What Does it Mean to Be Rejected?
When I was 17 my first serious girlfriend broke up with me. I felt totally devasted. We hadn’t been together long, maybe six months, but it felt like my life being ripped apart when she suggested ‘we should just be friends’.
Over the next couple of weeks, I spent way too many hours in my darkened bedroom listening to the most depressing music I could find (thank you Billy Bragg). I also drove my friends (or anyone who would listen) mad with my obsessive yo-yo-ing between ‘my life is over’ and ‘I don’t care that we broke up’. It was the only thing I talked about for a long time. Of course, the breakup also pushed my enthusiasm for alcohol up a few notches.
I wouldn’t have been able to put it into words back then, but I do remember at times having a sense that there was far more going on than just the breakup. I felt rejected, and this wasn’t something new to me. I could get over the fact that she didn’t want to be my girlfriend (when push came to shove, I didn’t really want to be with somebody who didn’t want to be with me), but I saw her rejection as further evidence that I was an unwelcome outsider in life.
There were moments when I could see my decent into depression and despair wasn’t really about her, but about the fact that my attempt to form a connection had been rebuffed. I had put myself in a vulnerable position, and it was like she had metaphorically kicked me in the balls.
There were many more experiences of rejection to come in my life before I finally figured out something monumental. I realized that there were times when I felt deeply connected to another human even though it later turned out this person hadn’t been as enthusiastic about the relationship as I had been. This meant that the sense of connection couldn’t be something they were doing, but something I was doing. I was looking for signs that it was safe for me to open a connection, and it didn’t matter if I misread the signs.
One of the biggest sources of suffering for us humans is the sense of being disconnected. We feel starved of intimacy, and we can spend the rest of our lives seeking it. One of our biggest fears is rejection because this only reinforces our sense of disconnection.
The Zen monk Dogen once described awakening as ‘intimacy with the ten thousand things’. This is poetic language for intimacy with everything. It turns out that our sense of disconnection is completely psychological. This means that when we feel rejected, it is illusionary and exists only in our minds.
We have learned to see people wanting to spend time with us, or people being nice to us, or people agreeing to have sex with us, as requirements for connection but there are no such requirements. Connection is something we recognize already exists, always has existed, and always will exist. What part of us is separate from life? Disconnection is not something we were born with, but something we were tricked into believing.
Nobody can forbid us from feeling connected to them. Disconnection only happens when we create a psychological barrier out of fear. Connection/intimacy is not something that can be given or taken away.
