Rejection: Fiction

by Tony Tulathimutte

After this incident, he develops thoughts of self-harm, which are sharpened by his awareness that rejection, loneliness, and sexual frustration are nothing compared with institutional and historical oppression. His sadness, he knows, is a symptom of his entitlement, so he is not even entitled to his sadness.

“It’s easy to feel sorry for yourself when you keep redefining rejection. You refuse pity but crave it so much that you won’t admit how strongly you invite it.”

he’s the kind of guy who’s only fully engaged when she’s talking about her pain, who subtly steers conversations in that direction, because it furnishes an opportunity for him to demonstrate caring, which is not the same as caring.

She fumes about how not only are women’s indulgences framed as immoral and selfish, such that chocolate is sinful and ladymags are trashy and chick lit is a guilty pleasure, but that even the supposedly healthy alternatives, shopping, yoga, skin care, are demeaning in their attempt to pass off consumerism and vanity as self-care and, largely, just as selfish and immoral.

the lonely are the easiest to manipulate.

After many years she will see the whole saga not as a tragedy but as the beginning of a horrific process of self-understanding, at the end of which she will accept that whether or not it has been her choice, to be and feel nothing will be all that has made life possible.

Here finally Kant perceives the true rift between them: Julian doesn’t know the difference between embarrassment and shame. How shame soaks, stains, leaves a skidmark on everything and, when it has nothing to stick to, spreads until it does. Embarrassment is contained by incidents, gets funny and small over time; shame runs gangrene through the entire past, makes the future impossible.

This, with the kid gloves of gentility white libs always use when they want to make your annoyance feel unreasonable; the flopsweating jargon invoked to signal their literacy on the subject of your existence; that fart-holding wince when they sense their good intentions going unrewarded.

assimilation can masquerade as solidarity; how this made us particularly vulnerable to white people who loved feeling depended-on.

And it’s almost endearing how people are so transparently their child selves online, how irrespective of content or sophistication the subtext is always Look at me and How dare you, and the sub-subtexts Who am I and Save me.

For a rejection to be settled, first you—the reject—must hear, and comprehend, and accept.