Spuds & Speculations

Through all the trials and tribulations I have already experienced since this crossing the threshold of preliminary “real-personhood”, few things have irritated me more than…

     Fetuses in my newsfeed.

Wait wat?  

     Yes.  Fetuses, in, my, newsfeed.

I feel like an old man Scrooge when I say this, but I have seen enough ultrasound pictures in my newsfeed to know what a baby looks like before it actually a fully formed baby, I really don’t need to see yours.

“But my baby is special, it’s my baby.  I just want to share. “

    Aww, how cute. Your baby, encased inside of the dark, musty depths of your engorged uterus, which looks the same as all the other babies also coincidentally adorning my newsfeed.

“I’m just cherishing my moment.”

    Your moment, not my moment.  Normally, I prefer the show to the tell, but this is not one of those times.  

    Does that mean you’re going to take pictures of that and spam my newsfeed with images of your child’s rupturing embryonic sack? Can you please not? I took a class called Women’s Reproductive History, and I have seen more than enough of that.

     So many of your moments are causing my ovaries to have a moment. A moment where in their hormone induced frenzy (caused by a combination of my prime age, and the constant images posted on facebook, live from inside your uterus) they must be bound in silence and forced to the deepest depths of the earth, where they must remain until the time at which I decide that children seem like a good idea.

     Don’t get me wrong.  Babies are great and I am happy for you.  I have nothing against the kid his/herself.  And I’m sure you will be a delightful parent, chronicling your child’s entire life on facebook, literally from the beginning.  Poor thing never had a chance at privacy.

How about I say hello to the kid when it is actually here.

Or I could say something like “Aww, I remember back when you had a tail and resembled a squid in a bucket!  They grow up so fast.”

In my quest to become a real person, I have encountered many magical pieces of adulthood.  Generally, I’d say the whole process, despite the ups and downs and the infinite empty fathomless pit that is my wallet has been one of growth and positive learning experiences.

Also, I am alive (which is usually an awesome thing, in and of itself), and I am 60% a real person.  I will explain my metrics for judging that percentage later.

I find that it is best to talk about things while I am experiencing them, so today, just for all you wonderful (wonderful first and foremost because you are people, and secondly because you are reading my blog, which makes you cool) people, I will talk about my perception of…

REJECTION.

What is this magical, horrible beast that you speak of?

I define rejection like this:

Rejection is that thing that happens when someone decides that, for whatever reason, they don’t want and/or need you.

This is pretty flexible on their end, but not on yours.  There can be all sorts of reasons as to why someone doesn’t accept you.  For all you know, their reasons could be loaded with emotional influences, issues of bandwidth, circumstance (fortunate or unfortunate), or even simple probability.

None of this is really externally relevant to you.  You’re done and it’s time to move on.  But internally, you decide the importance of the why and where that weight really lies.  Some people do this in more healthy ways than others.

Well, then, how do I healthily absorb rejection?

Honestly? The hell if I know. All I do in this blog is state thoughts, so take this with grains of salt. Big grains, like sea salt. That way, my thoughts are delicious.

Here are a couple ways I absorb and dissipate feels associated with rejection.

• Allowing temporary sadness.  If the rejection was really significant,  of course you’re upset.  Ignoring that you’re upset isn’t always a good thing, or a sign of strength.  I personally think strength is more evident when people acknowledge their feelings and then they work with them.  Kinda like painfuel, you know?  

• Crying while no one is looking for a bit is totally understandable, and in my authoritative opinion, completely socially acceptable. Less because I have authority in society (because I don’t), and more because no one is watching you, so no one actually knows.  Because I do not take shame in it, and because who cares, I will admit that I cry when I feel like it.  I consider it a perfectly acceptable method of recovering your rational state of mind so that you can deal with a problem. You cry for a bit, you clean yourself up, decide that what you’re crying about is not worth all this time you’re spending doing nothing but crying, and then you MOVE ON.  Don’t forget, but proceed forward with your life.

And when you move on, maybe you should do something different, because the it’s possible that what what you were doing before ultimately made you cry.  Maybe you learned something from this, so doing the same thing you did before despite this new knowledge would be kinda silly.  Instead, you should take this opportunity to use it.

What do you mean by “use it”?  Painfuel?

Utilization is a… thing.  In my brief, recent experience in sales, I found it beneficial to apply my feels to what I’m selling and how I sold it, rather than to myself.  That sounds like common sense to some peeps, but to other peeps like me, you know  that you do this.  Not doing this may be a conscious effort for you, as it is for me.

I had/have to remind myself that the customers/employers/people aren’t necessarily rejecting me.  Sometimes they are rejecting the way I sold your product. <tangent> On occasion, they do actually reject me.  I’ve been rejected with unreasonable cause before.  Racism and pure looks are my favorites.  I have a validation process for determining cause.  As a side-note, you cannot internalize those kinds of rejections for long.  That was not your fault, and worrying about it is actually futile and pointless.  That may be the only positive thing I can really say about this.</tangent>

Now, having what you’re selling be rejected is not necessarily a failure.  And even if it is, you choose where and how you apply the “badness” of that failure.  You could, as Tyrion Lanaster would say,

[Blah blah blah, the world will never forget, blah blah blah] … Wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt you.

What I particularly like about this statement is that it does not specify who does the hurting.  I don’t know about you, but for me, the pain I cause myself is usually much worse than what other people do to me.  

More importantly, things are messed up and you got rejected.  

1. Take that rejection, attribute it to something.  That something can be circumstance.  If it’s circumstance, let yourself feel bad for a bit, then move on.
2. If that something is a problem that you can fix, start fixing it.  If that problem is a vulnerability of yours, try your best to acknowledge it.  Be honest with yourself.
3. When you’ve fixed it, throw that shit up as another chink in your armor that you have patched.  It was the weak link, you said goodbye and now everything else is a little bit stronger for it.  And don’t beat yourself up for needing to fix something about yourself.  It makes you no less of a real person.

I work on this all the time.  I’m working on it right now.  This is what works for me, and as a person dealing with anxiety and depression, having a system helps me keep my happy going.  Especially now that I’m looking for a job, and I find it pretty stressful.

Happy is good and I like other people to be happy too, so there you go!  If you have any suggestions of other ways to deal with rejection, post a comment, reply, whatever you want.   I’ll probably read it because it is flattering enough that you actually read this in the first place.