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When I was dating, family and friends called me the breakup ninja. I knew how to end a relationship cleanly, with no drawn-out drama. “Would you rather have your legs sawed off or chopped off?” I used to explain my clean-break approach. Once you know the leg has to come off just go ahead and get ’er done.

An example: I had been dating a guy for a number of months and around the holidays he asked me to drive him to the airport to go visit family and pick him up a week later.

He did not call or text me while he was gone. Not one time. Not even on Thanksgiving.

To me the writing on the wall was perfectly clear: Out of sight, out of mind, which did not portend the level of interest or engagement I was looking for in a relationship. In layman’s terms, he was just not that into me.

Despite the lack of contact, I picked him up at the airport as scheduled and let him tell me all about his trip as we drove back to his apartment. Once there he asked if I’d like to come inside and I said indeed I would—where I proceeded to methodically gather my few belongings that had wound up over there in the preceding months.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m going to go home,” I said neutrally.

“Don’t you want to stay the night?”

“No,” I said. “In fact I think this has run its course.” I dispassionately explained my hurt and disappointment that he hadn’t thought or bothered to call. “Things were so hectic!” he justified, to which I replied, “I can appreciate that, but I want to be with someone who makes time for me—and wants to.”

That was the last time I ever saw him.

This was far from an anomaly in my dating life. Once I understood that a relationship was over, either because of my feelings or his, I wasted no time in severing it. I didn’t see the point of maintaining a friendship when none of these romances had started that way or been built on that foundation, and I didn’t like messy strings that might further complicate either of our emotions.

You might agree or disagree with my approach, but I realize now that it was designed to protect me from pain, both from feeling bad for rejecting someone else as well as to protect myself from my own pain of rejection.

If you’ve ever been rejected in any area—and if you’re reading this then you are presumably human and so I know you have—you may understand my motivations. Rejection is among the most painful of experiences, feeling like personal judgment on us or our worth or our lovability.

And yet if we pursue a career in the creative arts—and if you’re reading this, again I presume this applies to you—we are almost certain to face it, in many cases repeatedly. In fact rejection is a hallmark of this business, as anyone who has ever submitted their manuscript to a contest or award or agent or editor already knows.

And it sucks. There’s no real way to candycoat that. Rejection hurts on the deepest of levels—we’re hardwired for belonging—and that need for acceptance and love certainly applies to something as important to us as our creative work.

On a recent Smartless interview, actor Amanda Peet talked about being told by an agent early in her career that she needed to do something about her mustache. Will Arnett added his own story of an agent suggesting he see a nutritionist. Even now, both actors having achieved significant success, these stories had clearly stuck with them.

Read more: “Handling Rejection—and What Rejection Letters Mean, and Don’t Mean”

When I was an actor I frequently heard this kind of feedback too: I was too tall, not pretty enough, and in one memorable case, “Your nose is globular.” These rejections hurt especially when they are to your face and about your person (and often right in the middle of your monologue or scene), so in that regard I suppose writers can consider themselves lucky that much of our rejection takes place via email.

And yet I don’t think that mitigates the pain of it. I heard from an author just this week who talked about wondering when it was time for them to admit that they just didn’t have what it took after X number of submission rejections.

This is a not-uncommon reaction I see and hear from authors, and it always bothers me. To me it suggests we are always waiting for the nod, permission to pursue our art, validation that we are good enough. I’ve written a lot about this kind of external validation and how subjective this business is, but I want to talk more about the actual experience of rejection itself, and how we can learn to cope with an unpleasant part of our creative pursuits that’s not just a bug but a feature.

Everyone Gets Rejected

Rejection is inevitable in every life, no matter who you are or what you are pursuing. Who are we to imagine we will find universal acceptance and success? Think of the hubris of that, a complete lack not only of humility as a fallible and flawed human being in a mercurial and subjective world, but of reality.

Do you know a single person who has never experienced rejection or heartbreak, a crushing no? If you think you do, probe deeper. There may be those people who seem not to have experienced rejection, whose road to success looks smooth and steady and relentlessly upward-climbing.

But do not believe that.

Read more about celebrities or bestselling authors billed as overnight successes, or who seem to have had a steady climb to the top. Ask questions of the people you think have been uniformly successful. In nearly every case you’ll find the stumbles, the setbacks, the failures and rejections they encountered and overcame on the road to success—and still face.

Even those who’d like you to believe their road has been nothing but unmitigated smooth sailing to success—the self-important politicians or billionaires or stars who are self-deluded that they are self-made—had plenty of rejection and failures. They just don’t have the strength or courage or confidence to reveal it. They are spinning a fairy tale, desperate for others to believe it so they can perhaps believe it too, and escape the relentless voice in their heads that might suggest they are only human and flawed and not universally palatable…and confirm their worst insecurities about themselves.

It’s hard to blame them. The inevitability of rejection is a terrifying reality, one that can take many of us a lifetime to really grasp and accept. The world is random along with everything in it. We have no control over most of it.

