JOURNAL
(Photo to the right, taken by Aimee Zaring in Santorini)

Rejection: What’s Love Got To Do With It?
May 10, 2008

Love is perhaps the most difficult task given us, the most extreme, the final proof and test, the work for which all other work is only preparation. --Rilke

The only thing that brought a little smile to my lips earlier this month when I reached into the mailbox and pulled out yet another self-addressed stamped envelope (which for those who don’t know almost always bodes a rejection slip) was the little note I had written months before on the bottom of it: Good job, Aim! I like to think that the person who stuffed and sealed the envelope (probably some intern or minimum-wage assistant) got a smile out of it too, or at least thought, Good thing this girl has a sense of humor.

I’ve read almost as much on how to deal with rejection as I have on how to be a successful writer. I’ve read about other writers’ long, dejected struggles on the road to publication. (Jack London supposedly collected six hundred rejection slips before selling a short story!) I’ve been advised to allow myself to grieve for a short period of time, say forty-eight hours, after a rejection, then get back on the horse. I’ve been told that a rejection letter doesn’t mean that my writing has been judged “bad”; there are countless reasons why a work is declined. Novelist Catherine Ryan Hyde (Pay it Forward) says what perplexes her about rejection is this: “We never rip open the envelope, see that printed slip, and think, ‘Hmm. I'll bet it got all the way to the final cut and it's being returned to me with the gnawing regret of several editors.’”

I understand that rejection is a part of writing, a part of life. Even those who get lucky the first time around will inevitably have to face a closed door in their future. I’m also realistic enough to know that publication isn’t all it’s cracked up to be—there are the critics, the fear of low sales and attendance at book readings, the pressure to produce again or to surpass one’s earlier work, and on and on.

But none of this is very helpful when you’re hugging a pillow to your chest listening to sad songs about unrequited love and reading Thoreau (“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”) and cursing the day you first entertained the Peter Pan fantasy that you could write.

But why should publication be so important? Seeing my novel on bookstore shelves or my name in print isn’t, believe it or not, what motivates me. As Madeleine L’Engle once described, our stories are like our babies. Art is meant to be shared, and if we deliver the work into the world and there is no one there to receive it, it is as if that work, our baby, is stillborn.

I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately. What does love have to do with rejection, you
might ask? Well, if the opposite of love is not hate or even apathy but actually fear, because where there is fear, love can not also exist (and hate and apathy, to my mind, are by-products of fear), it has a lot to do with rejection, or rather how we choose to respond to it.

A while back I went through the Bible and wrote down everything it has to say about love (something I’d like to do someday with all the sacred texts). First Corinthians 13 probably has the most to say on this topic: love is patient and hopes and trusts and perseveres and casts out fear and bears all things and never fails. In Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees, one of the characters, Toby Maytree, lives his entire adult life contemplating the nature of love. Love, he concludes, is an act of the will. A theory I find boring, unsexy, tedious, and therefore, I would imagine, probably true.

So how does all this talk of love help me with rejection? It reminds me that lately my response to rejection has been a fearful one. I’ve allowed fear and its wormy cousin despair to have their twisted way with me. It reminds me that I haven’t been doing a good job at the one thing in life I want above all else—to love. To love better. To know and understand love (to the degree my simple, finite mind will allow). Wasn’t that all Jesus really charged us to do? Not to acquire and achieve but to love God with our whole mind, heart, and soul. To love our neighbors as ourselves. Krista Tippett sums it up best in Speaking of Faith (a book I highly recommend): “I believed--and still believe--that when all is said and done, none of us will be measured on how much we accomplish but on how well we love.”

We’ve all heard the saying it’s not about the destination but the journey. As much as my pride balks at this, experience is beginning to bear out just how true the adage is. And if along this painstaking journey I’ve learned a little more about patience and trust and courage and perseverance and endurance and will—that is to say, LOVE—well, then I guess I’m getting closer to what I want in life after all.

(But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t mind passing a stranger on a park bench one day reading a copy of my book.)

CLICK HERE FOR TINA TURNER PERFORMING 'What's Love Got to Do With It'
(if for no other reason than to see a great pair of legs).