Rejection: of course you should take it personally
Should you take rejection personally? Good Lord, of course you should. You are a person, after all.
What else are you going to do, take it like a llama?
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(1) Resiliance is not a moral virtue.
The amount of resilience you have is more like a hair color: It’s something you’re born with, unless you change it with chemicals.
Don’t listen when people tell you to get over it, move on, and let go. What the hell do they know? Feel what you feel. Discontent and anger are not defects, they are human. They are also very powerful tools for change, if you use them right.
(2) Success is not a moral virtue either
Success often is more like the lottery. Some people win the first time they buy a ticket, and try to convince the rest of us that winning only happens to people who believe in themselves with their whole entire hearts; other people win the lottery after buying 100 tickets, and then spend their lives urging the rest of us to keep on buying lottery tickets until it works for us, too.
The only logical conclusion to this line of thought is that people are starving in Africa because they deserve it. We need to stop equating vocational (and economical) success with personal virtue.
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(3) … Nor does success inevitably follow upon hard work or persistence
We also need to stop telling people that hard work and persistence will inevitably lead to vocational success. Hard work may increase the mathematical odds of success, sure, but there are no guarantees.
How unfortunate it is that we keep insisting that success comes from good character and hard work. The American mobility myth is astonishingly persistent, despite many recent (and bipartisan) studies that debunk it.
The good news? You can stop beating yourself up, now. Being unsuccessful is not a character flaw, and there is nothing wrong with you. Nor is there anything wrong with embracing your own experience for what it is, and moving through and past it your own way, too. I’m sorry I can’t tell you how to succeed, nor even guarantee that you will. But on behalf of the rest of the world, please let me say: we need you just the way you are.
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Update: Yesterday our local paper posted excerpts of my entry about the Knoxville shooting in several places on their website. For a few hours it was Google City around here. Therefore, I’d already written today’s entry when I was pinged by this article about anger, written by a licensed therapist, who took my point and ran with it quite beautifully. So now you have it from a real expert!
