» Rejected
Failure is all around me these days, it feels like I'm surrounded by it. There's a guy I know who's going through the long, sad process of having his year-long novel project turned down by publishers. Another friend of mine was recently passed over for a promotion at work and dumped in the same week. He's pretty blue about it, as you might guess.
To reject is simply to choose something else, to take another course -- you could even say that rejection is what makes the world spin. What's evolution, after all, but the methodical weeding out of unwanted and useless designs? For the extinct dodo-bird it wasn't personal, the world was just giving the matter some thought, and it felt it needed to move in another direction. (This was all of little use to my broken friend, of course, which is to say he rejected my attempts at cheering him up.)
Fear of failure is fear of the world.
Power and dominance are often tarted up with weird jungle metaphors these days. But in a society where it's not acceptable to maim and kill like lions, true power is the ability to impose rejection on others. To hire and fire, to act as the gatekeeper of content, to tell that undesirable dude who's hitting on you at the bar to sod off. When it comes down to it, we're all trying to get ahead so we can affect other people's lives in a negative way.
One of the great advances of our modern world is the illusion of choice, which in turn is the illusion of power. It's hard to feel disempowered when there's so much to choose from, when we have to turn off all the lights and curl up in a ball to get away from all the important decision-making, to drown out the millions of voices desperately crying out, "Pick me! Pick me!"
But our ranges of choices still come out of limited contexts. I can't, for instance, watch a 24-hour naked cycling network on DirecTV or go to the supermarket and find that really great amber-colored beer I had in Texas that one time. But there are enough decisions there that I can feel like I'm exercising real actual power over my surroundings. I can stand in the peanut butter aisle, weigh the relative merits of each of the 28 brands and consistencies, and be choosy if I so choose.
So if you're feeling powerless and small today, try some rejection therapy. Try to keep track of all the things you turn down. Make a list of every TV station you flip past, the billions of websites that aren't worth your time, the roads not taken, the members of the opposite sex you wouldn't bang if they were the last person on earth. Feel better yet? You are powerful, you impose great failure, you are the Great Rejecto and if they don't like it, fuck 'em.