But we can develop two key skills that will allow us to handle these realities in a way that’s not just healthier, but productive.

Take Back Your Power

The first step is to realize how much power you are giving to other people and factors outside your control by allowing rejection to dictate so much of your opinion of yourself and your creative work.

As an editor I’ve had authors I have worked with decide not to work with me anymore, which is right and good and as it should be, depending on each story and as an author grows and evolves and may want to try new things or branch into different genres. Or sometimes we just weren’t the right editorial fit. But it hurts every time. Every time, my delicate psyche wants to take it personally, convince me that I have dropped the ball (or never had it in the first place).

But those things aren’t true, any more than is the fact that I am “too tall” or “not pretty enough,” or any of the other subjective things that have been said about me or anyone else by another person. I’m good at my job, I know my craft, and I’m careful and thorough—but that doesn’t mean I’m the right editor for every author or every story.

Judgment like this is subjective—just like our business is. We can’t control how much of it we encounter.

Read more: “What Rejection Actually Means about Your Writing”

But what we do have complete control over is our reaction to it. Where rejection is a subjective matter of taste or market realities, we can refuse to take it personally or let it define our self-worth, or the worth of our work. Where it’s based on what may be realistic or valid assessments that our work may not yet be at the level we want it to be (or that it needs to be for whatever market we’re pursuing), we can take that as helpful insight to get better—to gain the skills we want to have and be as good as we hope to be.

In the dawn of my editing career after the first proofreading job I ever had, with a major publishing house, the in-house editor called me and painstakingly, painfully went through every error I’d made and everything I’d missed. It was excruciating. Embarrassing. Terrifying to think I’d blown my shot at a new career I desperately wanted.

It was also one of the most educational and edifying experiences I’ve had as an editor. It made me better, not just in what I knew to look for and then expand my knowledge on as a copy editor, but because it taught me the crucial humility that lets you come to things with an empty cup, rather than with it spilling over with all your preconceptions and no room for anything else. It (eventually) made me very good as a proofreader and later a copy editor because I wasn’t so sure I was right that I neglected to double-check my work, or to consider the author’s voice or the reader’s experience in favor of textbook “correctness,” as I talked about in last week’s post.

And not only did it not end my working relationship with this publisher, but I wound up working for them–and later with that editor at several other houses–for the entirety of my copy editing career.

Tolerate Pain

The second key element of handling rejection is to realize that you can tolerate pain, even terrible pain— whether emotional, psychic, or even physical—and I know that because you’re reading this and thus presumably alive, so pain has not killed you. And you know what they say about that which does not kill us.

If I knew back in my dating days what I came to know later in them, I might have handled breakups a little differently. So much of my fiercely dispassionate and “rational” behavior was designed to protect me from pain I thought I could not handle, stemming back to the kind of early life wounds we all sustain. I know now that I can handle it, in no small part because I divorced my self-worth from other people’s rejection. These two coping devices go hand in hand.

What else goes hand in hand with that is that our sense of self-worth grows stronger, which means we have a clearer-eyed view of what we deserve and what we will accept. By the time I met my now husband, I knew what I was looking for in a relationship and how I wanted to be treated, how I wanted to feel. From the moment we met it was very clear he was extremely into me, and nearly twenty years later I still feel the same thing from him (and, I hope, he from me).

I’m so grateful for every rejection and ended relationship before him, because without them I don’t think I ever would have found my way to him. My detached approach didn’t protect me from pain—but that pain shaped me into the person I was when we met, and made me ready to take the chance of giving myself to someone fully.

When you care more, you risk more—and the potential pain can hurt you much more deeply. But rejection helps you learn that you can go on…and you will.

And so will you, even if the pain or disappointment and hurt feel as if they will destroy you. You can tolerate rejection.

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Rejection comes for us all. You can’t change that. But you can learn to accept it—even to embrace it. I often advise sitting with the feelings and even leaning into them, as opposed to fighting or suppressing them. It hurts more in the short run, but it also defangs its bite in the long run.

Observe your reactions to it like a scientist—how it feels inside your body, how it colors your thoughts about yourself, usually irrationally. That lets you attain objective distance from rejection—it’s someone’s opinion about you or your work, but it’s not necessarily the truth. (Side benefit: It also gives you tools in your writer’s toolbox for believably, viscerally conveying similar emotions in your characters.)

When you have objectivity, you can analyze the rejection and decide what it means: Where criticism or outside observations feel valid, use it as a beacon for where you can improve your skills and your work. Where they don’t, accept that you can’t change people’s subjective opinions and let it go. They do not define you.

Rejection is simply a mile marker of where you are on your journey and what path you might take to continue to progress along it. And most of all, it’s a necessary and inevitable part of life that you are strong enough to endure, and—if you allow yourself—to grow from.

Authors, how do you handle rejection? What techniques do you have for distancing from it enough to take what is helpful and leave behind what isn’t?

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