You just got rejected. A job denied, a love unrequited, told you cannot eat ice cream for breakfast.

A tragic thing, it can seem at the time. A horrible feeling for sure.

What if it is all happening for the best? Stay with me here.

I listen to podcasts every morning. I find that it engages my mind in a gentle way while helping me to feel productive and learn something, while secretly keeping track of the time. The podcasts I listen to the most these days are both hosted by someone named Jemma Sbeg and are called “The Psychology of Your 20’s,” and “Mantra.”

These podcasts have slightly different functions but a powerful impact, and today the one I listened to on Mantra focused on how rejection should be seen as redirection.

Not a new concept, I know, but for the first time in a while I was hit with this intense awareness about the concept of rejection and redirection.

How often do we think about rejection as something happening to us before we ever see it as something that happened for us? Further still, how often do we see the things that we actively reject as a means of deliberately redirecting us? Maybe never…interesting right?

It hit me over the head and travelled through my body with an all-encompassing, holy shit.

Again, not a new concept, but a new way of seeing it that has completely changed something for me.

I hate rejection as much as the next person, and I’m doing what I can to overcome the discomfort that comes with it, but in connection to all the other discomfort I am experiencing, with my recent move and the new job, I just thought, wow I think I understand this now.

Sometimes, we have to actively reject the things we think we wanted, or the things we know we don’t want, and realize in that moment then and there that we are going to redirect and go down another path.

I’ve always experienced this as an afterthought in the past. Rejection happened, feelings ensued, time goes on and then at some point I look back and realize it was always meant to happen that way, no matter how horribly I might have felt at the time.

That is what I am in the process of doing right now, I am actively choosing to leave behind a version of my life I thought I wanted, because it doesn’t work for me. Even though there are so many great aspects about it, I am confident leaving knowing that deep down that I am supposed to be doing something differently in my life, and I’m not going to get to that point any faster by forcing myself to stay and finish out this chapter.

There’s a wonderful quote that goes like this,

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon

I have so deeply felt this way for most of my life. An overwhelming desire to be everything and anything.

I want to write books, read books, I want to cure illnesses, I want to climb the corporate ladder all the way to the top, I want to own a small business, bake bread, own a home, be an interior designer, be a graphic designer, a professional dancer, a Broadway star, direct movies, be a movie star, do makeup professionally, have a family, or maybe not have a family, date a ridiculous amount of people despite my anxiety and collect stories along the way so that someday books and movies can be dedicated to how interesting I was, I want to travel every inch the world, post silly little TikTok’s, I want to garden and wear very large ridiculous dresses, I want to have hair down to my ass but also have a bob whenever I feel like it, I want to live in a city, I want to live in a quiet part of Europe where I can own a very large estate, I want to become a supernatural being and time travel and save the world on occasion, I want to become an insanely good blackbelt and by extension a spy, I want to fall in love as many times as I can and maybe in my spare time go to the moon.

I am so many different versions of myself, not just through the passage of time and what it takes to age, but also because I have so many desires inside me, and I am faced with a very harsh and very ugly truth.

I cannot be all those things.

Which is perhaps why I am a writer, so that I can be all those things, in one way or another. To write is not only the greatest sacrifice of a certain kind of reality, but also to open yourself to insurmountable possibilities, if only you are brave enough to take the chance.

I have to say no to a certain version of myself so a better version of me can exist.

It takes just as much courage to reject and redirect as it does to endure it, I promise.

Perhaps it’s more daunting than anything else at first, I can understand that, but image how empowering it will be the second you are free. The moment you choose differently, you will be different.

Isn’t that promise enough? Can’t you feel the hope in that already?  

I’m not entirely sure if the advice for today is to Zoom Out, it certainly isn’t to Zoom In, but it might be a combination of both.

Sometimes the “wrong” path takes you on a shortcut to the right one. I think that is a beautiful realization.

Feel the fear and do it anyways. It’s only two little steps…

Reject, and redirect.