A few months back I wrote this:

“You would expect the next line to read something like, “Rejection is a funny thing.” But there is nothing like being rejected. From the first time you weren’t picked for a team, to that first girl or guy that you really, really liked turning you down for a date. And it hurts. That is the one thing about rejection and disappointment that we don’t spend that much time talking about.

We teach our kids to “rise above it.”

“Pick yourself up, and dust yourself off.”

“You have to get back up on the horse that threw you off.”

So easy to say, and yet so hard to do. For me it always seems that what keeps me awake at night is all of those times when I failed. Or thought that I failed. Or one of those rejections. Those thoughts are the ammunition that my sub-conscious uses against me on those sleepless nights.

Damned sub-conscious.

If you are a writer, you know about Stephen King taking all of his rejection letters and pinning them up in front of his typewriter as a way to inspire him to keep writing. J.K. Rowling was a single mother on welfare. Hugh Jackman was fired from 7-Eleven because he talked to the customers too much.

All of those famous people who just didn’t give up. Rejection is an ass kicker to be sure, but the lesson in all of it is to not quit. Don’t give up. The product/service/art/whatever that you offer to one person/company/group may not be received the way that you would like, but who is to say that the next group/person/company won’t absolutely love it. You have to continue. You have to keep on. You cannot give up.

The saying is if you do what you love, you will never work a day in your life. The real secret is just don’t give up.”

That had to do with more professional rejection than personal. In the time between that post and this one a number of things have happened to friends. Friends who have heard that soul chilling, “It isn’t you, it’s me” having to do with a break up. Nothing worse than those words, because the recipient KNOWS that it IS something that they did or didn’t do. That they have been judged as lacking by the one who delivered that statement.

I have been a crappy friend to the ones who have approached me with this asking for my input. I really don’t know what to say to them other than relationships are so damned tricky. What is endearing today, is so completely annoying tomorrow.

What I have said, and have had said to me in the past, is that the hurt of that rejection will pass. Eventually. The opinion of one person does not define us. We, by our actions and our character, define who we are.

Because no one is the boss of you, except for you.