Good morning! Like any red-blooded Zillennial, you wake up and immediately check Twitter. It’s a lazy scroll until you see someone’s celebratory tweet about a job, scholarship or grad school position they received.
“Wait,” you think, “I applied for that too!” You know you should make some coffee before checking your email to see whether you’ll be celebratory tweeting too — after all, the answer isn’t going to change in the five minutes it takes to get some caffeine brewing. But, of course, you can’t stand the idea of Schrödinger,’ email sitting around like that. You need answers NOW.
“We regret to inform you…”
Your mind is still a little fuzzy and sleep-clouded — you REALLY should have made some coffee — so you re-read that again slower. Maybe your sleepy cynical mind jumped to conclusions and it actually said, “We regret that we couldn’t have hired you years ago because you’re so perfect for this job! Yay!”
Welcome to Stage One of grieving your rejection: self-destructive re-reading. It’s likely to continue until after you finally make some coffee and wake up the rest of the way. Once caffeinated, you reach Stage Two—crippling self-doubt.
This is because of that time in fourth grade when you forged your reading log. You don’t know how the hiring committee knew about that, but they could probably smell the pathetic cheater energy just wafting off of your application. You were kidding yourself by applying there anyways, obviously they were never going to want you. (At this point, you might transition from coffee to a high-sugar breakfast food. I recommend cinnamon rolls.)
This leads you right into Stage Three, where you decide that it was probably a reach for you all along. Never mind that you were extremely qualified or that in the email they explained that because of the pandemic they’ve seen a 4,000% increase in applicants. You knew all along that you probably wouldn’t get it. You would never get emotionally invested in a position that was such a long shot. You are a realist and a paragon of emotional fortitude. Obviously.
It’s a slippery slope from “It was a long shot” to Stage Four: “I didn’t really want it anyway.” This is almost always a lie, but if you’re good at lying to yourself it can really speed along the rest of the grief cycle. I mean, the location wasn’t your top choice, the pay could have been better and if you’re being honest, you definitely haven’t been day-dreaming about the position for weeks. It’s FINE.
Stage Four may be slightly dishonest, but it’s essential to moving on. One dream job, scholarship or grad school position may have fizzled out this morning but armed with three cups of coffee and two (okay, four) cinnamon rolls, you are ready to find a new one.
Stage Five is when you jump back on that job board, re-vamp your LinkedIn profile and polish off your resume. It might take you a few days and several batches of cinnamon rolls to reach this stage, and that’s okay.
You will get excited about new opportunities and realize that persistence is the name of the game. You’ll delete the old rejection emails and get started soliciting new ones. You know it will work out when it’s meant to and that you have the skills to succeed when you get the opportunity, no matter how long it takes. One of these days you’re going to apply for the one that regrets not hiring you years ago and it will all be worth it.
Beth Hoots can be reached at [email protected]