An old professor of mine, long gone to glory as a university president, once confided in me how difficult he found hearing "no." It is a strange thing, of course, as this job is filled with "no." We hear it from our students in complaints on teaching evaluations; we hear it from our peers on applications for study leave or for promotion; we hear it from publishers and journal editors when we submit our work. My old professor heard it from his chair: he burned through thousands of pieces of paper and destroyed a photocopier disseminating additional material for our class.
Of course, the odds of someone considering graduate school ever getting that tenure-track job in the professoriate are long, indeed. Our whole enterprise is founded on hearing, and ignoring, the word "no."
But my old professor's lament is still sound. If you hear "yes" enough to get through school, get a job, and progress through the ranks, you can isolate yourself just enough that "no" -- a genuine, final "no" -- feels foreign to you.
What to do when you hear "no"? It is not something with which I deal well. I used to have a paper route as a kid in Newfoundland, for the only local publication that did not have a subscription list. Asking the same hundred and fifty people each week if they wanted to buy the paper they did not want the week before will scar you, rest assured. Is that why I prefer having my work solicited? Even though it is still -- and still should be -- vetted thoroughly, negative feedback in that situation feels different from a rejection received from a speculative submission.
I give myself credit when I let myself pursue anything for which I might likely hear "no." It represents for me genuine growth.
The best advice I ever got for how to deal with rejection from a publisher or a journal editor is to simply turn around and resubmit it elsewhere. Over the years, that has been remarkably effective. The problem, of course, is that it minimizes the value of feedback. If "no" really means "not now" or "not for us," we need less to grow than we need to find the right opportunity.
And that, really, is the issue, is it not? When "no" comes in search of a job, one that you really want, it is hard to imagine any consolation. Do you feel better if you failed in putting forward your best foot? It is less a personal rejection than it is a lost opportunity. But if you know that you did and said what you really wanted to do and say, it is key to accept that "no" means that "yes" would have been fraught with trouble from the start. It should make the personal rejection easier to bear.
Here, for me, is the consolation. I really believe that life is not what you have but what you have done. I knew, as an undergraduate, an Oxford graduate who fretted, constantly, about not being in England. I enjoyed living in England; I would live in England again under the right circumstances. But I do not dwell on trying to recreate something I had for the simple reason that I am satisfied to have had it, already. It is perfectly okay to move forward, seeking new dreams, new opportunities. To imagine a goal moving forward, one that you fail to attain, is not the end of your goals, just the end of one opportunity. If anything, I suffer from a lack of sentimentality, so I am not mawkish in saying these things. I just believe that to focus on one thing, to let any one failure crush you, is to imagine that something in the past was perfect or that something in the future could ever be.
Neither is possible.
I have always admired those creatures in nature that respond to the destruction of some half-completed enterprise with apparent indifference: they just begin again, as if nothing happened, as if they have forever to achieve what they set out to achieve. Knowing that a door has good and truly closed makes it impossible for us to begin again, thus, but it is a fine thought to have, you must agree.
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