exactly who you are, flaws and all, when you’re ruled by shame, when you struggle with trust, the tiniest differences can make you feel unsteady and unsafe. You reject others and isolate yourself and tell private, despairing stories about how no one will ever be enough for you, or no one will ever love you enough.

This convinces many of us to shape ourselves to match everyone around us. At a very young age, we learn to seem smooth and confident and hide all vestiges of what makes us who we are, our best and worst traits, our biggest flaws and our biggest sources of brilliance. Our access to who we are and what we truly desire weakens. Our light grows dimmer. Our joy fades.

***

Now let me be crystal clear about one thing: There’s absolutely nothing wrong with hiding in situations where you would feel overexposed if you showed yourself. I am a huge advocate of selective hiding at the moment, because it gives me much more freedom to navigate new realms and discover new, unusual types of people without being detected as the space alien from another galaxy that I am. I gain a lot of confidence and strength from biting my tongue and nodding along these days. I feel safe and relaxed because I can trust myself not to blurt out madness in mixed company. But I’ve also cultivated social settings where my unwieldy alien limbs can dance and flail and be ridiculous out in the open.

Blurting out madness is still 100% my jam and it always will be. I love being assertive and goofy and obnoxious and really digging into the weirdness in a room. But I feel emancipated by my sudden ability to shelve this urge and just be regular. I didn’t realize how much of a superpower it could be to disappear in plain sight. Other people do it all day long, of course. I never realized it would be so easy for me to do it, too, once I felt supported and full and fed enough — and learned to interrogate knee-jerk shame reactions and treat them like the random bad weather they are.

It's not easy for everyone. I have empathy for that because I realize now that it used to be impossible for me. In my case, my shame meant that I didn’t accept reality and differences enough to have compassion for people who were different from me, so I didn’t always respect other people’s needs and boundaries enough. I couldn’t play nice if I felt ashamed or isolated. For many other people, there are countless unchangeable reasons why they can’t play nice or bite their tongues.

I’m here to remind them and everyone else that MOST OF US will be rejected repeatedly no matter what we do. We’ll be pushed away even when we’re at our best. We’ll be ignored and ghosted even when we’re the most luminous and loving being within fifty square miles.

When you’re sensitive, you notice people rejecting you in real time. You can see the change in their faces. This sometimes makes you overthink and over-monitor yourself. You panic: I’m doing it again! What am I doing wrong? How can I fix this?

I’m not here to say that you shouldn’t reflect on how you want to be in the world. You can change your behavior. But it’s far easier to make gentle adjustments to how you navigate the outside world when you refuse to amplify your superpowered sensitivity or treat your intuition and desire like a control panel, lighting up and inciting constant calibration, with a low hum of self-loathing in the background. It’s much, much easier to exist among all of these rejecting, fearful humans when you understand:

It's not personal.

You don’t have to do anything or change anything if you don’t want to.

You can just exist.

People reject and get rejected all day long. It is mostly meaningless.

Trying to avoid rejection is like trying to avoid sunlight. Rejection is painful but it also helps you to grow. It can burn you but it’s everywhere. It feels good to show your face and be seen, once you accept that we’re all afraid and we will all get burned over and over again. It feels good to be brave and accept that you aren’t in control at all times. You don’t have to be so careful. You can relax and enjoy the heat and embrace each new discovery.

The pain is real, and the struggle is real. Just don’t take it personally. Don’t add up every slight. Don’t turn your bad break-ups, calamitous work scenarios, and harsh ghostings from trusted friends into scary narratives about how your life will always be.

You are here to dance and play and love and be loved, out in the open. You are here to explore and enjoy others, and to show them who you really are.

***

Every day, instead of taking every reaction personally, remember that most people are guarded, afraid of differences, and ruled by shame. They haven’t learned how to trust yet. They don’t know how to feel compassion for people who don’t sound and act and look like them. But when you show them compassion, you teach them to stretch and expand. You demonstrate a superpower that everyone on the face of the planet needs to develop, whether they know it consciously or not.

Everyone longs for love and compassion. Everyone secretly admires it, even when they’re distancing themselves from it. This is just a basic physical truth that doesn’t need to be proven, because you can see it in other people’s eyes when you’re generous to them, when you treat them with patience and kindness even when they weren’t kind to you, when you’re curious and loving even when they are hurt and defensive.

When you’re kind and you FEEL kind, when you’re compassionate and you FEEL your compassion, other people end up feeling it, too. You heal them without a single word.

When you read into every rejection, you keep yourself isolated. But when you accept that rejection isn’t personal, you set out on the road toward compassion and love, for yourself and others. You prepare to become a person who can transform other people’s hearts and transform the world.

Opening your heart to who you are includes opening your heart to everyone alive. You can’t be open-hearted without letting the world in. It’s scary. It’s sublime.

It starts with the daring choice to believe in who you are right now, exactly as you are with no changes. You are inherently lovable and you deserve to love and be loved — and so does everyone around you. Joy is trusting your core desires and cultivating compassion for those who can’t.

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