Lately I have been immersed in the work of submitting a novel to potential agents. It is a long and tedious process but a process that is necessary if one wants to become traditionally published.

And because it has always been a dream of mine, I have spent the last three weeks sending out queries and writing summaries and putting together proposals.

A couple of days after I sent my first batch of queries, I got my first rejection. I saved it, and all the ones after, because by then they started coming fairly regularly, one or two a day. Some were personal “try me again sometime” notes, others were form letters, but they all said the same thing: “I’m just not the right person to represent this project.”

I could have let that rejection get to me. I did once.

Years ago, before I was even a mother, I finished my first novel. It was a book based on my mother’s story of betrayal and heartache and divorce, and how she climbed her way back out of the dark.

Because it was my story, too, I was incredibly close to its outcome.

I sent it out to a whole long list of agents and never even got a personal letter back, just a stack of form-letter rejections tucked away in a file somewhere.

The rejection hurt. It hurt because it felt personal. So I closed up shop. For seven years.

It took me seven whole years to pick up my fiction pen again. I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time. I wish I had tried again. I wish I had shaken the dust off my sandals and kept creating anyway.

Sometimes in our art-creating, we can become so attached to what we have created, because it holds a piece of us, that rejection of it can feel like rejection of us. So we feel tied to its outcome. What people say about it. Whether it’s accepted or lauded or ignored.

Does it cease to be art just because it does not reach the masses?

No.

No, no, no. A loud, resounding NO.

Artists will always face rejection—because art is subjective.

The books I like to read may not be the same books you like to read. The music I listen to may not even make it on your top 1 billion songs list. The photography I consider beautiful and moving may not be the same photography you consider beautiful and moving.

We see with different eyes, all of us.

Just because a handful of agents don’t think they can “get behind” my project “passionately enough to give it proper representation” doesn’t mean my project isn’t good. I know it’s good. I know it could find an audience. I know it could hold its own in the literary world.

It’s just that these things—art things—are so subjective.

But there is something I know surely today that I didn’t quite know all those years ago.

I don’t write to get published or gain recognition or to be revered in the world of literature.

I write because it’s what I was made to do. Even if I never, ever get a word of my stories published, even if no one ever sees the value between my lines, I will still create.

And that means, this time around, rejection will not have the final word. It will not steal my fiction pen for another seven years.

I will create because I am a creator. I will create in spite of rejection. Because of rejection.

Because I can’t not create.

It’s what I was made to do. It’s how I breathe. It’s how I learn to live and move and be.

And because I know this, because you know this, rejection will not clamp its chains around us. It will not hold us down. It will not bind us to a weaker pen or paintbrush or song chart.

It will propel us to create more and better and even lovelier than before.

What experience have you had with rejection? How did it affect you?