A Meditation on Rejection
In my junior year of high school, everyone had advice about what I needed to put into the college application process. I needed good exam scores, a finalized college list by last year, and an impressive summer internship. I checked the boxes: got the AP exam scores, the list, the essays, and one hell of a resume-packing summer.
No one warned me, however, about what this process would take from me, and I’m not talking about time, sleep, or money.
We pour our hearts into our essays. We share our deepest fears. Our lowest moments. Our greatest passions, joys, and achievements. All to garner empathy in an impersonal and random process. Some of us dedicate our lives, our very identities, to impress some person at a desk that will, more often than not, toss that identity into a shredder.
This practice is a natural human behavior. We all have a part of ourselves we present to the world: the Instagram feeds that are carefully curated to not look curated at all, the not so casual Snapchat selfies, and even our TikTok feeds, which we all use as a sort of dumping ground for the things we wouldn’t dream of posting on Instagram. Even TikToks, no matter how revealing, are parts of ourselves we chose to allow the world to see. It’s part of human nature to create an image of the self, a story of what we’d like to be, and work tirelessly to ensure the rest of the world believes we embody this ideal.
There’s no reason to be ashamed of this behavior, but it’s important to be aware of its power.
In the modern world, it’s not just human behavior. Social media solidifies the fluid self into a static image feed or 280-character fragments of intellect and humor.
The self has become a quantifiable measurement of our worth. For an influencer, followers and views mean a fat paycheck. For the average teen, it’s much more. Being an active member of social media is how we are active members of society. To delete Instagram is to miss out on seeing the pictures of your cousin's newborn baby or your acquaintances' college announcements. When you delete social media, you become disconnected from society. You delete the self.
The self we create on social media is just one piece of the whole. We spend our entire academic careers creating a self for this college application season. This is one that our parents and teachers take pride in. Our friends celebrate it with a bed full of college paraphernalia.
Rejection of this self in particular means is a rejection of those thirteen years you spent in the education system. It’s someone saying to you that not only have you failed in cultivating this self, but everything you have done to cultivate it means nothing. That year you spent your lunch breaks in a teacher’s room retaking pre-calculus tests and asking for extra help just to pass the class. Yeah, that wasn’t enough. That summer you spent taking an AP class online, reading the textbook front to back, and then self-studying for the exam to get the score you wanted. Yeah, that also didn’t show us enough of your work ethic and dedication. The all-nighters you pulled rewriting your college essays over and over again, having your friends and family read things about you that you never thought you’d share with anyone. Those don’t really mean anything either.
Well, it doesn’t mean nothing. But I know that’s what you’re thinking because I thought it too.
To start the five stages of rejection (which go hand-in-hand with the five stages of grief), you have to acknowledge that your self is not who you are. It’s easy to deny this simple truth. If I’m not my self, then what could I possibly be?
You must resist the urge to spam that college’s Instagram DMs and comments. Anger is my favorite part of this process, but beware, it’s fleeting. You will regret any angry comments you made online or to a friend, wondering how you can bargain with the universe about your fate. Maybe you can wait a year and apply again. Maybe even transfer from a community college to this dream school. You will try harder to create this academic-self.
I’m sorry to tell you, but this too is not a healthy mindset.
Now, this is the worst part. You will spend the next six months watching your friends get into their dream schools. They will post on social media and have parties. You must smile and celebrate too, because you’re a good friend, and you really are happy for them. You must listen to everyone search for roommates and lament over student loans. You cannot make yourself a victim. This is a hard pill to swallow, but you are not one.
If you’re like me, you’re not going to a four-year college. You’re not getting the dorm experience. You feel a little embarrassed to talk about your future plans with your teachers and classmates because of how different they are from what they expect of you. It is not what they think when they look at your precious self.
Once you finally accept that all of your colleges either told you no or didn’t give you enough aid, you won’t feel good. Acceptance is not always relief. You might cry again, except this time, it’ll be an empty cry. You won’t scream into your pillow or throw your phone at the wall. You won’t write angry poetry about being a victim of society. You’ll take a deep breath and have a long sleep. And then you’ll get up at 7:00 AM for another few months to finish your school year. You’ll continue to exist, and you might even get to work on creating another self.
Keep this in the back of your mind: it will happen again. This new self will be rejected by someone. Maybe an employer or a partner. To make sure that it doesn’t feel like a threat to your existence, you have to remember that you are not your self. You will never be a self.
This application process is not built to accommodate the majority of teenagers: kids who fail, make mistakes, and have no idea what they want their self to be in the next two years, let alone the next two weeks. If you haven’t already, take a deep breath and say out loud: I’m proud of myself for making it this far.