Personal Growth through Professional Rejection

Sometimes, it can be difficult to write something worth reading from behind a veil of professional rejection. If you’re a fellow writer, or strive to make your living in any creative field, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about.

The creative process is littered with moments where just coming up with the tiniest speck of inspiration – no matter how experienced or talented you are – seems like an eternity. Like just getting two paragraphs, stitches, or brushstrokes into something feels like it’s going to occupy the next 30 years of your life.

So, here we are, two paragraphs in, and I’m just starting to bring up why I’m writing this – See, as difficult as it is creating something that I like lately, it seems that creating something others find amusing/enlightening/remotely worthwhile has been even more challenging.

A little background – Three years ago, I was lucky enough to be offered my opportunity of a lifetime with a Bay Area company. I’ve been focused on this professional goal so intensely for over 15 years that I couldn’t have written a more perfect job description for my abilities and experience if I had tried.

Things were going great for the first couple years. Then, thanks to some decisions made far beyond my control, my job description suddenly changed – Splitting my time between writing and other tasks that, while challenging, were not ideally-suited to my abilities.

I could instantly see my creative work start to suffer. When I was able to write, my work got passed through so many approval processes that it inevitably ended up being bland, robotic, anonymous copy. My daily goal quickly moved away from creating dynamic expression to just getting something approved to I could move onto the next task on a list. I was just glad there was no byline attaching my reputation to it.

The problem was, unbeknownst to me, that my reputation WAS being attached to it – by people high up in the company – and they thought the ineffective, watered down results were actually a reflection of my best work.

I have to be honest here – If I was in charge, and I saw that kind of writing coming out of someone under my watch, I would have made the same decisions. Unfortunately for my career, the decisions were made without the understanding of the context through which the crappy copy was created.

So, months after my position was eliminated, I’m left to get over professional rejection in a career I’ve been intensely focused on since the mid-nineties. To do so, I’m having to learn how to create again – how to string together words in a way that makes me happy – and hopefully makes others happy at the same time.

See, I think that’s what happened – I lost sight of why I do this, and why some people in the world think I’m ok at it. Instead of creating what my heart and mind knew was good, worthwhile writing, I started creating copy to meet the specific tastes of a select few people. People whose judgment I strongly question, now that they’re no longer my boss.

So, rest assured, starting today, everything you read on The Ridden Word will be what I want to say –words that I want to put down, and meet nobody’s approval but my own. If you like it, awesome! If you don’t, well, that’s ok. That’s why there’s a gajillion blogs on the Internet.

Screw professional rejection – I’m over it – it’s time to break out of this funk and start creating again!