(Hear the podcast version of this essay here.)
A good friend, let’s call him Ian, had dreams of being a rock star.1 Ian did all the things you do to “make it.” Guitar and voice lessons and songwriting camps; he joined the high school band as a cymbal player because he wanted to meet a drummer for his band. Finally, college came around, and it clicked. They were taking off in their hometown in NJ and then beyond. They won Battle of the Bands two summers in a row and started getting some real attention. Ian told me he’ll never forget the day the call came in. A producer from LA had seen their videos and loved their vibe. He wanted to fly them out to record a music video version of a song Ian wrote to be used in a Superbowl commercial.
Ian and his bandmates flew out to California, and Ian told me he knew he made it when he got to the studio and saw the hallways lined with platinum albums and the green room fridge full of Fiji bottled water. They were sent a commercial clip a few weeks later, and Ian teared up. This was it. Everything was finally happening. They told him and his bandmates to get the song ready, to make it downloadable and streamable because it would likely go viral. They would surely get signed.
Then, another call came in.
An assistant called Ian to say that the commercial would not air. She didn’t explain why; she just said the producers had pulled it.
Ian’s band didn’t go viral; they didn’t get signed. After that, the drummer quit to go to college out of state. The other guys drifted away, too. As easily as it had come together, it fell apart.
I was on a cross-country flight, sitting in the middle seat, when I got my own email. I don’t usually sign up for the free WiFi on planes, but I did that day for some reason. I’d been waiting for this email for eighteen months, or in some ways my whole life (not to be dramatic), and the answer… was no. I was not chosen.
You know, sometimes you’ve wanted to receive word about something so badly, and then it finally comes, and you can barely read it. You skim it looking for words like “unfortunately,” “regret,” “so many qualified applicants,” or “we went another way,” and you find them. And this rejection hit me differently at 30,000 feet. I’m sorry I can’t tell you exactly what it is yet, but I want you to know that I quietly sobbed on that flight, more or less the entire way home. I felt like a ravine had opened in me, a wound I wasn’t sure would ever close.
Have you ever felt like that?
I know I’m not alone because this is a risk of a brave, creative life. Some disappointments are meandering, like the slow-motion realization that something isn’t working or you aren’t right for this gig, and these aren’t always easier to take, mind you. This pain is achy, dull, and pervasive. But then there are the sharp jabs of rejection that take your breath away. They find you during the rehearsal break or in the middle seat, and you are sitting there holding your phone, and your chest caves in. Down to your knees, you go.
I do a lot of talking about the tortured artist stereotype: this whole thing in our culture where we almost fetishize artists’ suffering. Do you ever wonder if this is required of you? Do you feel like you must sacrifice your well-being for your creativity or else? (In my book, I talk about how being well and being an artist aren’t two things that go together historically; take Van Gogh’s ear, Beethoven’s fiery moods, or Mozart’s entire champagne-soaked life, for example.) As a coach for creatives, I’ve read many studies on the connections between creativity and mental health disorders. I’ve noticed that researchers seem to be asking if creativity makes us crazy or if crazy makes us creative. (Preorder my book, The Artist’s Joy, to read more) But as I tended to my latest creative wounds, I realized something new about this tendency towards torture.
When I told a loved one who has known me all my life about what happened, she said, “Why do you always take these things so hard?” (Nothing like a good ole, no doubt, well-intentioned, “why-question” to make you feel defensive and judged.) In truth, I had waited almost a week to tell her because I knew she wouldn’t understand my emotionality. I’ve learned to keep people out, protect my heart from others, and others from my tender heart. Because here’s the thing: I feel things deeply; a therapist told me once that she suspected I was an HSP, a Highly Sensitive Person. So many artists I know are like this. It makes us great, actually. We are attuned to the world’s suffering, open to being a vessel for creative joy to break through and invite others to feel their feelings.
