Your writing resonates with my life lately. As someone who believes they have overall experienced & embraced rejection over and over again I have developed some of my own framing which parallels yours.
One big thing that helped me grow was letting go of my expectations about the outcomes and instead focusing on the process and qualities of the moment to moment experience. I have felt this through relationships, doing my PhD, or while doing a startup. I think by embracing failure, rejection or other "negative" outcomes as an inherent part of existence it frees you in a lot of ways. You are unlikely to escape that kind of suffering.
To borrow your experience of writing a novel, we set ourselves up for much of the suffering with expectations like great writers got there by never writing a bad novel, or to find great love without failing once or many times. For me trying to build a business the last few years has been nearly weekly lessons in facing rejection or failure in many forms. The people who reach those often lauded outcomes are those who move through those experiences to the other side. Often because people don't share vulnerably or honestly about the challenges growing up many of us never got to really see how the sausage is made and the rejection becomes not only the momentarily failure but a judgement on our goodness or value.
Your writing resonates with my life lately. As someone who believes they have overall experienced & embraced rejection over and over again I have developed some of my own framing which parallels yours.
One big thing that helped me grow was letting go of my expectations about the outcomes and instead focusing on the process and qualities of the moment to moment experience. I have felt this through relationships, doing my PhD, or while doing a startup. I think by embracing failure, rejection or other "negative" outcomes as an inherent part of existence it frees you in a lot of ways. You are unlikely to escape that kind of suffering.
To borrow your experience of writing a novel, we set ourselves up for much of the suffering with expectations like great writers got there by never writing a bad novel, or to find great love without failing once or many times. For me trying to build a business the last few years has been nearly weekly lessons in facing rejection or failure in many forms. The people who reach those often lauded outcomes are those who move through those experiences to the other side. Often because people don't share vulnerably or honestly about the challenges growing up many of us never got to really see how the sausage is made and the rejection becomes not only the momentarily failure but a judgement on our goodness or value.