Saying Nothing

I used to believe I feared rejection. I’d send out my manuscripts with a mixture of hope and dread. Each story I submitted was like an opportunity for something new and exciting to happen, a portal to other and greater possibilities. But each story I sent also opened me to the threat of rejection, the, “No, thank you,” followed by a dead-inside hopelessness. No matter how many of those rejection letters I got, they remained strangely catastrophic.

They remained that way even though they never stopped me from writing. They remained that way even though I still liked what I wrote and believed that I could tell a story to which someone would say, “Yes, thank you.” It was as if I had convinced myself I was a hemophiliac, and that each of these little knives would bleed me to death. No matter how many times I healed and went on, I believed the next one would be the last and fatal cut.

The problem, for me, was one of distance. The truth was, I’d been dealing easily with rejection in conversation my whole life. I’d started hundreds of stories that some friend or coworker wasn’t interested in hearing. I never liked this experience, but I didn’t take it personally either. I could feel the disconnect between my story and where that person’s attention lay. Sometimes I’d sense this disconnect but start telling my story anyway hoping they’d join me; sometimes I wouldn’t sense it until I was halfway into the story.

I learned from these experiences. I learned to read my audience, so to speak, and trust what they were telling me about their interests. I also learned to tell better stories, to make them as short as possible, to not make them about me but about everyone, and to try to give them an interesting ending. I learned enough that eventually I could tell a story, get no reaction whatsoever, and think, “That was a good story, but I told it to the wrong person or at the wrong time.” And that was okay.

This was much harder to learn with rejection letters. Without an actual person in front of me, I was free to invent all kinds of devastating reasons for that rejection, chief among them being: Nobody wants my stuff. Not that editor, but no editor. It was a crazy idea, one invented in the face of countless contradictory evidence. Yet I remained committed to it for a long time.

Until, that is, I remembered something else I’d learned in my conversational stories. Sometimes I’d sense where my audience was and I’d tailor my story to them for the sake of keeping the conversation going. This was not always the story I wanted to tell, but it was the story I believed could be received. I told it because I wanted to be accepted and appreciated no matter where I was. Yet the more I did this, the less appreciated and accepted I felt. Ultimately, I was rejecting myself.

So, I stopped telling those other stories, and let myself just say nothing. This was not easy at first, but I came to understand that I had to accept where I was and where other people were. I had to accept what I was interested in without sharing at that moment, accept it even if I was only sharing it with myself. In this way, saying nothing taught me more about acceptance than all the laughs and agreement I’d ever shared, the acceptance I was actually looking for.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write With Confidence.
You can find William at: williamkenower.com