But here’s the other thing: if you’re a working artist and perhaps an HSP, then you are also risking so much, so often. You’re submitting your work for critique and applying for the fellowship and funding. You’re cold-calling strangers (cold-emailing them these days) with pitches and collaboration ideas. Even posting your work to social media can feel risky when you’re sensitive like us. If you are an artist, chances are you are throwing spaghetti against the wall, too, except it feels less like pasta and more like a precious baby bird we’ve been nursing since its birth. Whatever you’re making, others are roughing it up or, maybe even worse, disregarding or ignoring it. In other words, we are already sensitive people who find ourselves in the arena, and the punches keep coming. Sometimes, it's tough out here. We aren’t tortured; we are tender and trying.
I am not attempting to glorify tortured artistry; I just want you to know that if you’re out here with me being brave and getting disappointed, too, I see you. I know how easy it is to equate your work with your worth because the work is personal. We put our hearts and souls into everything we make. You and I both know that that is one thing that makes it good. Most of the time, it isn’t someone else’s money we are investing or company we’re running; the work feels synonymous with our very selves. And this is the gift and the challenge, isn’t it? It is painful when we interlace our identity with our creative output and get rejected.
But if we are going to be artists seeking joy, then we can’t not try.
We can’t not make personal art, and we can’t not care.
And so the challenge is to learn to move beyond the torturous bits into some other place. Being an artist that experiences wellness doesn’t mean that we stop caring. It means that we keep going even when our hearts are broken. We don’t let our deep disappointments and debilitating rejections keep us stuck.
We must cultivate resilience more than we seek success.
I had the incredible opportunity to attend some of the world’s best schools for classical music. I can’t even begin to tell you what kinds of things I heard and saw there. I’ve known people so brilliant they could dictate a piece of music after one hearing. I’ve known people who could play faster and more accurately than even the most highly edited recordings. I’ve heard those who can sing higher and sight-read better. I was always somewhere in the lower middle, not that everything was a competition, but of course, it was all a big competition. And whatever creative field you are in, these folks will always be around. They are the breakout stars who win the Pulitzer and get big jobs right out of school; that’s not the surprising or interesting part. What’s interesting is what happens to the rest of us. We either keep going, or we stop. And you probably think I am going to give you a pep talk and encourage you to keep going, to keep putting yourself out there, not to give up. And I will, but not in the way you think.
Ian’s dream of being a rock star didn’t come to fruition. For years, it was a wound that followed him like a shadow. Sometime decades later, he found himself making music with friends after work, practicing for a show they were doing at an outdoor venue on the water. He noticed the sunlight from the only window coming through onto the floor, and he felt joy.
Joy.
That music was still in him.
Joy.
That he was happy with his job and his family, in this house that he owned. His dreams had not played out like he had wanted, and that was painful. Still, there were other dreams that he hadn’t seen yet, other people he’d yet to meet, more to the story than he knew when he was 18. And for the first time in a long time, he felt the sting of a discarded dream dissipate a little, and he felt like he was exactly where he was supposed to be. And true to Ian form, he thought, I have to write a song about this.
If you are listening to this and you’re breathing, then you’ve likely experienced disappointment, rejection, failure. And it hurts. Something I really wanted went to someone else. Something I put my heart and soul into creating was not good enough for some faceless panel. And I bet you’ve been there, too. But what I learned from tending my fragile wounds these last few weeks, what I learned from hearing Ian’s story told to me again (this time with his joyful realization that he was actually joyfully still playing music), I realized that while we cannot control what comes of our creative career, we can control the stories we tell ourselves about it. In fact, this is how we release the chains that torture us and keep us stuck.
And so, if you are in the middle of your disappointment right now like I am, or if you are still torturing yourself about that life-defining email that crushed your dreams so many years ago, I want you to look at the story you’re telling yourself about it.
A few days after that plane ride, when I was still weepy, telling a caring friend, I realized why I was taking it so hard. I was making this rejection mean something about me. This verdict was reverberating forward and backward in time. Discounting and disproving all the progress or success I had found and dooming me to a future of failures. Accusing me, pointing and saying, “See? You are not good enough.”
And so, are you letting this one audition, pitch, application, or creative risk mean so much, maybe more than it should? Feel the pain when any tender-hearted person enters the arena and then give that disappointment its proper place.
