hello! this is probably going to be one of the longest text posts i’ve written on this blog, but i have a few things that i think might help some people. but first, an apology for being so inactive in the original content department. winter is always where i get quite burnt out and in the uk it gets dark at around 4pm so lighting for pictures is awful. i’m still on holiday at the moment so i have time to start taking photos and queueing posts again, so hopefully i will be less inactive this month!
now that’s out of the way, on with what i actually wanted to talk about. at the end of november i was rejected by my dream university - the one i’d spent my whole life dreaming of going to, the one that had everything i was looking for in a university, the one that was perfect. i didn’t post about it at the time, and i was debating posting about it even now, but i decided that i wanted to share some of the things i learnt about academic rejection over the last few months (these are in no particular order and are probably somewhat incoherent):
it’s okay to be upset. being upset is a completely natural reaction - nobody’s going to expect you to take a rejection with joy or even just with a straight face. have a good cry about it if that’s how you feel (i certainly did). sometimes you have to let your emotions be felt and let yourself deal with that, rather than immediately trying to move on.
once you are ready to start moving on, try and get excited about something else - there were other unis i applied to that i wanted to go to, so i started looking at their websites and finding things about them that excited me. your something else may not be academic or another university, but i think it’s important to find other things to look forward to in the wake of rejection.
many people told me something along the lines of ‘rejection is redirection’. this may be kind of cheesy, but i helped me remember that my dream uni wasn’t the be all and end all of my life, and that there are other directions i could go in that i might not even know about now! hopefully in the years to come i can look back on this post and say where i was redirected to, but i know that there are still plenty of good things coming.
as someone who is lucky enough not to have yet experienced a major bereavement this may be an inappropriate or incorrect comparison, but the experience of rejection struck me as similar to the experience of grief. you can be completely fine, then someone mentions something that reminds you and the sadness hits you. you can be going about your business and suddenly remember that you’ve lost an opportunity and it will hit you all over again. i’m aware that this is probably all rather overly dramatic, but academic rejection is somewhat a small bereavement, you will find yourself grieving for a lost future, and that’s okay.
it may be hard to be happy for people who got accepted where you didn’t, but my thoughts were that their getting a place/interview/offer (especially if they were applying for a different course) didn’t actively reduce my chances of getting one.
in the same vein as the previous point, another thing i think helped me is that being sad about getting rejected won’t magically mean the decision gets reversed. after i’d allowed myself to be sad, this mindset was useful in picking myself up and looking towards other things.
as a final point i wanted to say that rejection does not make you any less worthy of love, success or great things in life. you are amazing, hardworking and a wonderful person - rejection does not define you.
if you’ve stuck around to here i’m extremely grateful. this post is much more personal than anything i usually write on here, so i may regret the mortifying ordeal of being known and delete this. the aim of this post was to share my experience, my (rather unsure) advice and hopefully help at least one other person going through the same thing. if you have anything to add, please, please reblog and add it, i’d love to hear it <3
