Rejecting Rejection with author Linden McNeilly

It’s our 5th installment of our yearly blog series on Rejecting Rejection: How to Say Yes to Yourself When the World Says No. Winter has been bleak this year–no matter where you live, so today we offer more Monday inspiration, not only to get us to the page, but to get our “exceptional stories” out into the world.  Today’s essay, from Linden McNeilly, offers a big a-ha. Read it and gasp for yourself.

Exceptionally Exceptional

by Linden McNeilly

 

When I was fourteen I fell for a boy I’ll call Lenny. He had dark curly hair and sparkly eyes and he walked kind of bow-legged and eager, on his toes. He had a locker near mine, so I would plan my timing: if I saw him going there, I would head to my locker too, spin the dial casually and say….

That was the trouble. I never knew what to say. “Um, how’s Algebra?”

I soon found out he hated Math, and getting a D in Algebra. But he played on the football team, so the next time I saw him I asked him what position he played.

“Running back, but Coach Neilson never puts me in.”

Ouch. I should have noticed that his uniform was pristinely white. Wrong topic again.

The next time I went to my locker I couldn’t make a single word come out of my mouth, and I stood spinning and spinning my lock, trying to remember the combination while my heart hammered, say something, say something.

Slam. He had deposited his books and trotted off on those cute toes before I could gasp out, “Did you try the fish sticks at lunch?”

My best friend, “Melinda,” consoled me. “I’m sure he likes you. I’ll find out, okay? I’ll talk to him for you.”

So Melinda, whose locker was on the other side of Lenny’s, would chat him up, casual, friendly, with no stakes at all.

I would stand on the other side of him, listening with envy, wishing my conversation were facile and flirty. I

felt like a dope. I waited for my opening, waited for Melinda to pave the way, for her to guide the conversation back to me.

I waited for Lenny to notice me.

He never did.

He and Melinda got together, and soon were going steady. I found another boy eventually, a substitute, really, who walked flat footed and had unimpressively straight hair. The relationship was brief and insincere.

At a party later in the year, Lenny and I were waiting for Melinda, who had gone in the bathroom. I don’t remember the segue, but we got to talking. Really talking.

“I had a crush on you,” he said. “At the beginning of the year.”

I stared at him, looking for some trace of guile.

There was none.

“But I liked you too,” I managed to say. I still do.

Melinda came out of the bathroom then, hooked us both by the arm, and marched us back to the party.

A happy ending could have followed: Lenny realizes he still has a thing for me. Melinda acknowledges that her idea of helping me was self-serving, and releases him.

I finally figure out how to talk to him, and we have a happy relationship of conversation and mutual infatuation.

But that isn’t what happened. Lenny and Melinda went on being a couple for another year. Melinda and I drifted apart. I found other friends, and a boy or two that I truly enjoyed, but I didn’t get over Lenny rejecting me.

But in thinking back on it, though the rejection was real, I was wrong that Lenny rejected me.

I rejected me.

I did what a psychologist much later termed “controlling your own wounding.” I gave up too soon, because I was convinced that I would never get his attention. Even when Lenny told me he had liked me, I was incredulous. Why would he ever like me?

The New York Times ran an article last week about discrete cultural groups that have high rates of success in careers. Studies found that members of the most successful groups had three things in common. One was no surprise: The ability to control impulses. But the next two seemed to cancel each other out: a deep-seated feeling of being exceptional, and feelings of insecurity and the need to prove one’s worth.

I can control many of my impulses. I have a health dose of insecurity. But it’s the feeling of exceptionality that sometimes eludes me.

I sometimes like to buoy myself up reading about the early difficulties of famous writers. One of my favorites is about Kathryn Stockett, the author of The Help, a bestseller for more than 100 weeks that sold five million copies. It was rejected sixty times before Stockett got representation and was able to shop the book to publishers. When Stockett was asked why she didn’t just move on to write another book instead, she said she was stubborn. And she wanted this book to make it.

This book. It wasn’t that she wanted to publish something; she wanted to publish the one precious idea that mattered most.

She thought it was exceptional.

That belief is what conquering rejecting is all about. It isn’t just persistence in the face of rejection. It’s the spirit under that tenacity, that we have something special here, that the world needs what we have.

The belief in the exceptionality of our work.

This spring, I am girding up to send out my fiction manuscript to agents. I will remember my teenage lesson: I have something special here, and I’m not stopping until the world sees that too.

 

 

Linden McNeilly is an author and teacher living in the Monterey Bay Area of California. She writes middle grade novels, and her current work in progress features a boy born into a superstitious village that believes shadows breaks off from their hosts and do evil. She wrote a book with her sister, Jill K. Berry, called Map Art Lab, which is part of the Lab series by Quarry Books. It features 52 artistic and fun ways to make maps. It is scheduled for release in May 2014.