No one has the power to steal your worthiness. No matter how personal or all-consuming a creative project is, it is not you. You are capable of more than you think, and you have a tender heart but also a powerful mind. You know that the only thing that separates you from all those others you feel so far from, the ones who have “made it—” they know regardless of the platinum albums on the wall or Fiji water in the dressing room, there is no “there” there. No amount of downloads, book deals, sales, viral videos, or professional accolades will make you love yourself or satisfy your need for good enough.
C.S. Lewis compares it to fueling a car on anything but petrol.2 It was designed to run on petrol. You are not designed to run on success or accolades. You were made to run on something much larger and infinite, something that does not depend on you being excellent at all. That’s just a temporary kind of love that is a flash in the pan and needs constant one-upmanship. No, real Love, real Joy, comes from knowing that no matter what happens in the arena, you are seen, and known, and loved, and worthy. These titles are far better than “rock star” or “award-winner.” It’s not a temporary high note; it’s a low resonant resounding bass that underscores everything. It has been there all along and will never stop ringing.
And so, why not keep going?
Grieve the pain for the disappointment and then rewrite that story. Ian’s band fell apart, which was painful, and Ian found his way. He told me he is choosing to believe this way was better than going viral, better than some other life as a rock star. It’s a choice to believe another story.
Those who unlock the chains of past pains and failures with new stories, they are the ones who arrive in the future with their creative impulse intact. They are the ones who make it. They are free.
So keep writing and singing and creating, not so you can get good enough or win, but because you feel tenderly, which is a gift to the world. Keep going so you can be more yourself, so you can invite others to do the same, and when the emails come in, because they will, let yourself be sad for a little while and then let the autoplay feature (like on Netflix) take you to the next episode. Who knows what will happen next in this story? I can’t wait to find out.
The most resilient fish (according to some people on the internet and me) is the beautiful, majestic, mysterious salmon. Most species are born in freshwater streams, rivers, and wetlands, but as they grow, they begin a process scientists call smoltification. They literally turn into a whole other type of fish; they change their gill structure and their scales and make different kinds of body fluids so they can live in saltwater habitats. When they are ready, the still juvenile salmon begins the perilous journey downstream towards the ocean. How do they know where to go? Scientists don’t totally understand their abilities. But what they do see is their resilience. They use a combination of the current and their body strength to navigate rapids and overcome obstacles in their path. And this is just the beginning. Once in the ocean, some species migrate thousands of miles to find richer feeding grounds.
Their body tells them next that it’s time to spawn. They turn fin and head towards home, and, using what they think is a combination of the earth’s magnetic fields, their strong sense of smell (the scientific name for this is “olfactory memory,” which I love), and landmarks like mountains and river forks, rock formations, they embark on the next feat of persistence and courage, an upstream migration, back to sometimes the exact same freshwater of their youth where they pass it off to the next generation of fearless fish.
So my question for you today is: What if you were born for this?
What if this disappointment or rejection you’re facing is just a rock for you to swim around in a much longer and more epic journey than you can even see right now?
You are headed for open waters and if you don’t feel like you have everything you need yet, borrow the confidence from our salmon friends whose little slimy bodies somehow just know what to do.
What instincts within you are ready to shift, change, and grow?
What if, before you can reach the next bend, you have to shed some scales that no longer serve you?
What is this disappointment here to teach you?
The journey will be long and maybe even painful; sometimes, you will be fighting against the current and wondering if you’re actually completely lost. When you find yourself spinning in the rapids of self-doubt and imposter syndrome, may you tap into the intuition and mystery of the knowledge that every artist, every person, is born with. With or against the current, we know the way.
May your creative practice lead you where you belong: home to yourself and to your dreams. May they be different than you imagined them; may they be better. More real, truer, because you fought for them, especially when you wanted to quit. You kept swimming. And the fear and disappointment and demoralizing stories flow right off your back as you glide through the water towards your destiny.
May love be the landmark guiding you home.
The stories I tell here are always based on true events, with details and names changed to protect the identities of those involved.
From Mere Christianity