I don’t know about y’all, but I feel like lately life has been everything, everywhere, all at once.
I don’t want to go into details for lots of reasons, but this week I got a no on something I really wanted to happen, which—combined with being sick—felt like the cherry on top of an oversized sundae of nos in my professional life. So not only have I been feeling like something of a failure recently, but I’ve also been really fucking sad about it.
But there’s a reason I picked Support Human as my company name, and that’s because, really, the best way I have to get over these kinds of feelings is to make them useful somehow. I know I’m not the only one feeling this way, what with layoffs and a shitty job market and a spiraling economy and a barely-sentient cheeto for a president and, somehow, yet another forever war in the Middle East.
I will warn you, though, that I am the last person to give advice on dealing with feelings of rejection and failure; this is not that kind of piece. This is me, in the words of the wise Aimee Twigg from the last time I wrote about something like this, trying not to unpack and live here.2 This is me unpacking my shit so I can put it away again and find better accommodations.
A tale of two LinkedIn posts
What really spurred me to write about this was two very different LinkedIn posts.
Because time stops for no one, I was scrolling my LI feed to find items for this week’s Roundup. Having just received the bad news, my feelings were still pretty raw,3 and—of course—one of the very first posts I came across was from an (aspiring?) LinkedIn influencer.4
I don’t remember now the specifics of her post (and I certainly don’t want to go back and find it and experience it all over again), but it went something like this: she’d been set up to fail in a pitch to a client and subsequently lost a lot of money on the deal when she really needed it, and called her mentor to vent about it. The mentor told her to get over it, and the lesson she took from that was the winners don’t look back; they just move forward!
Readers, this post did not make me feel better. I wasn’t—and still am not—ready to move on from this mess. If anything, it made me feel worse, because I am already very obviously not a Winner™, and the fact that I can’t just buck up and get over it only reinforces that.
But then, a few minutes later, there was another, much shorter post. This one was from someone who had just heard that they hadn’t been moved forward in the process for a job they really wanted, and not only were they honest about how upset they were about it, but they also shared their gratitude for being on really effective meds, because otherwise they wouldn’t be nearly as stable about the situation as they were being.
Now that was something I could understand. I didn’t know this person; we don’t even share an industry, but just those two brief paragraphs made me feel seen and much less…crazy, maybe. Seeing a reflection of at least some of what I was feeling was useful, in that it allowed me to go a little easier on myself for feeling this way at all.
I always debate how honest I should be in this newsletter; there’s a fine line between being relatable and oversharing, and I never want to be nothing but a downer to readers. But I also don’t want to be like the person in the first story, refusing to acknowledge my own humanity and that, sometimes, it’s better to admit that shit sucks. Pretending that there’s some universal answer that you have and others don’t doesn’t make the shit suck less — all it does is make others feel like losers when that answer doesn’t work for them.
So. In the interest of making us all feel less like losers (or, at least, less lonely losers), here’s how I really feel about things.
10 things I hate about you
(When I say ‘you,’ I’m talking to rejection and failure.)
I hate that I got my hopes up. The thing is, I don’t know how not to get my hopes up about things. Hope is what keeps me striving for things I’m not sure I can do, but in doing so, I always set myself up for a long emotional drop when whatever I was hoping for doesn’t work out.
I hate that I feel so stuck. I feel like I’m going to be in the same place forever, and I don’t know how to get out of it, even if intellectually I know that can’t be true. I just want to be somewhere that is not here, and I don’t know how to get there.
I hate how selfish I am. I know my situation could be ten times worse, and not everything is about me. I hate that I’m a shitty partner and a shitty friend because I can’t get past my own feelings.
I hate that I’m jealous of others. I know comparison is the thief of joy, but it feels like everyone is more successful than me or smarter than me or getting what they want while I’m not, and I hate that I’m the kind of person who feels that way.
I hate how stupid I feel. I feel really stupid for putting myself out there and trying to attain something and fucking it up in front of people. Intellectually, I know no one really sees it that way, but I don’t know how to get my head and my feelings on the same page.
Speaking of, I hate fucking things up. I hate it. I hate thinking that I should have been more prepared, more informed, worked harder to make the thing happen. I do not know how to be an imperfect being and it sucks.
I hate that I’ll probably never have closure. I’ll probably never really know what led to the no, and it’s going to eat at me forever. I hate that I’m the kind of person who will let it eat at me forever.
I hate looking like a failure. I want people to look at me and see someone put together, to see someone successful, and I hate that I’m the kind of person who cares about that.
I hate that I’m not handling this better. Even though it was something that mattered to me, I hate something that’s ultimately as small as a no given kindly can make me struggle not to spiral. I wish I were the kind of person who could just buck up and get over it.
I hate having real emotions and I hate crying and I kinda hate everything.5
So, that’s it: the truth, as gnarly and unflattering as it is.
And because I’m telling the truth, I’ll be honest and say I don’t have a pretty, neat-looking bow with which to tie this up. In fact, I would love any advice y’all have to give on dealing with rejection and failure, since I clearly don’t do either very well.
I’m going to go to bed now. Tomorrow is another day and all that. I hope it’s a better one for you and for me.
1 The title is a reference to the song of the same name by Sims, which seems to really encapsulate what life has felt like in general.
2 Also, reference the song from that same issue: if I don’t write about it, was it really worth it?
3 Are, honestly. When it comes to rejection, my feelings start raw and take a really long time to cook enough to reach well-done.
4 Everyone and everything on LinkedIn is aspirational. Dog save us all from fucking LI influencers, for real.
5 I mean, I guess I don’t really hate everything. I like all of you, especially for listening to all this whining.
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