Jalen Gooch

You wake up another morning and the first thing you do is grab your phone and open your email. You type in the name of the company you dream of working for and hit the search button. After refreshing a few times, you don’t see what you are looking for and decide to continue with the rest of your day.

Your hopes only grow the further you move up in the interview process. You find yourself constantly envisioning the new life that lies before you. You struggle to fall asleep, playing back every second of each interview in your head, and always wake up eager to see if there are any updates. And yet nothing. 

A few days have passed and you are still waiting to hear back. However, you remain confident, knowing all the hours you spent preparing will pull through in the end. If they weren’t serious about hiring you, you wouldn’t have made it this far. Right?

You wake up yet another morning and go through your ritual of checking your email. This time, however, you see the company name front and center. Without thinking you immediately open the email. This is it. This has the potential to change everything. 

Upon opening the email, your heart sinks as you notice a single paragraph of text, which you know isn’t a good sign, having experienced numerous rejections. As you read through the email, the future you’ve built in your head crumbles piece by piece. 

You’ve been rejected.

My Experience with Rejection

This happened to me almost two weeks ago. After about a month-long recruiting process filled with early morning interviews and hours-long design challenges, I ultimately did not get the job.

While this was not the first time I had been rejected from a job I applied to, having made it so far in the recruitment process, this one stung especially. I invested a significant amount of time and resources preparing, only to receive a single-paragraph email in response.

If you look through the dates of my past blog posts, you’ll notice an absence of posts in the first two weeks of October. At this point, I had made it to the final round of the interview process and was starting to lock in.

I put everything aside and focused solely on preparing for this final interview. I would wake up in the morning anxious that I shouldn’t be sleeping this long when I still have so much to prepare and would spend the next 12+ hours of the day doing so. 

I bought books, watched hours of YouTube videos explaining how to succeed in these types of interviews, and spent every waking hour envisioning myself in this role, all for it to fall apart in the end. 

Rejection is a part of everyday life, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

At the time of writing this, I have been rejected from numerous jobs, ranging from start-ups and Fortune 500 companies to food service jobs and entry-level jobs that don’t require a college degree. I wish I could say I’ve developed an incredible resilience and that facing all this rejection has made me stronger, but that’s simply not the case. 

Dealing with rejection is never easy and it can be hard to hold onto hope when it feels like everything is falling apart around you.

Taking Rejection Personally

If you Google how to deal with rejection, whether the author is writing about jobs or relationships, I guarantee the first thing they will tell you is to not take it personally. Being rejected often has less to do with ourselves than we attribute.

Oftentimes, however, it can feel as though this is just a blanket statement or the correct response to say to someone who is facing rejection. It’s hard not to take it personally when society defines people based on their careers.

In adulthood, when you meet a new person for the first time, the first question you are often asked is “So what do you do?” 

An interesting psychological phenomenon related to this is Anchoring Bias, in which people may form incorrect judgments based on the first piece of information they receive. For example, the first time you meet someone, whether that experience was positive or negative will ultimately impact how you view your relationship with them moving forward (PsychologyToday).

When people ask what you do for a living, they often are subconsciously deciding where you fit in the social hierarchy they’ve built up in their minds. We all do it. The way we view or speak to someone who has just revealed to us that they are a neurosurgeon is not the same way view someone who is unemployed.

This is why, at least for me, it can be hard not to take job rejections personally. It not only impacts your own trajectory for your future goals and career but over time impacts the way the people around you treat you.

After being unemployed for a certain amount of time, even as an adult, people around you start to view or treat you as a child or speak to you with a tone of pity. Being rejected from a job can oftentimes feel like you are barred entry from being respected as an adult.

The increasing and arguably invasive nature of job applications in recent years has only made the sting of rejection hit harder. Instead of sending in your resume, meeting with the hiring manager, and getting the job, now you are asked to invest significantly more, often receiving little to nothing in return.

The more you invest the more you see yourself working at this job and start to envision how it will change your life. When preparing for the job I mentioned earlier, I made a list of all the ways changing this job would change my life. 

It had a total of around 26 items such as:

• I would not have to live at home anymore
• I’m no longer the only person in my friend group to not have a job
• I’ll have something to talk about at Thanksgiving when inevitably asked “that” question
• I’ll be taken seriously as an adult

Although I’ll never know how my life would be if I had gotten that job and the future we imagine is far from reality, at least a few things on this list would have hypothetically happened. In hindsight, I never should’ve placed this much on a single job, but the further I moved along, the closer this reality seemed. 

How to Cope with Rejection

I want to end this blog post by sharing some advice that has helped me cope with rejection. I’m sticking with the things that have worked for me and trying to avoid the generic advice that you’ll often hear online.

First, when facing rejection, step back and give yourself a break. When applying for jobs it can feel as though that is all there is to life. Rejection builds up over time and can make you feel as if you are failing at the only thing that matters when there is so much more out there.

As cliche as it is, try spending more time surrounded by nature. People will always tell you to reconnect with nature or get outside when you are feeling down and depressed in life, but not go any further than that. Being in nature every once in a while is important because it shows the simultaneously harsh and comforting reality that nothing matters.

While I was still in school, I went on a retreat as part of a club I was in and spent a night camping at a local forest. I woke up early one morning and sat alone journaling. My problems felt so small at that moment as I watched the life in the forest around me continue as it always does. 

Nature does not care about you, and that can be such a grounding thought at times. A full-time job or an impressive resume does not matter when the elements surround you. Life will continue to grow and change in an endless cycle of life and death whether you are there or not. 

Nature truly is the great equalizer and a reminder that when it feels like everything is falling apart, life moves on.

Framing the rejection in a positive light can be hard, but can help you get back on track faster. For example, even though I didn’t get the job I had applied for, I still kept all the skills I picked up reading books or watching videos to prepare for the interview. 

I have to remind myself that the life I envisioned this job would give me, is not the reality I would have experienced. One of my favorite books is The Midnight Library by Matt Haig because it explores exactly that.

We get the dream job and move to the big city, only to be let go a few weeks into the job as the company files for bankruptcy. Now you’re away from home in a worse situation than you originally were. You never know.

On the topic of books, whenever I am going through a rough time or dealing with a lot of rejection I’ll pick up a more feel-good cozy book such as the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series by Toshikazu Kawaguchi or Days at the Morisaki Bookstore. These types of books will oftentimes have themes that remind you there is so much more to life than what you are feeling in the current moment. 

Facing rejection is never easy, and it can feel as if things will never work out, but I like to believe that somewhere in the future there exists a version of myself who is looking back on this very moment laughing about how anxious I was about the future. They’ll thank me for not giving up and continuing to face each new day despite how exhausting it can be.

And I’d hate to let them down. 

Thank you for making it this far! I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic so feel free to comment below or email me at funemployedera@gmail.com. If you are interested, I also host InMyFunemployedEra, a podcast where I discuss similar topics. Thanks again for reading and until next time. Take Care!

References

Myers, E. (2023, August 8). Anchoring bias and adjustment heuristic in psychology. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/what-is-the-anchoring-bias.html