yulinkuang:

I have this video bookmarked. It’s a kid who tries every day for a year to throw a spoon into a cup behind him. Sometimes he gets close, sometimes it bounces into another cup nearby, one time he drops the spoon before he even gets the chance to throw it - most of the time he misses. When I first started watching the video, I was like, lol, this is dumb, why am I watching this. Then I got way invested. 

Because I started recognizing myself in this dumb exercise - pursuing a career in a creative industry, you’re going to fail most of the time and a couple of times you might get close and still fail, and if you do succeed, it’s a combo of dumb luck and persistence that got you here. And good luck making that happen a second time.

Today I got rejected from a thing. I get rejected from things a lot, actually, but I don’t post about them very often. Because I don’t want to remember that feeling, it’s not a very good feeling and if I can forget how rejection feels even a little bit, it makes it a lot easier to try things.

I think it’s helpful to read about people’s disappointments and rejections sometimes. It’s easy to look around at the things people are posting on Facebook and Instagram and think wow, they have it figured out, everything’s going awesome for them. I get messages sometimes from friends who I haven’t talked to in a while, “It looks like you’re doing great out in LA!” And I always think to myself, “Does it??? I feel like I’m doggy paddling furiously and barely keeping my head above the water.” And then I realize that’s probably everyone. We don’t post about rejection because it’s a bummer and not particularly inspirational and we’d rather just skip to the part where we succeed and casually say “There was a lot of rejection along the way, but I’m here now!” And I am not there right now. 

Anyway. I really wanted this thing that I got rejected from today. But it didn’t work out, and that’s okay. Apparently they liked me and they were just going in a different direction and there will hopefully be opportunities for me there in the future. All nice things to hear, and to be honest, I saw this one coming. It was always going to be a long shot, I’m happy to have made it this far in their consideration process.

But rejection still stings no matter how much you see it coming. So I’m kinda bummed today. It cool. I’ll be back to chucking spoons into mugs tomorrow.

Here’s a segment I field produced and edited for RMITV’s The Leak.