No Never Forever Affairs with Rejection Slips, Continues

by Mandira Pattnaik

Julian Gentile

“Rejection” is a violent word that speaks directly to the body, says neuroscientist and literary scholar Laura C. Otis. Otis wasn’t talking about literary rejection but personal rejection. Yet, for the longest time, writers have experienced this type of a cascade of emotions. Turns out, rejection does have physical reactions in our body that can actually be recorded, according to scientific evidence. That’s mind numbing. For sure. My editors are constantly throwing back work that I submitted. I am battered and bruised, but the realization that it is affecting my body is alarming.

The Latin noun rēicere, which means “to throw back,” is the ancestor of the word rejection. Rejection has many manifestations in society, literary rejection is just one miniscule demon: Social rejection (as in racism/casteism/ableism etc.), rejection from a group where the members make you feel alienated for a period of time although you otherwise seem to belong to that group (for example a new student in a class), and rejection from the chance of association with something that you badly wanted (like the rejection of an academic application). These examples are in no means exhaustive. In medical sense, the body sometimes rejects something, for example, a transplant — and that usage of the word rejection has been recorded as early as the 1930s. In the legal sense, the word rejection became popular in psychology in 1931, when parental rejection was seen as a motivation of bad behavior in children.

History reflects people’s tendency to feel rejection in their core, as though their body is falling, their lungs are feeling suffocated, their hearts are imploding, or their entire bodies are failing them. This may seem atrocious but is in fact true.

According to an expert in the field of neuroscience, Dr. Nicole F. Roberts: “We all know that rejection hurts, but neuroscience has concluded that it does in fact, literally, hurt. While the brain does not process emotional pain and physical pain identically, the reaction and cascading events are similar, and a natural chemical mu-opioid is released during both events. For example, when someone feels physical pain, opioids are released in the brain so that the significance of the pain is inhibited. We now know this same experience occurs when an individual feels slighted or rejected by others.”

Naomi Eisenberger, PhD, at the University of California, Los Angeles, Kipling Williams, PhD, at Purdue University, and colleagues used a technique in which a game called Cyberball was invented to study the effect of rejection. Williams designed Cyberball following his own experience of being suddenly excluded by two Frisbee players at the park. In Cyberball, the subject (say M) plays an online game of catch with two other players (say, A and B). Eventually, A and B begin throwing the ball only to each other, excluding the subject (M). Compared with volunteers who continue to be included in the game of catch (in this case those who I have named them A and B), the subject M showed an increased level of activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate and the anterior insula. These are exactly the same two regions in our brain responsible for certain higher-level functions, such as attention allocation, decision-making, impulse control and error detection, and these two areas responded with increased activity in response to rejection just as would be in response to physical pain. Or in other words, a broken heart (due to rejection) is no different from a broken arm.

In another study, participants earned money when they were rejected (which should have been attractive) but not when they were accepted. Surprising even to those who were monitoring the findings, the payments did nothing to dampen the pain of exclusion. It was equally heartbreaking. Rejection resulting in gains does not make up for the feeling of exclusion.

The similarities between physical and social pain makes biological sense. Instead of developing an entirely new response to socially painful events, evolution simply co-opted the system for physical pain.

I read somewhere that the decision to use the word ‘Decline’ instead of ‘Rejection’ was a well thought-out one in case of literary rejection. And for exactly the same reasons as above. But does that suffice? A friend, who writes sporadically, thinks rejection is the equivalent of social ostracism — at least to the new, unexperienced, emerging writer. I tell her that if you are a writer, there’s a 100 per cent chance of rejection. Nobel laureates and big prize winners were rejected at some point or other, only to pick up their game and take their work elsewhere. Those back-from-the-brink stories are, quite deservedly, part of literary lore, meant to inspire those at the bottom of the ladder. One of my earliest columns was about this aspect of receiving decline notes — No Never Forever Fever: Affairs with Rejection Slips.

‘Pick up your game and move on’ is also the most common advice that writers are offered. Some years down the line, a writer is sick and tired of listening to the same suggestion — that one should keep at it, keep honing their skill set, learn to ignore rejections, and move on from a particularly painful decline. The call not to linger is well-meaning (what else can one do after all?!). The other suggestion often found in decline notes, also equally well-meaning, is to reflect and take the time to improve the piece (which writers anyway keep doing all the time, don’t they?!)

Under this pressure to conform, writers injured by rejection may feel hurt many times over, pushing them to suppress rather than think through their pain. “Moving on” is always easier said than done, and one needs to pull back from the situation, and reassess their goals from a broader perspective. Again, when one puts one’s heart and soul into a project, even the friendly advice to shun the narrow and look at the larger goal can seem insulting. Healing begins with the understanding that at the other end is also a writer, or at least someone who loves reading and writing.

We must acknowledge that loving something cannot be forced, just like in case of a relationship, or a place, or an experience. We must also remember that no writing is truly disliked either, but only a subjective decision is made. There’s a balance involved and nothing is really the end of the world.