212. The Freedom To Reject

Rejection is always painful. It means learning that someone I’m interested in is not interested in me. Strong feelings necessarily arise. I feel grief over the lost possibility of a valuable connection. I feel sadness over the discovery that I am not what the other wants. I feel anger over being discarded like a useless object.

It’s almost impossible not to experience such feelings after being rejected. As I highly value the person doing the rejecting, I also value their judgment of me. And they’ve judged me unworthy of an effort towards a lasting connection.

I might feel a desire to lash out in response to this judgment, to declare that I no longer value them either, but I would only be deceiving myself. I do value them or I would never have sought the connection in the first place. I might try to brush off the rejection by claiming they couldn’t accept me because they already have too many friends or too many obligations. But a person will always make time for the people who are most important to them.

It’s simply part of life that there will be others who will not want to include me in their lives. This is a harsh truth I must accept. This doesn’t mean that the person who has rejected me is bad or that they have wronged me. For the other side of this truth is that I too would reject someone I do not value highly enough. I might try to pretend that this isn’t the case, or that I would find a way to include them, but this would just be another self-deception.

To reject someone is not to disrespect them or to ignore their humanity. It is simply to say that they do not fit with my current life and my current priorities. Everyone has the freedom to choose whom they would like to share their time with. To remember this when I’ve been rejected, and to recall the occasions when I’ve rejected others, is perhaps the best way to see that rejection is a necessary and ordinary part of life.