Emily Ratajkowski, famously hot, expressed in her memoir how she suffers from a deep degree of insecurity regarding her appearance. While she’s not necessarily my type, I think we can all agree that her fears are largely and evidently unfounded. Though I don’t remember exactly what she said (and refuse to look it up), it sort of embedded itself like a wobbly pebble in the sole of my shoe — mildly bothersome, but persistently present. It truly isn’t possible to out-hot rejection or neglect or heartbreak. You can in complete earnest direct a sizeable sum of resources in the pursuit of attractiveness, enhance whatever your mother gave you, augment what she didn’t, distract from its lack with curated style, maintain it in elaborate rituals, and it still just won’t be an impermeable armour.
This is fine with me mostly, even reassuring, because it takes the pressure off of performing constant visual palatability, I can be a little grimy on some days and still be loved by my friends. The thing that does sting, however, is that you also can’t outsmart, or out-funny pain. There’s simply no way for you to navigate life without rejection, no matter how much of a Cool Hot Girl you are/aspire towards being. I know this, yet it stuns me every time. How naive of me to want, and how I want to want still.
Let me actually define Rejection while I still have you, so as to not paint in broad strokes. I’m not speaking strictly romantically/sexually as the title may allude to, but I’m also not speaking of UAL turning down my painstaking application (still not over it). Rejection is that which scrambles your your self-image and requires intervention from your well-wishers to reaffirm your dignity, but is not necessarily a situation where you can claim victimhood. It’s a million infractions of varying magnitudes, you could be left on read or you could be left for dead. It can manifest with violent immediacy, a clear-cut betrayal or as an insidious slow-burn of withdrawal, a change of pace you weren’t primed for, or an epiphany you come to in an empty room with no observers. A humiliation that launches a survivorship, a kernel of loneliness you must stomp out with a conviction of conserving yourself. Articulating feelings of rejection may not pass the tyranny of pure reason — you risk sounding like you’re overthinking or way too obsessed — but they have sound emotional logic.
How you handle it is where Character comes into play — are you graceful, dignified, stoic? Are you hysterical, needy, inconsolable? What about after the aftermath, do you grow numb, maybe give up, try less hard, be less enthusiastic? I’m still too young — though not for long — to have clarity on how I operate. Some very clear principles I stick to though: just as a true hater is an ethical one that gives credit to the object of hate when due, you must also be generous to your past self who endured the rejection. Shortchanging their judgement (in the vein of “Anyway he was a total loser who sucked in bed!” of Dump Him culture) is a dishonest approach, you haven’t come upon a genius prescience overnight. Retrospective analysis is a Thing, yes, but it must not be revisionist. I’ve been tempted to minimise, to claim I was above it all all along, that it was never that serious, but I resist the urge. You cannot move forward if you dismiss how much you cared, you must revel in the hurt if you are to truly heal. (Secondly, I also like deeply-deeply love myself, which helps cushion most blows to the ego.)
I don’t believe I’m the most bothered person, though formerly I thought I feel stuff too personally. I have since met people who hang on to their rejections like war trophies, relishing in reliving the freshness of their wounds. It’s a bit much, and it’s not really my thing. As it turns out, on the wide spectrum of human emotion, I am surprisingly one of the easiest people to reject, as hot as I may be.